“There can be no successful monozukuri (making thing) without hito-zukuri (making people).”
from the The Toyota Production System.
Category: Design
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Lance Armstrong’s giant heart
It turns out that intense, long-term cardio training actually enlarges the heart and therefore the amount of oxygen-rich blood that can be delivered to the muscles, according to this long-term study at the University of Texas…Lance Armstrong…improved his cycling efficiency by a phenomenal 8% as he matured from age 21-28 years… There is no doubt that Lance now possesses a big and strong heart that can beat over 200 times a minute at maximum and thus pump a exceptionally large volume of blood and oxygen to his legs. There are probably 100 other men on earth who have comparable abilities while each assumedly must have performed intense endurance training for at least 3 years and are now between the ages of 18-40 y. In testing hundreds of competitive cyclists over 20 years at UT, Dr. Coyle has found two other individuals with the physiological potential of Lance.
An additional factor in Lance’s improvement over the years is that he has learned how to reduce his body weight and body fat by 10 pounds (5 kg) prior to each of his victories in the Tour de France. Therefore, over all his power per kg of body weight has increased 18% while climbing-up the steep mountains in France.
There’s definitely a metaphor here for business, as companies that excel over time consistently apply themselves to excellence until it is rooted in their culture and not just the occassional project success.
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The Agile Project Leadership Network
I’ve found the Agile Development community has a lot in common with the user-centered design community, and their methods — especially the spirit of them — is closely aligned. In case you haven’t been following their evolution, many different methods from Scrum to Extreme Programming sprang up and, seeing commonalities among them, the founders came together to write the Agile Manifesto and form the Agile Alliance. Soon project managers caught the bug, adopted the practics and just recently formed the The Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN) which incidentally is structured much like the Information Architecture Institute.
The APLN’s core principles reaffirm the human-centeredness and agility of their predecessors:
In order to consistently deliver successful results, great project leaders embrace the following practices:
- Relentlessly Focus on Value. Focus efforts on generating organizational value rather than managing tasks.
- Be Situational Specific. Use situationally specific strategies, not a one-size-fits-all approach.
- Manage Uncertainty. Manage uncertainty through client focused collaborative exploration and proaction.
- Continuously Align to Changing Situations. Choose strategies for leading within a dynamic environment.
- Lead with Courage. Confront reality with conviction and a dedication to purpose.
- Build Strategies that Leverage People. Challenge team members with opportunities to grow professionally.
- Design Strategies Based on Teamwork. Devlop and sustain a collaborative team environment.
- Communication Through Immediate and Direct Feedback. Maintain control through feedback, not prescriptive plans.
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Business design example: opening up the process
I’ve heard some skepticism towards business design, which is healthy and quite justified given that no one has shown concrete examples of it yet. One reason for this is that examples are difficult to describe; the application of design thinking to business situations is highly contextual and — as the name states — has much to do with how people think.
I recently encountered a situation where I thought design thinking could improve a problem-solving process. It’s small and simple, but often difficult to put into practice because it challenges the way organizations work.
Let’s say a mail order company’s Customer Service group reports that an usually high number of products are being returned. Someone in management might request some data and generate a hypothesis about what is happening. Then they might come up with an idea for fixing it and implement the idea. Or, maybe two good ideas are analyzed and the better one is implemented, thusly:
Another way to process this problem is to consciously inject elements of design thinking into it. Starting with the data, the manager could collaborate with a partner or a team and use creativity techniques to abductively generate several hypotheses for what is causing the unusually high number of product returns. They could then run an experiment and test the best hypotheses with customers to understand the unique and personal issues behind the problem. With both quantitative and qualitative information in hand, the team starts to integrate this information and interpret it while creatively generating a number of possible solutions. The solutions are analyzed for potential and tested with customers, and the best one is launched.
The second approach is unquestionably more work, but strives to find a better answer with less risk. Remaining agile is all in the execution.
This isn’t new or radical thinking, it’s just new and radical for organizations whose cultures are suffering and need to change.
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Business book summaries
I was just thinking it would be great to have summaries of all those books I’ll never get to read, and of course someone has done that already. But this company is emphasizing the variety of formats they offer, when I bet business people would most prefer a bound collection of these published once per quarter.
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Engineering-Design love-in
In GM’s Design Push Picks Up Speed David Welch profiles Bob Lutz’s struggle to balance the priorities of accounting, engineering and design in an enterprise. This bit pressed the clutch down in my brain:
One of the first things Lutz did on arriving in September, 2001, was push designers and engineers to stop fighting and start collaborating. Now, when the two sides butt heads, they get together in weekly meetings to hammer out their differences. “It isn’t a love-in,” says chief designer Ed Welburn. “But in the last two or three years the laws of physics have changed.”
Now I realize this is a huge company, and the projects run for years, but we all know from having done this work that once-a-week meetings doesn’t count as teamwork. At the Skunkworks for example draftsmen and engineers worked in ajoining rooms, close enough to shoot rubber bands at each other. This helps people generate ideas and sort out issues while in the synthesis frame of mind, rather than the review frame of mind. Hopefully GM’s weekly meetings are a step towards richer interaction.
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Tomato TomA[h]to, the Re-Imagine Manifesto
Tom Peters just released his Re-Imagine Manifesto, Tomato TomA[h]to (.pdf) which captures the spirit of the book series and probably most of what he’s saying these days (and how he’s saying it). Such as…
They say, “If it can’t be precisely measured then it isn’t real.” [And I suppose if it can be measured it is real? Think Enron? Adelphia? WorldCom?”]
I say, “If it can be precisely measured it isn’t real.” [Think Age of Intagibles & Relationships.] [Think: “He knew the price of everything and the value of nothing.”]
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Stone Yamashita talk on business design
An AIGA/Apple Store event…
As designers, we have an extraordinary capacity to help any organization rethink and reinvent itself from within. Yet many of us unwittingly limit ourselves — by assuming that our value is limited to adding design at the end of strategic thinking, as a byproduct, or by focusing too much on artifacts, rather than the experience we want to create. In their presentation, three leaders from Stone Yamashita Partners will challenge us to change the conversation about design. They will argue that we can add extraordinary value to our businesses and our lives if we rethink our attitude to our craft, and start to consider it much more holistically. Drawing on case studies from companies such as HP, Nike, Gap, and eBay, they will argue that design can be central to the conversation in any business, and a powerful force for change.
Wednesday, July 20, 6:00 pm at the Apple Store, One Stockton Street, San Francisco. More info.
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The unhidden value in Netflix
Karl, in The hidden value in Netflix, points out that Netflix has… 345 Million movie ratings… Netflix gains a valuable resource that is hard to duplicate, that is almost the dictionary definition of a “strategic resourceâ€, or a resource that can lead to a sustainable competitive advantage.
Now Netflix is going beyond recommendations in using those ratings, combining them with its social network and other data already licensed…
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The Experience Store
The Experience Store sells Cooking Classes in Provence ($3,995), Zero Gravity Flights ($3,750), Tank Missions ($1,249), and Driving Tours of Iceland ($2,800) among others. Playthings for the affluent, but not much imagination involved.
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More business design quotes
I added thoughts from Peter Senge, Ray Stata and Ed Simon to the Design Thinking and Business quotes page. Ed Simon’s is the earliest reference I’ve found of the term business design used in this context.
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New n-gen
Well, new to me anyway. Move Design has posted Mac OS X and Windows versions of their n-gen layout generator, a nice example of designing a tool for design rather than an artifact.
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Job Search
I pitched an old colleague last year on a job search engine concept. He was working at one of the big job websites and I figured they were all threatened by Google. After all, if a “job search” is a form of search, then why wouldn’t Google want to conquer that? He wasn’t interested.
But I still think it’s a good idea, so I’ll be keeping my eye on Simply Hired.
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Inevitability or possibility
David Byrne on Mau’s Massive Change exhibit…
It comes across as a sort of gee whiz science museum exposition, one that proposes that the solutions to many of the world’s problems are not only within our grasp, but that their solution is inevitable. And Design, with a capitol D, has the answers. If only we would listen to the designers. Every room begins with an affirmative statement in huge type — We WILL do this, we will do that. That in itself might be a little off-putting to many people, as if Mau knows our destiny and is simply telling the rest of us what will happen. I also found it disturbing, the whole project, for its optimism, and especially what I took to be its utopianism…
The future is partly limited by what we can imagine it to be. Granted, events sometimes intrude unpleasantly on our imagination, but John and Yoko might not have been too far off the mark — urging that if we could but imagine a new and better world, then, and only then, could it come into existence. They didn’t claim its inevitability, merely its possibility. That’s where Mau’s we WILL diverges with their more gentle utopianism.
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Motorola’s Zander leading the charge
Christopher Rhoads lobs some harmless questions at Motorola’s CEO Ed Zander ($) in today’s WSJ. Luckily Zander steps up and honestly assesses the company’s challenges, shortcomings and approach. Excerpts:On learning the importance of cool…
When I came here on January 1, 2004, I didn’t think much about cool. I thought about making a quarter, meeting financials, meeting customer-delivery dates, developing the products on time, better quality. [He picks up a RAZR cellphone.]…I bumped into this thing a year ago April, and I thought it was cool. I would walk around with it on the streets of Chicago or in restaurants or with friends, and when they saw the RAZR, they just couldn’t believe this phone and said, ‘I gotta have it.’
On what needs to improve…
Motorola’s got a thick culture. I had to learn it, and it’s been hard bringing the things I think are valuable, such as a sense of urgency, fast decision making, shareholder value, competition. I don’t want to imply that none of that was there, but it was not to my liking, not after living in Silicon Valley for 17 years. I got the feeling that there were days the company was on autopilot to a degree.
On how to change the culture…
I think we ought to get back to putting the customer first. As simple as that sounds, I think it’s something that every American corporation, every corporation around the world, sometimes takes for granted.
He seems to incorporate the innovator’s dilemma into his management style…
Whack yourself before somebody whacks you. I used to have these meetings called the whack meetings at Sun where we’d think about what could happen to us and what we have to do to keep that from happening. That approach led to the creation of Java and a lot of the Internet.
On transformation:
The real challenge for corporations that are trying to transform is in the VP ranks. That’s where the blockage is. A lot of companies have clogged arteries. So we have undergone a transformation of our vice president ranks. I don’t know how many dozens of VP’s are no longer with us. Some have left on their own accord, some have not.