Noise Between Stations

Author: Victor

  • Tomato TomA[h]to, the Re-Imagine Manifesto

    Tom Peters just released his Re-Imagine Manifesto, Tomato TomA[h]to (.pdf) which captures the spirit of the book series and probably most of what he’s saying these days (and how he’s saying it). Such as…

    They say, “If it can’t be precisely measured then it isn’t real.” [And I suppose if it can be measured it is real? Think Enron? Adelphia? WorldCom?”]
    I say, “If it can be precisely measured it isn’t real.” [Think Age of Intagibles & Relationships.] [Think: “He knew the price of everything and the value of nothing.”]

  • Stone Yamashita talk on business design

    An AIGA/Apple Store event…

    As designers, we have an extraordinary capacity to help any organization rethink and reinvent itself from within. Yet many of us unwittingly limit ourselves — by assuming that our value is limited to adding design at the end of strategic thinking, as a byproduct, or by focusing too much on artifacts, rather than the experience we want to create. In their presentation, three leaders from Stone Yamashita Partners will challenge us to change the conversation about design. They will argue that we can add extraordinary value to our businesses and our lives if we rethink our attitude to our craft, and start to consider it much more holistically. Drawing on case studies from companies such as HP, Nike, Gap, and eBay, they will argue that design can be central to the conversation in any business, and a powerful force for change.

    Wednesday, July 20, 6:00 pm at the Apple Store, One Stockton Street, San Francisco. More info.

  • The unhidden value in Netflix

    Karl, in The hidden value in Netflix, points out that Netflix has… 345 Million movie ratings… Netflix gains a valuable resource that is hard to duplicate, that is almost the dictionary definition of a “strategic resource”, or a resource that can lead to a sustainable competitive advantage.

    Now Netflix is going beyond recommendations in using those ratings, combining them with its social network and other data already licensed…

  • The Experience Store

    The Experience Store sells Cooking Classes in Provence ($3,995), Zero Gravity Flights ($3,750), Tank Missions ($1,249), and Driving Tours of Iceland ($2,800) among others. Playthings for the affluent, but not much imagination involved.

  • More business design quotes

    I added thoughts from Peter Senge, Ray Stata and Ed Simon to the Design Thinking and Business quotes page. Ed Simon’s is the earliest reference I’ve found of the term business design used in this context.

  • New n-gen

    Well, new to me anyway. Move Design has posted Mac OS X and Windows versions of their n-gen layout generator, a nice example of designing a tool for design rather than an artifact.

  • Job Search

    I pitched an old colleague last year on a job search engine concept. He was working at one of the big job websites and I figured they were all threatened by Google. After all, if a “job search” is a form of search, then why wouldn’t Google want to conquer that? He wasn’t interested.

    But I still think it’s a good idea, so I’ll be keeping my eye on Simply Hired.

  • The New Heroes

    The New Heroes tells the dramatic stories of 14 daring people from all corners of the globe who, against all odds, are successfully alleviating poverty and illness, combating unemployment and violence, and bringing education, light, opportunity and freedom to poor and marginalized people around the world.

    Also known as “social entrepreneurs,” they develop innovations that bring life-changing tools and resources to people desperate for viable solutions. What is possible? You’d be surprised. Take a journey into a world where people take action to make a big difference.

    The show will include a profile of KickStart whom I wrote about recently. Hosted by Robert Redford, the series airs on PBS stations Tuesdays, June 28 and July 5, 2005.

  • Inevitability or possibility

    David Byrne on Mau’s Massive Change exhibit…

    It comes across as a sort of gee whiz science museum exposition, one that proposes that the solutions to many of the world’s problems are not only within our grasp, but that their solution is inevitable. And Design, with a capitol D, has the answers. If only we would listen to the designers. Every room begins with an affirmative statement in huge type — We WILL do this, we will do that. That in itself might be a little off-putting to many people, as if Mau knows our destiny and is simply telling the rest of us what will happen. I also found it disturbing, the whole project, for its optimism, and especially what I took to be its utopianism…

    The future is partly limited by what we can imagine it to be. Granted, events sometimes intrude unpleasantly on our imagination, but John and Yoko might not have been too far off the mark — urging that if we could but imagine a new and better world, then, and only then, could it come into existence. They didn’t claim its inevitability, merely its possibility. That’s where Mau’s we WILL diverges with their more gentle utopianism.

  • Motorola’s Zander leading the charge

    Zander gesturing with hands Christopher Rhoads lobs some harmless questions at Motorola’s CEO Ed Zander ($) in today’s WSJ. Luckily Zander steps up and honestly assesses the company’s challenges, shortcomings and approach. Excerpts:

    On learning the importance of cool…

    When I came here on January 1, 2004, I didn’t think much about cool. I thought about making a quarter, meeting financials, meeting customer-delivery dates, developing the products on time, better quality. [He picks up a RAZR cellphone.]…I bumped into this thing a year ago April, and I thought it was cool. I would walk around with it on the streets of Chicago or in restaurants or with friends, and when they saw the RAZR, they just couldn’t believe this phone and said, ‘I gotta have it.’

    On what needs to improve…

    Motorola’s got a thick culture. I had to learn it, and it’s been hard bringing the things I think are valuable, such as a sense of urgency, fast decision making, shareholder value, competition. I don’t want to imply that none of that was there, but it was not to my liking, not after living in Silicon Valley for 17 years. I got the feeling that there were days the company was on autopilot to a degree.

    On how to change the culture…

    I think we ought to get back to putting the customer first. As simple as that sounds, I think it’s something that every American corporation, every corporation around the world, sometimes takes for granted.

    He seems to incorporate the innovator’s dilemma into his management style…

    Whack yourself before somebody whacks you. I used to have these meetings called the whack meetings at Sun where we’d think about what could happen to us and what we have to do to keep that from happening. That approach led to the creation of Java and a lot of the Internet.

    On transformation:

    The real challenge for corporations that are trying to transform is in the VP ranks. That’s where the blockage is. A lot of companies have clogged arteries. So we have undergone a transformation of our vice president ranks. I don’t know how many dozens of VP’s are no longer with us. Some have left on their own accord, some have not.

  • Innovation in cartoons



    New Yorker cartoon taxonomy
    The cartoon editor mentally classifies cartoons in a 2 by 2 of normal/abnormal setting vs. normal/abnormal caption.

    We just saw Bob Mankoff, New Yorker cartoonist and cartoon editor, talk about his job. I was happily surprised to see the magazine using both sides of its brain in figuring out which were the best cartoons for the magazine, trying to innovate in the unlikely area of cartooning.

    He and the other editors ultimately use editorial judgment to select pieces for each magazine from among thousands of submissions. But he also uses group discussion (in which he noted the inevitable group think involved). He uses surveys, and found that women consistently rate cartoons funnier than men. He’ll test one illustration with multiple captions. He considers the psychology behind cartoons (“It’s the opposite of empathy, and closely paired with fear. If you want to get children to laugh, run at them with a snowball in your hand.”) The University of Michigan’s Humor at Michigan study started with the complete collection of New Yorker cartoons and used eye tracking to analyze how people look at the illustration and the caption in different kinds of cartoons. And lately they’ve encouraged participation from readers with a caption contest on the back page.

    It all adds up to make Mankoff a highly educated student of what is funny and why. And it makes me think: if they can do this for cartoons, what can’t we do this for?

  • Opportunity for handling a crisis: Guidant

    Barry Meier of the NY Times reports the Guidant recall story…

    The Guidant Corporation said yesterday that it was recalling about 29,000 implanted heart devices because of flaws that might cause them to short-circuit when they are supposed to deliver a potentially life-saving shock.

    What makes the product flaw so important in this case is that the defibrillators are located inside the users’ chests. If quality control alone wasn’t bad enough,

    The recall, which comes at the urging of the Food and Drug Administration, involves three models of defibrillators made by Guidant. In the case of one model, the Ventak Prizm 2 DR Model 1861, Guidant did not tell doctors for more than three years that it was prone to electrical failure because of a design flaw. The company also disclosed yesterday for the first time that two other Guidant units had also repeatedly short-circuited.

    So not only is the device rather difficult to “recall”, it happened only when the government stepped in, has been an undisclosed problem for years, and incidentally there’s a couple more products that are now revealed as flawed. I guess that last disclosure signals they are owning up to the problem, but one wonders if they’re doing enough to fix the problem.

    The company said it was aware of two recent deaths involving the units at issue. It is not clear how much the recalls may cost Guidant.

    I’d bet Guidant has a pretty good idea of how much it will cost, that cost is the reason for their delay in disclosing the problem, and accounts for their passive position on the issue…

    While the action is technically a recall, it will be up to patients and their doctors to decide whether to undergo surgery to replace the affected devices. Such decisions are typically based on the age and health of a patient and the physician’s assessment of a device’s risk.

    The physician’s assessment of the device’s risk? Wouldn’t physicians want to avoid the risk of recommending the use of a flawed product (and be paid to replace it)? Hasn’t Guidant learned from the Tylenol crisis how to save a brand even when your product has led to accidental deaths? Do they perceive this as a product issue or a brand issue? Or a moral issue?

    Ironically, Johnson & Johnson — makers of Tylenol — is currently in talks to buy Guidant…

    “The events reported by Guidant are serious matters, and Johnson & Johnson is engaged in discussions with Guidant to help the company understand the issues,” the statement read.

    So is that J&J getting help understanding the issues, or Guidant?

    Update: Meier updates the story today: Defective Heart Devices Force Some Scary Medical Decisions

    …some patients like Ms. Alexson and Mr. Parsons are sharing a similar emotion: a sense of betrayal that Guidant did not disclose the problem earlier so that some people might have been spared the tough choice they now face.

    While Guidant has offered patients a free replacement unit, Ms. Alexson plans to get one made by a competitor, Medtronic Inc., and battle out the financial issues later. “I can’t trust these people who sit around in their offices and decide whether I’m going to live or die,” she said

  • If you like coffee you might also like…

    I was talking to a manager at one of the big ecommerce websites recently and she predicted that collaborative filtering is reaching the apex of usefulness. The below recommendation from Fresh Direct had me laughing at their clever suggestion. Are customer behavior and needs just as much if not more important than purchasing patterns in making recommendations?

  • Columbia’s Ideas At Work

    In a valiant attempt to connect research and industry, Columbia University Business School launches a new site called Columbia Ideas At Work. The first issue focuses on entrepreneurship.

    Here’s one interesting research brief from the site:

    People take more risks when they judge from experience rather than from other sources of information.

    Ralph Hertwig, Greg Barron, Elke Weber and Ido Erev studied how people make decisions of two kinds: when they do or don’t have information that describes the risks involved. When they do have such information, it’s a decision from “description.” When they don’t, it’s a decision from “experience.”

    The study asked 100 students at a technical university to make six decisions. Half got a description of the risks, and the other half did not. For each decision, before making your final choice you could try out different answers to see what result each gave. Then you moved on to the next decision. So both groups were able to learn from experience, but only one had description too.

    The results showed that the pure experience group made dramatically riskier choices than the description group and the description group made more accurate choices; the experience group underweighted the risks. Also, the experience group did not do more sampling beforehand to compensate for the lack of description; sampling came out about the same for both groups.

  • Race to the $100 Laptop

    kids outside holding laptops over their heads

    I’m seeing two different approaches to the $100 laptop. MIT is starting from scratch and — as you would guess — focusing on technology to simplify the current platform:

    …we will get the fat out of the systems. Today’s laptops have become obese. Two-thirds of their software is used to manage the other third, which mostly does the same functions nine different ways.

    Dell aims to get there by — as you would guess — pushing the limits of operational efficiency. Dell currently sells a laptop for $560 and a desktop for $299, so the $100 price point isn’t that far away.

    In both cases, an organization is using a core competency to achieve a goal. But in both cases I wonder if the edge competencies are reversed. It seems the actual costs of Dell’s computers are pretty low and some ruthless efficiency in (MIT’s goal of) getting them distributed to children in developing countries is needed. On the other hand, we all suffer from needlessly complex laptops and MIT’s work should be championed by Dell.