My friend Jess and I have shared hotel rooms at two recent conferences, where he gently challenged and explored my thoughts on design and business. He’s smart, humble, and dedicated, so I’ve taken his skepticism seriously and use this space to address the criticism he offered. I’m happy to see he’s now doing the same on the bplusd blog, where I’m looking forward to hearing more from him.

Bob Lutz explains plans to centralize their design and engineering budget and what that means for building automobiles worldwide…

We expect a reduction in our architecture count over time of 50% as we introduce more converged architectures replacing the regional architectures we have today… For example, as we develop our new global mid-size architecture, which will replace such vehicles as the Opel Vectra, Chevy Malibu, Pontiac G6 and Saab 9-3, we’ll realize significant savings as a result of this new system. We’ll move from three closely related regional architectures to one global architecture serving nine different models in all four of our regions. We expect a 40% reduction in our prototype builds, a 20% reduction in material costs as a result of the common components, and 25% reductions in both engineering costs and overall investment. That one program alone could save us more than $1 billion over the course of its lifecycle.

Having just drove an Opel Meriva in Italy, a mini minivan not available here in the U.S., I can see the wisdom in leveraging great architectures worldwide. But we’ll have to see if a Saab is still a Saab when it has a Chevy chassis.

I added another quote — notably from a woman — to the Design Thinking and Business page, courtesy of Madelon Evers… “…To achieve superior design thinking in business, we need to facilitate learning from design across organisations.”

Malcolm Gladwell recently gave the keynote at the American Association of Advertising Agencies’ Account Planning conference in Chicago. It’s excerpted on Advertising Age ($). If you’ve worked in design or product development (or read “Blink”) you know the drawbacks of focus groups. But what Gladwell does here is describe the solutions as ones of management. Not surprisingly, I agree.

Here’s the ending…

Now think about the Aeron chair. [The focus group participants] say they don’t like the chair, of course they don’t. The chair is nothing they’ve ever seen before, but that was the whole plan in designing the chair. But that’s what’s wonderful about it, that’s why this chair will make billions of dollars for Herman Miller, but it’s also what dooms that chair in the focus group, because people don’t have the language.

Market research, when it is observational or when it is interpretative, is profoundly useful. But those are two critical things. They require the intervention of the person conducting the research. They require the findings that are gathered are considered, and thought about, and processed and interpreted. Back in the 1950s, most of the major advertising agencies on Madison Avenue employed Freudian psychoanalysts for this precise reason, and you don’t see that anymore. I think that’s a big mistake.

This understanding about what’s so terrible about focus groups ought to pave the way that we manage people. First and foremost, it’s very important for management to trust the creative talent.

The second thing is patience. The more breakthrough, the more revolutionary and the more innovative an idea is, the longer it will take for people to come to appreciate it.

The third thing is it requires people in management to tolerate uncertainty. The thing that’s driving all this focus-group and market-research data is the desire of people with the management power to make every decision as methodical and thought out and certain as possible.