Noise Between Stations

The common way that financial people will judge the potential value of a project, or a design concept representing a potential future concept, is by building a model, usually a discounted cash flow model like Net Present Value (NPV). The calculation essentially asks, if we do this project and gain the profit we think we’ll [...]

Monitor110 was a business/site that tried to filter information for institutional investors. This post mortem from a founder probably won’t reveal any new lessons, but it’s always powerful to see theory — in this case the value of the beta release — played out in the form of failure… …By mid-2005 the system worked, but [...]

I’m back from Overlap 08 which is becoming my reliable annual inspiration for all things professional. It will surely fuel more thoughts here, but I wanted to capture one thing Deb Johnson said that Bruce Hannah taught her in design school: Mock it up before you fuck it up. The profanity I think is not [...]

I think a lot about how organizations and their products evolve quickly rather than remain static, and Google Labs are a prime example of that. By developing many alpha products, releasing several public betas, and getting live feedback they use the market to tell them what works. For many companies the notion of releasing your [...]

It looks like agile software development is having the same growing pains, expressed through semantics, as the design field (or the Design field). It’s the perceived misapplication of language that catches my eye… Jason Gorman argued that the meaning of Agile was ambiguous and was being inappropriately applied to a very wide range of approaches [...]

Another reason I like agile management is because when something bad happens, you should know as soon as you can. If you only check project status every week or longer, that can be way too late. It’s like what Robert Duvall says in The Godfather: “I have to go to the airport. The Godfather is [...]

It must have been Toyota Week last week in the New York Times. In addition to the Toyota-in-America story, they published a front page magazine piece on Toyota’s “world domination“. What’s perhaps most revealing is the slideshow of their training program, a reminder of the discipline in their culture.

[ this is a first draft of a chapter in Evolve, comments are appreciated ] Healthy organizations share information promiscuously to speed communication and generate tacit knowledge. Share current, important, non-urgent information using information radiators. In 1966 the New York Stock Exchange installed a huge electronic board that displayed the stock prices of every company [...]

When you have a new idea and you’re not sure it will work, create a tangible version of it as quickly as humanly possible. Even if it is very rough, something tangible helps you reach a solution. I’m sure you’ve been in this situation. There’s an important problem that needs to be solved before the [...]

To solve tough problems, we need the active participation of a diverse group of people. Instead of control residing only with managers, each person on a team should have the authority and responsibility to contribute fully. Rather than command them from above, the team leader should facilitate the team’s efforts. Since the industrial revolution we’ve [...]

The tools we use to create and communicate should be so easy to use we rarely ever think about them. With simple tools we naturally focus on what the tool allows us to do. The famous typography designer Matthew Carter has said that when you read you should not see the letters on the page, [...]

I’m finding examples of agile work practices in more and more places, and see them as perfectly aligned with the application of design practice in innovation services. Here’s a running list… Agile programming has the most robust expression, including a philosophy, an alliance of various approaches, tools, software, and measured results. Agile project management Get [...]

There’s a funny (or cruel, depending) dilemma to improving your work over time. If you don’t do it, your organization becomes less and less valuable over time, gradually failing, and dying an unfortunate death. If you do all the time, you never get to benefit from each change very long and probably suffer from change [...]

So how do we tell the truth? Here are a few ways I found work: Inform the uniformed: Challenging the accepted situation by citing reality may get you sent to Siberia. But it depends on whom you’re talking to. Over time executives become ill informed – ironically – because timid employees avoid giving them bad [...]

Over time a company’s official history becomes ideology and people need the truth of reality to help them grow. On my first trip to Berlin I toured the former Deutsche Demokratische Republik including a number of museums and memorials describing the former communist state, the Berlin Wall, and life within its boundaries. We’re now well [...]