Noise Between Stations

Business Design

  • Strategy + Business mag

    •

    1 min read

    Strategy + Business is a pretty good quarterly. Free registration allows access to the copious archives. Without reading the About page, you might never know it’s published by a consulting firm, Booz Allen.

  • Integrative Thinking

    •

    1 min read

    Roger Martin and the folks at the Rotman School are helping to popularize a model of Integrative Thinking they see in more successful leaders. Summarized, integrative thinkers consistently consider a broader and more diverse set of inputs to be salient to an issue. They work on all those inputs simultaneously — bringing each into focus…

  • Slides from Can We Run the Company?

    •

    1 min read

    Here’s the slides from my recent talk, Can We Run the Company? (.pdf). You’ll have to imagine me waving my arms wildly as you read. To summarize, if we got into this business to empower people, we can do even more empowering from higher up in the organization. Our skills as designers can be used…

  • A merger of consumer product innovators

    •

    2 min read

    While some have read the Gillett-Proctor & Gamble merger as leverage against Wal-Mart, James Surowiecki argues it was all about combining innovative like-minds: A. G. Lafley, the C.E.O. of Procter & Gamble, denied that the acquisition had anything to do with the power of Wal-Mart. When he was pressed, he said, “The power has shifted…

  • Richard Farson

    •

    1 min read

    I stumbled across Richard Farson’s site looking for an old HBR article he wrote, and discovered a wealth of excellent thinking, synthesizing ideas on business design, organizational design and designers. The article from HBR, The Fault-Tolerant Leader (free here), hits on all the important reasons management needs to accept risk in order to innovate. His…

  • Rotman Business Design Conference

    •

    1 min read

    There doesn’t seem to be many first-person accounts of Rotman’s recent Business Design Conference. Here’s some of the press releases instead: Shift Needed in Design World, Says Whitney “The power of design thinking must be freed up to deal with all sorts of issues on a global scale.” The Design of Business, Rather Than Designing…

  • Creating change by creating leaders

    •

    1 min read

    Imagine a consulting organization that not only provided advice, but guided clients through the changes recommended. Imagine further that the client learned and was transformed by being challenged to quickly assume the place of the consultants. Imagine how much more effective the consultants’ advice would be in the long term if they emphasized qualities like…

  • Design as a core strategy

    •

    1 min read

    My business partner John Zapolski will be speaking at The Institute of Design Strategy Conference in May. For a preview of his thoughts, check out the interview with him on the conference website, “Design as a Core Strategy“. …Companies that are successful exploiting the full potential of design do so because it’s present in all…

  • Malcolm Gladwell blinks

    •

    1 min read

    Malcolm Gladwell I just saw Malcolm Gladwell do a book tour talk. With “The Tipping Point” and now “Blink” it’s clear he’s a student of change. In his new book he looks at the ability of the adaptive unconscious to make good decisions because it’s been trained through experience. The implications for practice and iteration…

  • Redesigning American Business

    •

    1 min read

    Bruce Nussbaum’s Redesigning American Business for Business Week identifies what my company is doing: “Designers are teaching CEOs and managers how to innovate… They pitch themselves to businesses as a resource to help with a broad array of issues that affect strategy and organization — creating new brands, defining customer experiences, understanding user needs, changing…

  • Business fuses with design

    •

    1 min read

    Niti Bhan’s While you were out: changes in the global design industry for Core77 is a good overview on the fusion of business and design, including some nice words about my new company. Niti is from IIT’s Institute of Design who, incidentally, has a newish Master of Design Methods program for those who want a…

  • Make eight mistakes a day

    •

    1 min read

    The HealthWorks! Kids’ Museum is a unit of Memorial Hospital in South Bend, Indiana and an organization truly focused on health care, not just illness care. In a recent profile, one employee cited the need for trial-and-error in the design of their education programs, “To innovate, we need to make at least eight mistakes a…

  • Tom Peters on TV

    •

    1 min read

    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…

  • Open, Subsidized Innovation

    •

    1 min read

    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…

  • How a competitive stance blocks innovation

    •

    1 min read

    W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne in Think for yourself – stop 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…