do_matic

Tidying up - a critical part of the design process

(Banksy gets it. Courtesy of danbrady, flickr and creative commons.)

This morning I engaged in one of the most satisfying and productive parts of the design process. I cleaned up after a frenzied day of creation with my team yesterday.

When I see a team that's looking for some direction, one of the things I'll suggest is to go ahead and clean the workspace. I think cleaning, at the right time, can be as important as getting messy.

When we do it in the middle of the process, what we throw away and what we keep tells us something. In that sense, it's a codeword / code activity for "convergence." Taking it slow and being quiet, ends up being really good reflection time as well... meditation while keeping your hands busy and steeping in the space.

At the end of a project, it can be really valuable as well (as well as polite). In that sense, it helps us learn, reflect, purge and let go.

Non sequitur: Be stupid

My buddy Scott pointed me to this Diesel campaign embracing Stupid and eschewing Smart. Some really nice overlaps with doing innovative stuff. The right approach might feel kind of stupid at first!

You might not love the approach or the brand, but you have to admit that they're on to something. Here's the Diesel site: http://www.diesel.com/be-stupid/

 

NYC Resistor: Making Awesome Things Happen

I loved this Alex Pasternack documentary about NYC Resistor. Via Motherboard.

You can just feel that new cool things are coming to life there. Barbot? Sure, why not.

Apparently I'm a child of the Bauhaus

(Josef Albers Stacking Tables; My wife's favorite piece in the exhibit.)

Until a recent visit to the Moma's Bauhaus exhibit, I wasn't aware how influential that movement was (and the importance of the word "diaspora"). Apparently I'm a child of the Bauhaus and we're all brothers and sisters. It was pretty amazing.

Some observations:

>> The commitment, desire and expectation to work across mediums and disciplines. That's a hallmark to what our teams exhibit at work, but wanting to do it and committing to do it as an individual requires another level of curiosity and risk-taking.
>> There's a difference between a studio and a workshop. This made me think about the idea of "craftspeople" and how they may differ from "tradespeople" (see Shop Class as Soulcraft). Guess which side I err towards...
>> The striking similarity of what we have, use and like today with what they were designing then. Great design is self-referential.

My favorite piece was the so-called telephone enamel pieces by László Moholy-Nagy. He didn't build it, he gave the specifications to the builder over the phone:

I'm sure I missed tons of stuff and actually learned one one-thousandth of what there is to learn, so I bought a big ol' book about it to learn more. (Update: a few pages in and man I didn't understand half of it.)

Inevitability: A tell for disruptive innovation opportunities

My colleague Joe just pointed me to this nice article describing one of the big aspects / inner workings of the Visa business model.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/your-money/credit-and-debit-cards/05visa.html

We do a lot of work in this space and there's lots of room for innovation and designing for users. I was struck by the sentiment in the article that interchange is a God-given right. Hmmm... maybe...

Certainly banks and the associations have real expenses and there is a value they are providing. They should absolutely have a right to capture and compete for that value.

Yet the idea that this situation is inevitable could be a dangerous one to hold onto too dearly within these companies. There are lots of smaller players out there that would gladly halve those fees and take a percentage of the now smaller amount. It's a good message to broadcast to keep competitors at bay and vendors placated...

There are some firms trying to do it, but that are having trouble competing effectively quite yet. The barriers and scale benefits are still difficult for these entrants to overcome. But some big folks, Google among them, are playing with payments.

Where else is there an "inevitable system constraint" in this industry or any industry?

It could point us to other disruption opportunities.

Define: Idea Blindness

(Photo courtesy of Giancarlo D'Allesandro's Flickr stream and Creative Commons.)

Sometimes we hold onto an idea just a little too tightly. Sometimes we encounter somebody holding on a bit too tightly.

You know the situation. No matter what is said or suggested, it always comes back to the same concept, the same meme, the same position.

The concept is a black hole possessed of such gravitational might that it bends light and twists words. It's not that we're ignoring other ideas or people, it's just that we can neither see those ideas nor hear those people. We're idea blind.

Sometimes we cling to the idea because we couldn't possibly have been wrong all this time. Our commitment, as the psychologists say, has escalated. Sometimes it feels like this idea is all we've got.

But to others, those that might feel otherwise or be talking about something altogether different, it's like living with a parakeet that only knows one phrase.

I wonder what it would be like to force ourselves to let our pet idea (or parakeet) go for one solitary day? To convince ourselves that we were wrong all along.

Have no fear, I'm betting that we won't lose much in one day. And if the idea is good enough, it'll actually be stronger in the morning.

I heart Jeff Bezos

(Made with the help of iCrushALot) 

Bruce pointed me to this interview with my innovation hero Jeff Bezos in Newsweek's interview issue. Bezos describes three elements of their success:

1. Start with the customer and work backward, learning the skills necessary to serve them as you go
2. Be an inventor, willing to go down unexplored pathways and be pleasantly and cheerfully disappointed in what you find; always think like it's "Day One" [edited by me]
3. Have a long-term orientation

This excerpt is so, so true and it brings home the patience and persistence that it takes to be a repeat innovator:

There are two ways that companies can extend what they're doing. One is they can take an inventory of their skills and competencies, and then they can say, "OK, with this set of skills and competencies, what else can we do?" And that's a very useful technique that all companies should use. But there's a second method, which takes a longer-term orientation. It is to say, rather than ask what are we good at and what else can we do with that skill, you ask, who are our customers? What do they need? And then you say we're going to give that to them regardless of whether we currently have the skills to do so, and we will learn those skills no matter how long it takes. Kindle is a great example of that. It's been on the market for two years, but we worked on it for three years in earnest before that. We talked about it for a year before that. We had to go hire people to build a hardware--engineering team to build the device. We had to acquire new skills. There's a tendency, I think, for executives to think that the right course of action is to stick to the knitting—stick with what you're good at. That may be a generally good rule, but the problem is the world changes out from under you if you're not constantly adding to your skill set.

Non sequitur: Bye 2009

Shot this morning.

Learning to think and do small / PB in the FT

I really enjoyed my friend and colleague Paul Bennett's recent piece for the FT:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a63acc20-f5ac-11de-90ab-00144feab49a.html

Paul's essay triggered a few connections for me.

First, there's how to get big companies to learn to move fast, or perhaps move at all. I've written about it here a bit (Small to learn, Get generative by thinking small) and Colin's "Business in Beta" pattern on IDEO.com does a really great job of capturing this trend.

Here's Paul:

What hit me was the scale of the enterprise and how a small seed of an idea could be world-changing in its impact.

..and...

Personally, I have long believed that not every idea has to be mega, mammoth, gargantuan or a billion dollar disruption. Often, the small, well-designed, intelligent and, most importantly, do-able ideas are infinitely better.

... and the pièce de résistance...

Rather, it sees it as the best way to learn how to get closer to its consumers - in the field through experimentation and prototyping, rather than intellectualising and theorising - and to bring that learning back into its core business and apply it there. It is learning-by doing rather than death-by-discussion.

Second, there's a motivation link to doing and being able to connect to something bigger than yourself, but not so big that you can't see yourself in it. It's super important for innovation. Leaders need to ensure an organization's people stay inspired. Tim Brown talked about it here and I shared some thoughts here (What's your purpose?)

I'm about a third of the way through Dan Pink's new book on motivation. Pink certainly foreshadows early in the book the link between purpose and new corporate forms such as the L3C, Fourth Sector/For Benefit and Yunus' idea of "social businesses."

There's something inspiring and motivating about working for something other the machine trying to make a big, big impact. Chip Heath (along with his brother Dan) describe the importance of connecting to something bigger than ourselves to help make an idea, innovation or story sticky (e.g., the accountant who put a man on the moon). I see folks struggle with this all the time at companies big and small. I suspect that's one reason organizations aren't always flat - motivation and purpose can be found by organizing smaller cohorts amidst the big (e.g., "hot teams").

Paul again:

Employees want to work on things they believe in, in places that support those belief systems. Creating impact outside has huge impact inside.

...and Paul quoting an exec...

"Even the people in Paris who book our travel to Bangladesh feel like they are part of this project..."

I guess the only thing I'd say in response is the importance of commitment. You need to mean it, act like you mean and get people to feel like you mean it. People can smell the bullshit. And if they smell it, they'll wait you out. Seems like Danone is doing it.

Get generative by thinking small

I thought this Seth Godin post was excellent:http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/12/you-dont-have-the-power.html

In particular, this passage was inspiring:

Here's a way to think about it, inspired by Merlin Mann: Imagine that next year your company is going to make 10 million dollars instead of a hundred million dollars in profit. What would you do knowing that your profits were going to be far less than they are today? Because that's exactly what the upstart with nothing to lose is going to do. Ten million in profit is a lot to someone starting with zero and trying to gain share. They don't care that you made a hundred million last year from the old model.

That's why I love Discovery Driven Planning with a number like $10MM as a starting point. Why not? Even for the big guys.

Seth is writing about publishing here. I've written a lot about my fascination with the current situation in publishing. Pricing dictated by history and fixed cost hangovers just doesn't make sense to me.