Author: Victor

Conley’s new kind of professional

Chris Conley’s A New Kind of Professional declares

There is a need for professionals skilled in navigating innovative work

No specific professional discipline owns this space

There is a lack of professionals who do this well

In my mind I see a castle surrounded by a moat. On each side are designers, engineers and business people. Those willing to leave the comfort of their present situation and explore the castle could leap over the moat, but only if they leave their baggage behind. Doing so means living with others that think and work very differently, and working together to find common ways of working. That’s the place the new kind of professional is creating.

Strengthen your right brain

In the April issue of Scientific American Mind, Ulrich Kraft’s Unleashing Creativity ($*) investigates the physical and behavioral evidence for our creativity, still of course a mostly mysterious thing. One fascinating finding is how the left brain’s convergent thinking can inhibit the right brain’s divergent thinking.

The neurologist Bruce Miller studied patients with dementia that resulted from damage to their left brain. The common immediate symptoms were loss of speech and learned social behavior, typical left brain functions. Some of these patients also exhibited a simultaneous burst in creativity in activities from art to music to invention, activities new to them. Kraft makes the argument that we are born with this creativity — young children are invention machines — but 20 years of convergent-thinking education strengthens the left brain’s domination over the right brain.

So how do we become more creative? There’s no easy fix. To be creative, new neural pathways need to be constructed by, well, being creative. Kraft suggests four steps for doing that:

  • Wonderment: Try to retain a spirit of discovery, a childlike curiousity about the world. And question understandings that others consider obvious
  • Motivation: As soon as a spark of interest arises in something, follow it
  • Intellectual courage: Strive to think outside accepted principles and habitual perspectives such as “We’ve always done it that way.”
  • Relaxation: Take the time to day dream and ponder, because that is often when the best ideas arise. Look for ways to relax and consciously put the ideas into practice.

I can now justify all that childhood time spent lying in the grass staring up at the clouds.

* Thanks to James for the article heads up. If you’re considering buying it, the online version is cheaper than the dead tree version.

Environment alters DNA

WSJ reports ($) that the effect of a gene depends on the environment it’s exposed to. Several studies have shown, for example, that water-fleas will only grow hard-skull defenses if they are in waters with fish, that oak-tree caterpillars grow to resemble the food they eat, and that men with the “violence gene” only act violent if they were neglected or abused as children. My favorite example:

Last summer, Michael Meaney of McGill University, Montreal, and colleagues reported that a gene that shapes how fearful, jumpy and neurotic a rat is can be altered by how regularly its mother licks and grooms it. Maternal care changes the chemistry of a “neuroticism gene,” and the rat grows up to be mellow and curious. The genetic trait for neuroticism — deemed innate because scientists had found a gene “for” it — is reversible by environment.

I wonder how different working environments interact with our genes?

Published
Categorized as Science

Bruce Nussbaum, design thinking champion

Bruce Nussbaum, editorial page editor for BusinessWeek, continues his crusade to spread the good word of design thinking to the business community. In The Empathy Economy he quotes GE Healthcare Technologies (GE ) CEO Joseph M. Hogan as saying,

Today, when we think about designing, say, a new MRI system, we don’t just think about designing the product, we think about designing the whole radiology suite. Design in the next 10 years will move beyond the product. It will move beyond workflow. Hospitals in the future…will have different ways of interacting with the patient. We have to think about setting the course for how design can affect the whole health-care experience.

And with Rachel Tiplady he reports Insead has joined with the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., to offer a joint program that teaches the role of creativity in business decisions.

Avoiding toxic co-workers

Diego has two worthwhile posts on avoiding assholes at work, using Richard Branson’s reality show as an example:

Sir Branson took an innovative approach to the asshole problem by donning Scooby-Doo-ish makeup and mask before picking up would-be contestants from the airport in a London taxi cab. Disguised as an arthritic old cabbie, Branson was able to observe these would-be Trumps interacting with a “little” person, a situation which is to an asshole what buried truffles are to a pig – an invitation to root around and generally make a boor of one’s self. Not surprisingly, three contestants showed their true colors in short order, and Branson kicked two of them off. A strong cultural statement, eh?

The Wall Street Journal has a piece on inept managers today. They get there either because

Sometimes a supervisor promotes a lame manager because he figures the manager is unlikely to unseat him. “They don’t want to have subordinates on a lower rung of the ladder who might soon step over them,” says Angelo Calvello, a principal at a financial firm in Chicago. “Normally, a boob has got a boob for a boss.”

or

Organizational psychologist Gary Hayes says organizations flattened starting in the 1970s, when layers of management were removed in the name of organizational efficiency. But “a very large number of companies after that really stopped rewarding management skills,” he says. As a result, “people get promoted because they have a technical skill that gets found out and recognized early on and that becomes the horse they ride into town,” he says.

Linking to the New York Times website

I just discovered two techniques for increasing your online enjoyment of the lovely New York Times:

  1. From blogs, links can lead behind the pay wall by creating a weblog-safe link (thanks Jason)
  2. If you live here and have a library card, you can access the newspaper’s archives back to 2000 — as well as the WSJ, Washington Post, company data, and a whole lot more through the public library’s Novel system
Published
Categorized as Blogs

Same product, new attitude

Irreverent online outfitter Moosejaw Mountaineering‘s homepage currently reads: “The person who wrote this text just started at Moosejaw. He is not funny. But we’ve got softball season coming up and he’s a ringer.” NYT Magazine says,

This is not your standard outdoor-brand message, which tends to go something like this: Our stuff is strictly for the hard-core, not for the poseur (so never mind that you keep seeing our logo on people loading their S.U.V.’s in mall parking lots). Wolfe, however, says he has learned that the ”hard-core user” has no problem with Moosejaw’s approach — and not because it’s subtle or sneaky but because it’s so over the top.

They managed to keep the traditional audience and add a new audience by deviating from the usual way of doing business, in this case altering their identity. Small Dog is another example of same product, new attitude.

Published
Categorized as Branding

Design is to design a design to produce a design.

I was at Brand Experience Lab last week and David Polinchock was describing how he talks to clients about the potential of cutting edge interaction design hardware. He quoted someone else who pointed out that our children could have access to 3D printers and so, just before leaving to live away at university, they’ll print their furniture.

A neat concept, but what put the clutch pedal down in my brain is what David said next: “We’ll all design, because we can.” That shifts designers from primarily makers of products to makers of design tools.



David Polinchock

Published
Categorized as Design

Premature optimization

“Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.” — Donald Knuth

I think you can replace the word programming with the word design and that would still be true.

Published
Categorized as Process

Programming language design

For some reason I’m fascinated by programming language design. One reason is that innovation can happen at the tools level, and the tools that fuel software are undeniably important.

In the hands of a great author, writing on this topic weaves together the technical, the social and the personal forces at work. One of my favorites is Worse is Better, an analogy that applies beyond programming languages. Another is Paul Graham and his work on Arc.

In The Periodic Table, Primo Levi tells a story that happened when he was working in a varnish factory. He was a chemist, and he was fascinated by the fact that the varnish recipe included a raw onion. What could it be for? No one knew; it was just part of the recipe. So he investigated, and eventually discovered that they had started throwing the onion in years ago to test the temperature of the varnish: if it was hot enough, the onion would fry.

We’re going to try not to include any onions in Arc

An exciting part about Graham’s work is that he starts by admitting Unix/C has won. Then he proceeds to set his goal even higher. This is the spirit of design, of always turning whatever situation you have now into something even better.

Reflexivity of the dollar

James Surowiecki elegantly encapsulates yet another economic trend, this time it’s the falling-yet-floating dollar. Essentially the dollar is falling because Americans don’t save and keep spending, accumulating incredible debt, and the dollar is not crashing because Americans keep buying… from Asia, who is interested in buying lots of dollars to prop up our currency and our spending habits.

So if no one panics, we’re alright for a while. But once the US population pyramid flattens out, we’ll have less spenders and more older adults wishing they had saved. And then maybe Asia won’t view us as such a great candidate for subsidies.

I was talking to Monika and Ulrike from Germany last night and that country has the reverse problem: a lot of saving and not enough spending. Compared to the US, it seems their habits favor long-term stability and short-term pain.

Published
Categorized as Economics

Creativity, logic and hindsight

Edward de Bono on the interaction between creativity and logic:

…every valuable, creative idea will always be logical in hindsight. If an idea were not logical in hindsight, then we would never be able to appreciate the value of the idea. The idea would remain valueless. So we are only able to appreciate those creative ideas that are indeed logical in hindsight. Then we go on to say — as we have been doing for 2,400 years — that if an idea is logical in hindsight, then better logic should have found it in the first place. So we try to teach more logic instead of taking creativity seriously.

Or as James says, “That’s Common Sense You Didn’t Have 6 Months Ago.“

It’s Synergistic!

I saw this posterboard in a conference room in corporate America recently:

definition of synergistic, which is the same as synergy

…and I just had to take a picture of it. While at first it strikes me as a funny word, I’ve been seeing more and more corporate language bashing, and I find it discouraging. It’s too easy to position people who use corporate-speak as the other and label them corporate drones. Language is learned, and so this language acts as useful shorthand to the initiated — which is true in any discipline. If creative and analytical people are going to work together, we need to jump this hurdle.

Synergy is usually the word I think of to illustrate this. It’s hard not to say it without sounding silly because of its use in dot-com exuberance. And yet it has a specific and important meaning to business; the merger of AOL and Time Warner could have resulted in synergy, and that should have been a focus of their integration efforts.

Corporate speak really only fails in two cases:

  1. When the speaker incorrectly assumes the audience knows the vocabulary, as when government speaks to the public
  2. When fancy words substitute for substantive ideas. This is really a case of bad thinking and not a language issue.
Published
Categorized as Writing

Orpheus-style leadership

This book review reminded me of the conductor-less Orpheus Chamber Orchestra…

…which has forged a successful recording and performance career without the need of a conductor. Their group is not leaderless, members are keen to emphasize; rather, the leadership role shifts among them within a performance and even within a piece. Echoing Peter Drucker, the author writes, “The Orpheus approach may be the harbinger of leadership trends to come in the business world.”

I love this example of putting power in the hands of the people doing the work, yet I’m still a little skeptical about how much your average classical musician wants to be on the board and schmooze with rich patrons to keep the endowment funded. Still, I’d like to experiment with the model in businss environments, especially in employee-owned companies.

The Orpheus Process is built on eight principles:

  1. Put power in the hands of the people doing the work.
  2. Encourage individual responsibility for product and quality.
  3. Create clarity of roles.
  4. Foster horizontal teamwork.
  5. Share and rotate leadership.
  6. Learn to listen, learn to talk.
  7. Seek consensus (and build creative systems that favor consensus).
  8. Dedicate passionately to your mission.