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.
For a limited time only you can download the full text of Finding the Right Job for Your Product by Clayton M. Christensen et al. The article itself isn’t revolutionary — they essentially mirror the transition that marketing research has undergone in moving from demographic to affinity customer segmentation. Christensen and his colleagues describe that transition in terms of product development. It starts to get a little muddled as they come up with their own interpretation/strawman of user-centered design and then critique it, but the intentions seem noble.
Jeneanne Rae spanks innovation efforts that are little more than idea-management systems…
Collecting random ideas may be an interesting exercise, but unless distinct energy is directed against solving a vexing corporate problem or exploiting a complex opportunity, you can count on low-level noise that won’t get senior management very excited. Lack of enthusiasm on the senior management front ensures sponsorship but little support, as well as attention deficits, long cycle times, and high frustration levels all around. Maintenance is high while reward levels can be very low.
Amen, sister. We can extend this criticism to consulting firms that hype idea generation as the foundation of innovation rather than those vexing corporate challenges.
Late last year I finally became frustrated with using whatever lame pen happened to be on hand. I did some research, tried several options, and corrected the situation. Here’s a summary:
On the inexpensive end, many people like the Pilot G2, though I think the Uniball Signo 207 is as good. Both are refillable rollerballs.
Unlike in Europe where my friends were required to use fountain pens in school, they’re rare in America. Following some recommendations I tried The Lamy AL – an aluminum version of their inexpensive Safari plastic line. Fountain pens can be fussy, but when they work there is nothing smoother and more beautiful. I tried using this all the time, but now I reserve it for letters. It costs about $30.
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HBR finally succumbs and publishes a design-is-great article, Roberto Verganti’s Innovating Through Design. Here’s his lead-off argument:
If you shop at Target, you may have seen a distinctive teakettle designed by architect Michael Graves. Target’s version is a knock-off (by Graves himself) of his original 1985 design for Alessi, the northern Italian home-furnishings manufacturer. Alessi has sold more than 1.5 million of the original design at five times the price of the Target version. This outstanding teakettle (also known as model 9093) emerged from a process that Roberto Verganti calls “design-driven innovation.†In this article, Verganti describes how Alessi, the lighting manufacturers Flos and Artemide, the furniture maker Kartell, and a few firms in the Lombardy region take a distinctive approach to design and innovation.
He then goes on to describe how these manufacturers — centered around Milan — nurture a community of discourse that eventually gestates into new product designs over the course of several years, contrasted with user research-generated design ideas.
What’s new here is his view that one need not have any design training to participate in this process, the executives in Milan typically having been trained in law or engineering. A radical idea?
A great outcome of Overlap is that the New York attendees — plus other peeps in our network — have been meeting up and continuing the conversation. Some of the same themes keep surfacing, such as the culture of business consulting firms and design firms, and social action. Another is service design.
A fundamental question in service design that we’ve been asking is, to be frank, is this just the same old design under a new title? I’ve spent the better part of the last 13 years designing things for the Internet that, while they result in media and code, are delivered as services. So looking at service design from this point of view doesn’t look much different: there’s a lot of emphasis on the customer and their experience rather than artifacts. But at the end of the day even a service involves making stuff that ultimately facilitates the service.
Service design does seem to be a wonderful catalyst for helping designers consider use of a product over time. Creating interaction points that happen over time isn’t easy to record or communicate, as we turn to time lines, storyboards, flip books, movies, and so on to capture these ideas. A central challenge is to help stakeholders understand what we’re creating in terms of the customer’s experience. It fails when you’re all sitting around staring at an artifact like a web page for a 10 minute critique — as if it were print — when the customer will only look at it for 10 seconds. It’s the experience that needs to be communicated and reviewed, and service design as a frame is helping us talk about these artifacts as interaction rather than just stuff. And that’s a good thing.
Incidentally, Overlap will be happening again in 2007, coordinated by the Toronto set. Stay tuned for details.
Though there is much punditry on the topic, I’ve found a paucity of books, classes, and other educational materials about Internet strategy. Guessing Internet practitioners would appreciate a formal review, I’ve created a course called Introduction to Internet Business Strategy and will be teaching it first at the Information Architecture Summit in Las Vegas this March.
If you can’t make it to Vegas, I’ll be teaching it again in New York soon thereafter. Stay tuned.
Jack Welch and his wife, former HBR editor Suzi, were at the 92nd St Y in New York last night in an on-stage interview with the editor of BusinessWeek. It was great seeing them in person, and Jack’s persona was especially refreshing: large doses of common sense spoken with brutal honesty.
One point he made stood out. Because his politics are “right of center” and he’s obviously pro-business, he’s not quick to believe in global warming without more evidence; he took the time to cite scientists who have refuted Al Gore’s statements. So for anyone taking an intellectual position on the issue, he said, it’s very difficult. But for business people the strategy is clear: stop denying this might happen and prepare for it by developing products and manufacturing that are cleaner and greener than the competition. He was emphatic that this is the only rational way to proceed, and ended up sounding like a stronger voice for green innovation than someone else with an obvious bias.
Last year I hacked away at an article about the need for a greater degree of experimentation in marketing organizations, but it never really seemed to gel quite right, and eventually I abandoned it. I’m happy to see that Joseph Jaffe completed the task in Manifesto for Experimentation. Successful executives I’ve seen already embrace this attitude when they become comfortable with tolerating risk, but it doesn’t commonly spread through organizations.
Of course we know feedback in human and product performance is important, but this study from K. Anders Ericsson is still interesting. He spent 25 years interviewing and analyzing high-flying professionals and is the coeditor of the recent 918-page book Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance.
You have to seek out situations where you get feedback. It’s a myth that you get better when you just do the things you enjoy.
Here’s a typical example: Medical diagnosticians see a patient once or twice, make an assessment in an effort to solve a particularly difficult case, and then they move on. They may never see him or her again. I recently interviewed a highly successful diagnostician who works very differently. He spends a lot of his own time checking up on his patients, taking extensive notes on what he’s thinking at the time of diagnosis, and checking back to see how accurate he is. This extra step he created gives him a significant advantage compared with his peers. It lets him better understand how and when he’s improving.
Richard Powers, winner of the 2006 National Book Award, reports how his speech recognition software has altered his experience of writing to be more like that of traditional oral culture…
…I can write lying down. I can forget the machine is even there. I can live above the level of the phrase, thinking in full paragraphs and capturing the rhythmic arcs before they fade. I don’t have to queue, stop, batch dispatch and queue up again. I spend less mental overhead on orthography and finger mechanics and more on hearing my characters speak themselves into existence. Mostly, I’m just a little closer to what my cadences might mean, when replayed in the subvocal voices of some other auditioner.
It was recently the birthday of former American president [[Woodrow Wilson]], someone who knew about trying to be innovative and bringing about change. He pushed major legislation through Congress, entered World War I, and sought to establish the League of Nations. He said, “If you want to make enemies, try to change something.“
Thomas J. Watson Jr., the head of I.B.M., which was famed for its militaristic corporate culture, was incredulous over Norris’s operation. So lean, so ragtag, so bafflingly humane. In a 1963 memo, Watson wondered how Control Data achieved with just a few dozen people what he had not with several thousand. Control Data later went on to defend its supercomputer innovation in an antitrust suit against Big Blue. It prevailed and won a settlement of $600 million.
A good example of agile innovation, from The Bleeding-Heart Rationalist.
Louis Uchitelle asks that excellent question in the NY Times. My reaction is no: in a world of artful making, inventing without making would be difficult.
“Most innovation does not come from some disembodied laboratory,†said Stephen S. Cohen, co-director of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy at the University of California, Berkeley. “In order to innovate in what you make, you have to be pretty good at making it — and we are losing that ability.â€
A few years ago, when he was in his mid-40s, Zell Kravinsky gave almost all of his $45 million real estate fortune to health-related charities, retaining only his modest family home in Jenkintown, near Philadelphia, and enough to meet his family’s ordinary expenses. After learning that thousands of people with failing kidneys die each year while waiting for a transplant, he contacted a Philadelphia hospital and donated one of his kidneys to a complete stranger.