Tom Peters: Re-imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age comes to PBS (in NYC, on Monday, Nov 22 at 10pm)
Each of the companies profiled faced revolutionary business challenges and responded by inventing entirely new opportunities. Each had to re-imagine the nature of work itself—and did so by soliciting the energy and engagement of each and every one of their people.
The company suggestion box is growing in size and sophistication. Taking a cue from the software industry which subsidizes innovation by letting passionate customers beta test new products, companies like Bose are setting up forums for ideas. They recognize that innovation needs to be open, tapping creativity from inside and outside the organization.
The system that Bose is using, Informative, stresses the importance of the brand relationship. It’s interesting that they go for this softer, more ambiguous benefit than simply saying they help commpanies harvest more ideas. Though they do realize this is a conversation and not just direct mail in reverse…
Our real-time interactive communications tools allow us to engage large numbers of consumers in ongoing, concurrent dialogues, and our patented systems explore these conversations and consolidate actionable insights based on what your customers want and need right now, next month, next year and beyond.
Chris Anderson’s article in Wired, The Long Tail, is about making previously unprofitable products profitable by making them more widely available.
C. K. Prahalad’s book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, is about making previously unprofitable products profitable by making them more widely available.
The primary difference is that Anderson describes it happening in the digital realm, e.g. .mp3 files, in ways that aren’t possible in the physical realm, and Prahalad describes how it’ll work in the physical realm. Anderson’s “tail” is all the products that don’t fit in stores and normally don’t get sold. Prahalad’s pyramid bottom is all the people that are poor and normally aren’t sold to.
Imagine locking Anderson and Prahalad in a room until they figure out how to best distribute our digital and physical surplus to the poor of the world and make money for companies in the process.
Frontline is doing the Frontline treatment on brand strategy and the latest marketing. There’s a few refreshingly honest people, and the rest are either critical of the methods or vary from slightly to very silly… A market researcher probes a participant, “Would you say you feel lonely when you eat white bread? Anxious? Trusting?”
Read Montague’s Neuromarketing — potentially the most far-fetched method — sounded the most convincing, mainly because he’s an actual psychiatrist and not a hack. “I get to the reptilian brain… in France cheese is alive, you don’t put it in the refrigerator just as you don’t put your cat in the refrigerator. It must be marketed as alive. In the U.S. cheese is dead, it must be pasteurized and put in the refridgerator, and it is sealed in plastic like a body bag, and put in the cold, like a morgue.”
From a design perspective, it strikes me that this approach could be upstream of designers, displacing parts of ethnography. The design brief may come from the psychiatrist.
And of course there’s the deeper issue of marketers creating an alternate reality, going beyond selling to obscuring the truth of issues. And that’s why I like Frontline, they’re very good at exposing the truth.
The architect, Yoshio Taniguchi, of the new addition to the Museum of Modern Art in New York said to the trustees at the beginning, “Raise a lot of money for me, I’ll give you good architecture. Raise even more money, I’ll make the architecture disappear.”
John Updike adds,
And disappear, in a way, it has. The customary sensations that buildings give us—of secure enclosure, of masses of matter firmly supported—are diluted by a black gap, a mere quarter inch wide, that runs along the bottom and top of every interior wall, and even at the base of weight-bearing pillars, so that everything, subtly, floats. The gaps are useful for heat and air-conditioning, too, but their aesthetic accomplishment is to dematerialize the walls; the visitor moves through spaces demarcated as if by Japanese paper screens.
A friend just reminded me of a story from some time ago. I was giving a short presentation at a financial services company on the user-centered design process. The audience was a project team. I threw up some slides illustrating the various activities: researching users, designing the interface, implementing it, etc. Toward the end, the database programmer said, “Ohhhhhh, I understand, you do everything backwards!”
That’s because his process was: build a database, slap on a user interface, and test it… the exact opposite of what I would do.
I wonder if this is a way to explain UCD to technical audiences? “OK, what I’m about to tell you may be hard to believe. But there’s this whole field of people achieving great results by doing everything completely backwards!“
Since the 1703 Treaty of Methuen giving mutual trade advantages to Portuguese wines and English woolens, countries have recognized their own expertise and costs and opted to trade rather than compete in particular markets. So regardless of what our re-elected president tells us, the facts of economic life in the modern world will not change: we will lose jobs to less expensive workers elsewhere in the world.
But all is not lost. Everyone in the design world now has the gift of foresight and can adjust career trajectories to not only avoid pain in this, as yet, mostly unaffected field, but to additionally take advantage of the situation (I have). And this is the point I make in a new AIfIA editorial, The Best Sourcing of Information Architecture.
…I’ve decided to become stinking rich and in my utter richness punish those amazingly annoying “millions of farmers, factory workers and waitresses who ended up voting – utterly against their own interests – for Republican candidates.” Arrrrrrrrrrrgh.
The next social meeting of First Fridays in NYC for the User Experience Design community will be Nov 5, 6:30 at
Hell
59 Gansevoort St at Washington St (Meatpacking District)
(Between 12th & 13th Streets, West of 9th Avenue/Hudson Street)
212-727-1666
Subway: A,C,E and 1239 to 14th Street or L to 8th Ave
I’ll miss it unfortunately, have a G&T for me.
New Scandinavian Cooking is just so wonderful. I love when someone takes a format that is already popular and full of variation and just takes it in a whole other direction.
In the episode I saw, host Andreas Viestad skied through a sunny day over to a man pulling three char out of a fishing hole. Andreas immediately pan fried them and served them with an orange-curry filling. And then, on top of the mountain, orange chicken and for dessert ice cream and meringue served in an orange. All done outside, cooling ingredients in the snow, with the mountain range in the background. This has spoiled me for all other cooking shows.
I had just read What New CEOs Need to Know (here’s a free, shorter version) and was contemplating the CEO’s experience (expressing a strategic vision, trying not to send the wrong signals, not in power but reporting to the board, not in touch with operations, balancing obligations inside and outside the company…) when I came across Darrel Rhea’s post about selling a CEO on a new branding campaign.
So what compels them to invest in solving their brand problems? When a CEO perceives brand as tool to express his or her vision for the organization, they fully support it.
Yet another good example of applying empathic design (researching your audience and tailoring your work accordingly) in yet another context.
Tom Peters in Re-Imagine!
For me business is personal, not an abstraction… I’m writing another book because I’m pissed off… I happen to believe that innovation comes not from market research or carefully crafted focus groups but from pissed off people….
Many people I’ve met who strive to be designers and innovators are driven by frustration with the world as it is, wanting to make it what it can (and should!) be. Anger acts as a useful driver for innovation; I know I nurture my inner fiestiness. But I also think anger acts as a hindrence to getting things done. You can’t always work angry, you can’t always communicate angry, and you can’t always lead angry.
Peters goes on to describe how innovation suffers when mostly well-intentioned people are thwarted by organizational barriers. True enough, but aren’t those organization barriers constructed of and by other people? Well-intentioned people get charged by inspirational ideas, but — my gut tells me –feel scared as hell to quit their own jobs and follow his advice. At some point the anger must turn into empathy in order to make progress. Fear of change and risk can be alleviated, but it requires more than anger or prodding.
There’s a function of emotional intelligence that must initially let the anger flow, and then when an idea has momentum the strong emotions should be channeled into more productive means. “I’m so angry and want to fix this stupid product/company so bad that I need to stop being angry and start understanding. I need to look for commonalities with people who act differently and find whichever approach is right for the situation to make progress.“
A product named FreeStyle Flash is…? Take a guess, then look at the answer.
W. Chan Kim and Ren̩e Mauborgne in Think for yourself Рstop copying a rival make a great case for reducing the focus on competition and refocusing on innovation:
Assisted by new means to analyse competitors and influence their behaviour, companies [in the 1980’s] placed competition at the centre of strategic thinking, where it has remained ever since. But should organisations be motivated in this way? Our research suggests not. Focusing on building competitive advantages detracts from reshaping old industries, driving young industries to new frontiers and building entirely new industries. It blocks creativity.
I experienced this first-hand years ago while working on a project alongside one of the big management consulting firms. They had morphed the best practices mantra into a design method, aggregating disparate features of the competitors products into our product, and viola — this would somehow result in a cohesive whole that would trump the competition.
Seth Godin says, “The reason it’s so hard to follow the leader is this: The leader is the leader precisely because he did something remarkable. And that remarkable thing is now taken — so it’s no longer remarkable when you decide to do it.“
It’s written in HTML and JavaScript to run on any browser without needing any ServerSide logic. It allows anyone to create SelfContained hypertext documents that can be posted to any web server, or sent by email.
Whoa, wikis for the masses. It’s not as if they’re hard to setup (I’ve set up two personal wikis in about 10 minutes) but hosting is still a major hurder for many writers.
And it’s combined with a novel layout system:
A TiddlyWiki is like a blog because it’s divided up into neat little chunks, but it encourages you to read it by hyperlinking rather than sequentially…
Go and click a link, it’s fun!
Link courtesy Peter.