Noise Between Stations

Author: Victor

  • Edge competencies

    I’ve been thinking about how organizations today are more distributed and decentralized, relying on the performance at the interface to the customer. Compared to core competencies that power the creation of new products and live deep within the company, most companies have one or more particular capabilities that live at the fringes where organizations exert their last influence over performance before the consumer takes over. I’m starting to collectively refer to these capabilities as edge competencies (yes it’s a little jargony, but core capabilities probably was as well back in 1990).

    For example, Coca-Cola’s core competency is the manufacture and distribution of nonalcoholic beverages, and their edge competency is how they create brands through marketing campaigns.

    T-Mobile’s core competency is building telecommunications infrastructure, and their edge competency is the design of each customer-facing service.

    The concept becomes interesting when you think about how executives crafting the organization’s strategy must align with one or two particular project teams doing tactical work (incidentally, I think the dichotomy of strategic and tactical is less useful in these situations, since the importance of edge project work can have deep importance to the organization).

    There should also be a feedback loop between core competencies and edge competencies, so that customers are both informed and have a voice in crafting an organization’s work.

    More to come…

    Update: More is here… I’ve expanded this idea into an essay and renamed it Strategic Delivery Points to avoid any confusing comparisons between it and core competencies. Enjoy.

  • “Designer” of the year

    Shaggy at Core77 reports that the Design Council’s Hilary Cottam has won the Design Museum’s (UK) 2005 Designer of the Year award and the resulting controversy around her selection. It illustrates the confusion and emotion possible when designers of the intangible mix it up with the traditional sort.

    The Observer reports two points. One is that Cottam didn’t work alone. But what designer does these days?

    The other point is that she’s not a designer. This assertion can get us into a long semantic debate, but the design community has persistently pushed for larger and more inclusive defintions of design. Now that someone who embraces that larger definition and applies design thinking to intangible problems wins a traditional design award, we’re surprised.

    I needed to ask, why was she actually nominated? The Design Museum says,

    Hilary Cottam has been nominated for the Designer of the Year prize for her achievements in championing a more inspiring and efficient approach to public sector design by demonstrating how design can be used as a tool to “tackle some of the more intractable social problems of our day”.

    and the chair of the award committee says of the award decision…

    ‘Hilary Cottam is not a designer in the traditional sense, but she is a wonderfully worthy winner of Designer of the Year for the imaginative and innovative way she uses design as a strategic tool to modernise schools, prisons and other critically important areas of our lives.’

    I applaud the Design Museum for taking such a progressive stance. It’s unfortunate they may make a few enemies along the way, but hopefully the award will act to widen our understanding of how design thinking helps solve problems and not just make things.

  • Design –> Business –> Culture



    Fund culture

    Seen in the Vitra store in Manhattan.

  • More intelligent design blogs

    Fast Company cited Noise Between Stations as one of seven smart blogs worth following for the latest insider thinking from the design world. Grazie!

    Link courtesy of Diego.

  • Business, design and class

    This New York Times app allows you to determine your class based on your occupation, education, income and wealth.

    It looks like a “management analyst” is three times classier than a designer. Let’s ponder that and how business designers should be positioned to exert influence in organizations.

  • Kelly Johnson’s Rules for Skunk Works

    Kelly Johnson standing next to U-2

    I’m doing research on high-performance teams that can evolve how they work to changing environments. I see it in the best designers, agile programmers, engineers and others. And I’m not too surprised to see it in Skunk Works, a book about the famous Lockheed Advanced Development Projects group. The man who ran the group during the early years — Kelly Johnson (shown with the U-2 spy plane) — wrote up a set of rules that emphasize small teams, close collaboration, low ceremony, iteration and testing, relationships built on trust, and constant communication…

    1. The Skunk Works’ program manager must be delegated practically complete control of his program in all aspects. He should report to a division president or higher.
    2. Strong but small project offices must be provided both by the military and industry.
    3. The number of people having any connection with the project must be restricted in an almost vicious manner. Use a small number of good people.
    4. Very simple drawing and drawing release system with great flexibility for making changes must be provided in order to make schedule recovery in the face of failures.
    5. There must be a minimum number of reports required, but important work must be recorded thoroughly.
    6. There must be a monthly cost review covering not only what has been spent and committed but also projected costs to the conclusion of the program. Don’t have the books ninety days late and don’t surprise the customer with sudden overruns.
    7. The contractor must be delegated and must assume more than normal responsibility to get good vendor bids for subcontract on the project. Commercial bid procedures are very often better than military ones.
    8. The inspection system as currently used by the Skunk Works, which has been approved by both the Air Force and the Navy, meets the intent of existing military requirements and should be used on new projects. Push basic inspection responsibility back to the subcontractors and vendors. Don’t duplicate so much inspection.
    9. The contractor must be delegated the authority to test his final product in flight. He can and must test it in the initial stages. If he doesn’t, he rapidly loses his competency to design other vehicles.
    10. The specification applying to the hardware must be agreed to in advance of contracting. The Skunk Works practice of having a specification section stating clearly which important military specification items will not knowingly be complied with and reasons therefore is highly recommended.
    11. Funding a program must be timely so that the contractor doesn’t have to keep running to the bank to support government projects.
    12. There must be absolute mutual trust between the military organization and the contractor with very close liaison on a day-to-day basis. This cuts down misunderstanding and correspondence to an absolute minimum.
    13. Access by outsiders to the project and its personnel must be strictly controlled.
    14. Because only a few people will be used in engineering and most other areas, ways must be provided to reward good performance by pay, not simply related to the number of personnel supervised.

      15. And a last rule passed on through oral tradition…

    15. Starve before doing business with the damned Navy. They don’t know what in hell they want and will drive you up a wall before they break either your heart or a more exposed part of your anatomy.

  • Refresher on critical thinking

    Stever Robbins pens a critical thinking refresher in the new HBS Working Knowledge…

    1. Make sure you understand the logic behind your decision.
    2. Identify your assumptions and double-check them.
    3. Collect the data that will support or disprove your assumptions.
    4. Deliberately consider the situation from multiple frames.
    5. Remember the people!
    6. Think short and long term.

  • Product instinct & venture capital

    I had a great conversation with Phi-Hong the other day about how despite our having seen the insights and risk management that user research can achieve, some companies seem to do just fine without it, thank you very much. Apple’s product design, the early Google, much of Amazon.com.

    While teaching others the product development process, I know there’s a point at which one synthesizes audience desires, trends, content, function, esthetics, price point, revenue model etc. etc. etc. together not in some grand spreadsheet but in our subjective little minds. It’s a hard thing to teach, and not terribly surprising that companies could produce great products by hiring individuals who are very good at this synthesis.

    I witnessed this recently watching a CMO reviewing new product concepts. He wasn’t too interested in concepts that were mostly new UI ideas; I think it’s hard to look at a couple screens and see a whole new product, much less a whole new business. Who of us who saw Google in 1999 saw the potential? I know I was skeptical, figuring any algorithm that relied on popularity would devolve into presenting a tabloid. Their modest response seemed to acknowledge that even they knew they were running a big experiment…


    I don't think we will turn into a tabloid. But, time will tell.

    -Larry

    Reading through Google’s official history paints a picture of UI+algorithm innovation being tough to identify, based on the highly subjective perspective of whoever they presented it to…

    Among those they called on was friend and Yahoo! founder David Filo. Filo agreed that their technology was solid, but encouraged Larry and Sergey to grow the service themselves by starting a search engine company. “When it’s fully developed and scalable,” he told them, “let’s talk again.”

    …

    Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, was used to taking the long view. One look at their demo and he knew Google had potential — a lot of potential. But though his interest had been piqued, he was pressed for time. As Sergey tells it, “We met him very early one morning on the porch of a Stanford faculty member’s home in Palo Alto. We gave him a quick demo. He had to run off somewhere, so he said, ‘Instead of us discussing all the details, why don’t I just write you a check?’ It was made out to Google Inc. and was for $100,000.”

    The lesson? Designers need to shop their idea around to different people before giving up. Investors — whether it’s CMOs or venture capitalists — need to occassionally throw money at an idea to try it out in the real world to ultimately know if it’s successful or not.

  • Options for Ground Zero

    The architectural planning for Ground Zero in New York serves as a good example of where design thinking could have helped. Paul Goldberger’s recent New Yorker article, “A New Beginning: Should Ground Zero be Used for Housing?” (unfortunately not online) describes the emotional situation four years ago when it failed to occur to anyone that the new World Trade Center plan should focus on housing, not office space. In retrospect, it seems obvious. Manhattan needs more residential space, has an office surplus, and the trend in lower Manhattan is toward residential offerings.

    An approach that explicitly goes looking for more and different options might have uncovered the obvious sooner. But it requires diligence to honestly question the available options in the midst of emotional rhetoric. Design thinking is, as the name implies, a particular way of thinking, and so not easy to invoke against the tide of conventional judgment thinking. I think some of the advantages we attribute to design thinking will actually come from the courage and cleverness to evoke design thinking at all.

  • Stealth research & development

    I’m reading Skunk Works, a book about the famous Lockheed Advanced Development Project that has an amazing record of innovation. It reveals the source of the F-117’s stealth technology not as an American invention, but as an idea that was passed from scientist to scientist for a century. The idea centers on calculations describing how a given geometric configuration will reflect electromagnetic radiation (e.g. make a plane invisible to radar). Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell first derived the set of formulas, a German electromagnetics expert Arnold Johnnes Sommerfeld refined them, and the Russian radio scientist Pyotr Ufimtsev further developed them. They lay hidden by obscurity, in an untranslated Moscow scientific journal for ten years. Eventually the US Air Force translated it and Lockheed radar specialist Denys Overholser read Ufimtsev’s dense 40-page paper out of pure geek interest, finding the key to stealth technology near the end. It’s ironic that an American used this information, as it was 1975, during the cold war.

    There’s a lesson here we all know already, about connecting research and development, about helping academia and industry cooperate in ways that profit both parties. It happens now, but there’s still plenty of universities and companies that could benefit from a relationship.

  • Authentic Brands

    My recent post about brand layering reminded me of something Kevin Fong mentioned at the ID Design Strategy conference. Companies like Polaroid and Westinghouse are now renting out their brands to other manufacturers, while the parent company puts an ironic layer of marketing frosting on top: “You can be sure… if it’s a Westinghouse.” Um, apparently we can’t. Click through to the small appliance category and the mask comes off, a giant list of “Salton Brands” (not “Salton Products” mind you).

    With brand layering, brand renting, and consumers taking the situation literally into their own hands, an authentic brand backed by an authentic company will be a rare and valuable asset. My current client has two offices full of authentic people doing authentic work under an authentic-but-little-known name, they’re feeling the pressure to grow, and the pure marketing path (as opposed to marketing great work) tempts them. It’s easy to talk about doing the right thing and focusing on the customer, but the reality — even in “good” companies — is much messier, requiring thoughtful conversation within the organization of how the products and processes on the drawing board will change the way they are perceived.

  • Brand Layering vs. Customer-Made

    Last Saturday I sauntered into Urban Outfitters to see what they were selling these days. Their inventory is pretty edgy and feels like a bellweather of what fashion is moving from the lead users to everyone else.

    I was drawn to this line of relaxed suit jackets, which mix business and design in a way you might think I’d want them mixed. The line is called Urban Renewal (a house brand?) and which — according to the tags — might be vintage clothing, might be new, and/or might be modified somehow…

    Some of the jackets had added stiching patterns or an ’80s iron-on or patch on the back. On this particular specimen, the jacket was vintage and simply rebranded, which is only appropriate as the original was created by Needle Craft for another company called Good Friends of Athens, Tennessee. Notice how Urban Renewal leaves the original label inside…

    It was only $59, so I had half a mind to buy it and add my own layer of branding to it. But, now inspired, I instead headed for the vintage store where I found a mint DKNY suit jacket for $15. After spending another $10 in funky buttons at the sewing store and a half hour of sewing, I had a Noise Between Stations brand jacket. The customer-made approach was more fun, an exercise in play, and saved me $35.

  • Lawrence Lessig on innovation vs. the law

    Lawrence Lessig’s recent speech, Clearing the Air About Open Source actually focuses more on the war between innovators and those that profit by impeding innovation: lawyers, lobbyists, and the companies that employ them. He illustrates how the courts are used to litigate companies into bankruptcy, how companies like Microsoft are hiring boatloads of lawyers to use the reality of patent law to fend off open source, and how on the macro level it is countries who are making decisions about patent law and software investments to further their interests.

    Most importantly, he points out that these arguments are rarely framed as threats to innovation, but that they need to be to protect innovation. You can see his influence on the EFF’s website.

    During the Q&A he offers some specific ways the open source community can fight this war, e.g. by supporting political points of view that both embrace liberal (allow innovators to compete against BigCo) and conservative (stop government from meddling in the market) points of view. Still, he paints a dire picture for anyone building software from the OS to the application layer, and I’m glad I’m not in that business.

  • Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW)

    I was exposed to the ISEW by Josephine Green of Philips at the ID Design Strategy conference. She struck me as the female John Thakara: highly intelligent and morally scolding, and dropping in your lap the challenge of solving the problems she just convinced you are vitally important.

    To understand how ISEW differs from, say, measuring GDP, first look at them graphed together:

    graph showing GDP going up and ISEW going up then down

    Then read the description:

    The ISEW is one of the most advanced attempts to create an indicator of economic welfare. It is an attempt to measure the portion of economic activity which delivers genuine increases in our quality of life – in one sense ‘quality’ economic activity. For example, it makes a subtraction for air pollution caused by economic activity, and makes an addition to count unpaid household labour — such as cleaning or child-minding. It also covers areas such as income inequality, other environmental damage, and depletion of environmental assets.

    And hear how the proponents respond to criticism:

    Some commentators say that the use of such ‘non-statistical’ judgements invalidates the utility of ISEW. However, this is even more of a problem for GDP when it is used as an indicator of progress — for its own value judgement is that these adjustments be set at zero.

    In the past you might have gotten traction with a name like ISEW, but I’d like to see it reframed — possibly with the help of the Longview Institute — into an idea progressive political candidates can run on. For now, we can all start chipping away at the use of GDP.

  • ID Design Strategy presentations online

    Now online are the presentation visuals from the recent Design Strategy conference at the Institute of Design.