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.
Category: Business Design
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Integrative Thinking
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 in turn — rather than consider them in discrete sequences. They perceive indirect casual links among the inputs. And they work creatively to find new solutions, rejecting the tradeoffs that others accept.
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Slides from Can We Run the Company?
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 not just to create artifacts but to help us perform management functions as well. But, even though we’re still using our design skills, we need to stop thinking of ourselves as designers and start thinking of ourselves as leaders.
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A merger of consumer product innovators
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 to the consumer.†This may not be mere talk. In a world where brand names alone don’t confer power, the only way to prosper is to make products that genuinely improve (even if only marginally) on what came before. This is exactly what Gillette and P. & G. have done. Gillette’s razor line is one of the most lucrative businesses in history, mainly because the company has invested billions in technological innovation. This has allowed it to introduce a new razor every few years that costs considerably more than the one it’s replacing. And while historically P. & G. has focussed more on brand-building and marketing, in recent years it has invested heavily in innovation, too. The Swiffer mop and the SpinBrush electric toothbrush may not quite rank up there with penicillin or the Model T, but in the world of consumer products they count as real breakthroughs.
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Richard Farson
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 articles Management by Design and Designers as Leaders are excellent as well.
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Rotman Business Design Conference
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 for Business, Leads to Greater Innovations Says IDEO President & CEO
“Whether you like it or not, the more innovative you try to be, the more you are going to affect the business and the business model.”
Intelligent Design is Key to Our Success Says Four Seasons Hotel President
“…last but not least is our decision to focus all of our energy and expertise on hotel management rather than ownership.”
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Creating change by creating leaders
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
- Self-knowledge
- Craftsmanship
- Tenacity
- Teamwork
- Leadership
- The ability to go beyond self-imposed limitations
- Acceptance of responsibility
- Self-reliance
That’s what Outward Bound does. They take you out into the wilderness and show you a plethora of new skills, everything from navigating dangerous white water rapids in a raft to campsite cooking for 30. The next day you’re not only expected to do these things, but to also lead your peers through them. It’s deliberately very hard, and forces people to step up and achieve more than they could before, and become more comfortable as leaders. It seems to me this is a great model for consultants to use when the goal is to create lasting change.
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Design as a core strategy
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 of the decisions the company makes. …these companies aren’t choosing to apply design to their respective business strategies, but have chosen design as the fundamental strategy itself. Design is the philosophical core of the company. Everyone in the company becomes involved in designing, whether that means creating financial plans or selecting casing materials for an industrial product. Design isn’t something that the design department does. It’s a way of operating the company. It’s an ongoing set of choices about how the company is going to exist, to compete, to grow.
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Malcolm Gladwell blinks
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 are directly relevant for designers.
He says, “Decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately” — especially by those with expertise — but this requires “changing the environment in which the snap judgment is made.” Often this means less information is better. A mass of information is alright when planning, but when action is needed too much information brings with it dangers of bias and drowning in data.
Later… I suddenly realize Gladwell is applying neural network theory in reverse. We’ve built articificial networks modeled on the brain and train them, fine tuning the weight of each node. Then we expect the computerized versions to make decisions instantaneously, not mull it over. Gladwell seems to be saying once we’ve trained our neural networks similarly, we too can make effective instantaneous decisions.
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Redesigning American Business
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 practices.”
It’s interesting that a year ago only a handful of people were talking about applying design thinking to business management, and now the mainstream media has caught up.
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Business fuses with design
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 9 month deep dive into this area.
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Make eight mistakes a day
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 day.”
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Tom Peters on TV
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 and every one of their people.
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Open, Subsidized Innovation
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 that Bose is using, Informative, stresses the importance of the brand relationship. It’s interesting that they go for this softer, more ambiguous benefit than simply saying they help commpanies harvest more ideas. Though they do realize this is a conversation and not just direct mail in reverse…
Our real-time interactive communications tools allow us to engage large numbers of consumers in ongoing, concurrent dialogues, and our patented systems explore these conversations and consolidate actionable insights based on what your customers want and need right now, next month, next year and beyond.
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How a competitive stance blocks innovation
W. Chan Kim and Ren̩e Mauborgne in Think for yourself Рstop 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 remained ever since. But should organisations be motivated in this way? Our research suggests not. Focusing on building competitive advantages detracts from reshaping old industries, driving young industries to new frontiers and building entirely new industries. It blocks creativity.
I experienced this first-hand years ago while working on a project alongside one of the big management consulting firms. They had morphed the best practices mantra into a design method, aggregating disparate features of the competitors products into our product, and viola — this would somehow result in a cohesive whole that would trump the competition.
Seth Godin says, “The reason it’s so hard to follow the leader is this: The leader is the leader precisely because he did something remarkable. And that remarkable thing is now taken — so it’s no longer remarkable when you decide to do it.“
