Author: Victor
Your future is older, browner, and more feminine
The always entertaining Andrew Zolli has a new article in the current Fast Company mag, expanding on the themes he’s been talking about in person. Essentially he demonstrates the importance of looking through the demographics lens when thinking about the future…
The hourglass society will bring an avalanche of new social challenges, cultural norms, and business opportunities. With a huge increase in the number of older consumers, entirely new entertainment, culture, and news markets will open up–film, television, books, and Internet sites pitched more to the Matlock set than to the Eminem crowd. Also, older people tend to vote more frequently, and they will wield significant political clout: We could see a multidecade “boomerocracy” or, as one gen-Xer put it archly over cocktails, “TRBN: terminal rule by boomer narcissists.”
I’ve found his presentations quite useful in the past, and I’m looking forward to his participation in the Design 2.0 panel. If you were thinking of going, I hear a few seats are available.
Hardware companies will learn to be software companies
In the past I’ve observed that as processor speed increases, software replaces dedicated hardware. For example, in music or video production programs like GarageBand and Final Cut Pro and a stock Macintosh can replace dedicated rack systems and DSP chips.
Now with Web 2.0-ish advances on the Internet, we can go further and say as bandwidth increases, remote applications replace locally installed applications.
Yamaha has developed a beautiful prototype of a device that “allows everyone to play music intuitively.” But the simplicity of the user interface begs the question of why isn’t it implemented in software (i.e. why can’t I get my hands on this now?). I know the obvious answers, and I appreciate a great hardware UI and portability, but believe we’ll only gain more utility from network-based software applications as people adopt them. It makes even more sense when you see someone make something that looks similar and is a lot of fun, like Ollie Rankin’s Ten or Eleven (imagine this on a tablet PC).
Balancing Act: Westin
John Holusha of the New York Times profiles Westin’s decision to move to an all non-smoking format in their hotels. I think this rocks on several levels:
- It’s progressive, recognizing only 6% of customers request smoking rooms (only half of which actually smoke in the rooms), and this segment isn’t key to their success. Also see Nikon’s move to all-digital cameras.
- It’s good for customers, in that Westin’s in-house smoking cessation program will help the 90% of smoking customers that say they want to stop.
- It’s good for business, creating more flexible room inventory and avoiding the damage caused by smoke and cigarette burns.
It’s a brave thing to aspire to higher goals for your revenue, brand, environment, and customer satisfaction, then design a solution that addresses all of them.
Tom and Jerry and management
My colleague Jim, from a recent interview:
I was born in Hollywood and raised in Los Angeles. My father, mother and grandparents all worked in the film industry. My parents actually met when they were both working on Tom and Jerry cartoons. The culture of filmmaking has influenced my approach to design and business. Hollywood offers interesting models for collaboration, ad hoc organization and merging creative and business requirements. Similar practices have migrated to Silicon Valley, and working with clients here was one of the things that sparked my interest in management issues — how we work and the ways in which our working methods influence the products we make.
Agile everywhere
I’m finding examples of agile work practices in more and more places, and see them as perfectly aligned with the application of design practice in innovation services. Here’s a running list…
- Agile programming has the most robust expression, including a philosophy, an alliance of various approaches, tools, software, and measured results.
- Agile project management
- Get Real from 37 Signals is an effective framing for web application developers
- Lean manufacturing
- Lean manufacturing applied to programming
- Adaptive Co-management in forestry
- Artful Making is the application of theatrical processes to business
- The Knowing-Doing Gap
- Research into pre-mechanization group work
I think people in the product design and user-centered design disciplines work in agile ways as well, but haven’t yet found a common frame that other disciplines readily understand.
Dancing elephants: Lockheed
I love seeing big companies move in agile ways (because it’s so unusual), even if it only arises from panic of losing their old revenue streams. Here’s an example from Lockheed, whose old culture (despite their Skunk Works-style innovation) included bitter internal fights over whether to pursue unmanned aircraft…
…It also designed and delivered the seven-pound Desert Hawk within 127 days of receiving an Air Force request. The total cost for the first six drones and laptop-computer control system was less than $400,000, Mr. Cappuccio says. To date, Lockheed says it has supplied 126 Desert Hawks, which are used for surveillance to protect U.S. bases in Iraq.
When you also produce the most expensive fighter jet in the world, that’s certainly overcoming your innovator’s dilemma.
Incidentally, here’s an article about another group at Lockheed using agile practices.
On pre-sliced, preserved apple slices…
Not since the canneries of the early 20th century have food processors sought merely to preserve perishables. Processing foods now means redesigning them, making them easier to eat for a population that is steadily less willing to go to any trouble at all. Given the childhood obesity epidemic and the longstanding economic troubles of America’s apple growers, boosting the apple’s performance so that it could, as an industry observer explained, “stand up to ordinary use,” was a doubly urgent project. By making a healthful, fresh fruit that looks and acts more like a bag of chips, a handful of companies like Crunch Pak may have finally figured out a way to compete with the hassle-free junk foods that blazed into this era of hyperconvenience. Some marketers say that the reformation of our venerable apple — and the sense that this improvement was necessary — suggest that we may soon buy most of our produce this way. Presliced plums, celery, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, mangoes and star fruits are all in production.
Thinking numerically
I’m taking a class in financial models to round out my skill set. The instructor said something interesting last night, taking care to put us in the right frame of mind for this work. He said, “Teach yourself to see the world in numbers. Try to think numerically.” In that comment I hear that quantitative work is not merely work, it’s a worldview, a mindset. Hearing this, to me, it validates talking about design as a way of thinking, and by investigating different areas I see how they differ but also how they can fit together. As I go through the class I want to see how thoroughly I can mesh the two.
Incidentally, to help one think numerically he recommended the book What The Numbers Say.
Positive solutions that are neither left nor right
In this Bruce Mau talk on Global Creativity, he mostly discusses the Massive Change exhibit. But at the end he drops this, without making it clear how it’s tied in… (my paraphrasing)
Why are we seeing things on the political right and left that are both interesting? They should be at odds. What we realized is that there’s another political axis, and that’s what the project is about. There’s another axis at 90 degrees from the left and right which create a paradigm that is increasingly cumbersome and unproductive. And this new axis is about advanced and positive, rather than retrograde and not.
I sense the existence of this axis intuitively, but it’s difficult to conceptualize examples of this given the constant left-right framing we do. Days after hearing Mau I read Million-Dollar Murray by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker. To summarize/spoil it, some issues in society have a power-law distribution with regard to how they harm us, rather than a normal bell-curve distribution. Gladwell illustrates this with the examples of homelessness, police brutality, and car pollution, all cases where a small percentage account for the overwhelmingly largest costs. In comparing this to our usual political methods for dealing with these problems, he finds real progress is at Mau’s axis, 90 degrees to the left and right…
Solving problems that have power-law distributions doesn’t just violate our moral intuitions; it violates our political intuitions as well. It’s hard not to conclude, in the end, that the reason we treated the homeless as one hopeless undifferentiated group for so long is not simply that we didn’t know better. It’s that we didn’t want to know better. It was easier the old way.
Power-law solutions have little appeal to the right, because they involve special treatment for people who do not deserve special treatment; and they have little appeal to the left, because their emphasis on efficiency over fairness suggests the cold number-crunching of Chicago-school cost-benefit analysis.
I have to think, religion aside, that Jesus was trying to tell us this a long time ago in the story of the father that welcomes back his prodigal son with a feast. Our political institutions are like the other brother who feels cheated, but the wise father knows it’s better to solve problems than manage them.
Better generalizations: finding true relationships between categories and traits
Malcolm Gladwell’s Troublemakers extends his Blink thinking to how we generalize. The takeaway is “It doesn’t work to generalize about a relationship between a category and a trait when that relationship isn’t stable — or when the act of generalizing may itself change the basis of the generalization.”
In the article he asks whether pit bulls are dangerous dogs. It turns out they are only dangerous if bred, trained, or raised to be dangerous. A better indication of whether a dog may attack is if the dog displays aggressive behavior and has a negligent owner. Not an earth-shaking conclusion, but one we don’t always take the time to investigate.
U.S. jobs aren’t shorter, but they are riskier
James Surowiecki’s Lifers reviews some statistics and concludes that — contrary to popular belief — long-term employment in the U.S. hasn’t disappeared at all. But what has changed is the amount of risk employees are expected to shoulder in terms of…
- Benefits: Health benefits and pensions have decreased
- Stratification: “Companies now tie compensation more closely to performance, so that people at the top take home much more, relative to their colleagues, than did the high-fliers of thirty-five years ago.“
- Unemployment: “People who are unemployed stay unemployed, on average, about fifty per cent longer now than they did in the seventies, and only about half as many receive unemployment insurance as did so in 1947.“
Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker has called this “the great risk shift.”
Books on European Innovation
A day after my recent musings, the Wall Street Journal looked at three books on European growth…
Cousins and Strangers is written by the last British governer to Hong Kong and a former EU commissioner. Most of the text seems to mirror the kind of Bush administration bashing that progressives in the US already do, so nothing new there. It could be interesting for Americans to better understand how Europeans view themselves in relation to the U.S.
In The Next Superpower? Rockwell Schnabel argues that the EU is a serious global economic force, and Americans need to pay heed. No argument there. He worries about overregulation and Europeans’ inability to take risk in order to make progress.
It’s Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century that looks like the really interesting read for its counter-intuitive stance. The author, Mark Leonard, points out that two billion people now live in Europe’s “zone of influence” and gradually adopt European ways of doing things. This includes the EU’s 80,000 pages of regulations which, while seeming to hobble flexibility on the surface, is also dramatically changing any country that must obey them upon entry to the EU. So whereas the U.S. uses force to achieve regime change in Afghanistan, Leonard argues that the new power will be softer, as with the EU’s peaceful transformation of “all of Polish society.”
If an 8-year old can do it…
Here’s a great story from David Hornik of how his 8-year old son started an Internet business.
All the things we’ve struggled to make will be tools our kids use to build wonderful new things.
The Innovative Europe
Continuing on the Europe theme, I see a lot of potential for innovation there if the EU, governments, and companies are willing to address the current challenges with a view of the current situation as helpful constraints rather than roadblocks.
State-based benefits are a competitive advantage that should be leveraged more. The obvious example is the advantage German car makers have when employees receive public health insurance vs. American car makers allocating more and more money to rising health care costs. Modifying these benefits could encourage a “free agent nation” where talented individuals can freely move from contract to contract. Many people will feel a personal insecurity about this compared to a regular job, but the government can show the way by putting the right policies in place now. America, ironically, is behind on this issue by continuing to tie health, retirement, and other benefits to a particular job (usually at medium or large companies only).
Europe should embrace immigration for all the benefits of diversity that America enjoys. It’s not an easy road, but with the example of America’s civil rights movement and South Africa’s apartheid behind us, Europe is not blazing a new trail here. France’s elitism results in rioting, Germany’s prejudice results in conflict, and the Danish media is mistaking blasphemy with freedom of the press. The EU and member nations need to see integration as inevitable and be more sensitive, sophisticated, and progressive about sharing their cultures. Power needs to be shared and will be over time, the question is only whether it’s a difficult process or not.
Preserving culture vs. benefiting from globalism is a false dichotomy, and the media’s representation of the issue as protestors against free-market purists isn’t helping any. Each region needs to think about preserving what’s important to them and preserve it, while doing what is necessary to remain economically viable. Tuscany is a great example of putting very strict architectural restrictions in place while encouraging tourism. They don’t profit from giant tourist attractions, but they have built one amazing brand that is proving resilient.
Unions (and worker’s councils) must become a competitive advantage rather than a source of friction. Again, management needs to recognize they share power with unions and leverage that relationship through collaboration to improve their operations. This is not a new road as the Japanese have already shown us the way with relationships of higher respect and processes that value collaboration and constant feedback (e.g. the Toyota Production System).