Victor
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Who are the new rebels? (Managers?)
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2 min read
I live in one of the art centers of the world — the West Chelsea section of Manhattan — and my opinion of today’s art can be summed up in one word: boring. Rarely do contemporary artists teach us anything, or even make us feel anything. The best art only manages commentary, as with Banksy’s…
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Balancing the heart and head is an old problem…
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1 min read
For the problem is simply how can warm passion and a cool sense of proportion be forged together in one and the same soul? Politics is made with the head, not with other parts of the body or soul. And yet devotion to politics, if it is not to be frivolous intellectual play but rather…
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The world is one baby girl richer
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1 min read
My business partner Christina just gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. Congratulations to the new parents! You’re bound to have the smartest, geekiest, toughest kid on the block.
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Bottom-Up management lessons from no-collar workers
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1 min read
In this latest HBSWK piece, Bain’s talking customer experience. Not long ago, BCG was talking about open source-style collaboration. Naturally, we talk about the vital importance of strategic delivery too, having lived it. I clearly see many ways in which the no-collar working style — natural collaboration, little hierarchy, relationships built on trust, smooth flow…
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Did Johnson & Johnson heed my advice to stay away from purchasing Guidant with its unethical practices? Probably not, but I’m glad they’re hesistating. Guidant responds, typically, by suing the company that wants to buy it.
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A story of classic inspiration… Norwegian painter and public art creator, Vebjørn Sand, saw the drawing and a model of the bridge in an exhibition on da Vinci’s architectural & engineering designs in 1996. The power of the simple design overwhelmed him. He conceived of a project to bring its eternal beauty to life. The…
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Bill Swanson’s 25 Unwritten Rules of Management
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3 min read
Raytheon CEO Bill Swanson offered his 25 Unwritten Rules of Management and Jim Collins asks, “I wondered, how would his rules stack up against the behavior and leadership styles of the successful CEOs profiled in Good to Great? …the overall fit appears quite positive.” For posterity, here’s Swanson’s list: Learn to say, “I don’t know.”…
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Fairly Good Practices
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1 min read
Fairly Good Practices from the Agile community (of which the design and management communities can learn a lot).
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Amazon disintermediates the credit card companies
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1 min read
Why bother with micropayments when you can reach right into the bank account? For anyone familiar with European banking, this is an obvious solution. My European friends pay all their bills directly using a standard electronic system and none of them have checkbooks. Checkbooks are an American anachronism.
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Cultural capabilities: JetBlue vs. Song
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1 min read
Song Airlines is closing. It’s sad that a better customer experience alone isn’t enough to compete, but that in itself is a good lesson. The symptom of Song’s decline was a failure to replicate JetBlue’s service, while the cause is a failure to look beyond JetBlue’s product to the true source of their success. There’s…
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Bootstrap 1.0
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1 min read
In response to David Hornik’s Bubble 2.0 I responded that it looks more like Bootstrap 1.0 to me. Scott blogged this topic a month ago… With customers using a working product, decisions about what type of additional capital will be needed to scale are much easier to frame. And if you do decide to approach…
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Mintzberg and Liedtka think it’s time for design
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1 min read
In Mintzberg’s “Strategy Safari” he devotes one chapter to The Design School: Strategy Formation as a Process of Conception. But his description of the cognitive act of design is different from the classic Herbert Simon description. So I appreciated discovering Liedtka’s In Defense of Strategy as Design (pdf), summarized… This article proposes management reconsider the…
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ID Strategy Symposium and the design-business chasm
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1 min read
Yesterday I attended the Institute of Design Strategy Symposium. The remarks were along the lines of business design we’ve been reading about. What I particularly liked was that the conversation afterwards revolved mostly around the chasm between design and business and the means by which to span the chasm, mostly in terms of language (“design”…
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Worse is better (and more human-centered)
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2 min read
Nicholas Carr’s argument against peer-production of knowledge by “amateurs” has been getting a lot of attention, but I think it misses the point. It’s not human-centered. I don’t mean that in a make the interface easy to use kind of way, but in a make it something people want kind of way. For example: We’re…
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The listening-to-customers wake up call
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1 min read
Looking back through the classic management texts I realize the call to listen to customers isn’t new. Here’s a few that counsel an emphasis on customers: Innovation in Marketing (1962) In Search of Excellence (1982) Moments of Truth (1987) Relationship Marketing (1991) The Experience Economy (1999) The repetition of this message isn’t surprising as it’s…