Business Design
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Business Design Term Alert: “Hybrid”
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1 min read
Not that Crain’s NY is any sort of reliable trend watcher, but this me-too article on people who combine technical and artistic skills comes with an interesting frame: hybrids. In one word it sums up a natural blend of two or more disparate skill sets and perspectives, and does so with a term that’s in…
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Great Process Leads to Great Products
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2 min read
That simple idea (hopefully obvious to anyone who has tried it) that great commercial products aren’t simply the result of great product ideas is one I’ve mentioned before in the context of company culture and improving capabilities over time. But compared to the concrete sexiness of topics like the iPod and Swiffer this argument isn’t…
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Business Model Diagrams
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1 min read
Inspired by Samuel Mockbee’s work helping architecture students make actual homes during their studies, I’m having my Business & Design class at the Pratt Institute do business design work on an actual business. We’ve studied business operation and finance, secondary and primary research, and business idea sketching. Monday we’re kicking off our project with a…
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What Makes a Good Job? Trust
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1 min read
Milton Moskowitz, who has co-authored “The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America†since 1984, disovered (not surprisingly) that to really learn what makes a good job you need more than surveys and secondary research, you need to talk to employees. In this article, We Love Our Jobs. Just Ask Us, he identifies several…
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Videos from Overlap 2007
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1 min read
The magical Overlap 2007 event happened this past summer in the woods north of Toronto, a weekend devoted to exploring the intersection of business and design. To keep it conversational and intimate the size is limited to about 40, but for the first time thanks to this year’s organizers there’s video from the event on…
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Design Thinkers Convening in Dallas
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1 min read
If you’re in the Dallas-Fort Worth area you may want to check out Design Thinking 2007, a full day of sessions exploring the topic.
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I was very frustrated at work yesterday thinking through a key business issue with a lot of variables in play, and the emotion was clouding my ability to think about the problem. Approaching the problem creatively was even harder, even though I was aware of this obstacle at the time. And of course this is…
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Business Design Career Advice
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3 min read
I’ve gotten this question from students and others entering the field a few times, and frankly still ponder it for my own purposes, so I’m going to lay down some thoughts on it here. The question is: I’m very passionate about pursuing design strategy and bridging the gap between developing engaging user experiences (product side)…
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Meg Whitman on the Strategic Advantage of Design
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1 min read
Alex Kirtland blogged Whitman’s comments from eBay’s Q2 analyst conference call, where she said “making improvements to the user experience is one of our main strategic priorities.” See Alex’s post for the full quotes. As I gather more examples I’m feeling more confident in my theory that strategic delivery points — gaining a sustainable competitive…
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Note to Self: Resist Accepting Millions of Dollars
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2 min read
Something to keep in mind just in case someone ever wants to throw several million my way… I still don’t think you should raise as much as you can, for several reasons, but I’ll just highlight the most important. You will spend what you raise. If you raise $10 million, you will quickly ramp up…
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Launched!
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1 min read
The first SmartEx class was taught this week and went off without a hitch. While it’s a real working course from the students’ point of view, behind the scenes I’m using it as a prototype to quickly learn better ways of doing everything schools do. I was even planning to take a hit financially in…
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Slides from “Getting Good Designs Built”
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1 min read
I posted the slides from my Getting Good Designs Built talk at the New York IxDA meeting earlier this week. Of course you won’t get the full experience from a deck, but there’s some useful references in there.
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Back Home After Overlap 07
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2 min read
I ventured up to “cottage country” north of Toronto this past weekend for Overlap 07, now in its second year of exploring the overlap of design and business in a small event format out in a beautiful, woodsy setting. Again, it was inspiring and useful, perhaps more so as the mix of design, business, media,…
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Some folks are asking this question. I’ve spent the past two years making the transition from designer to business consultant, jumping a lot of hurdles along the way. Here’s a little of what I learned: Highlight opportunities instead of bitching. As designers, we walk around in the world and feel overly sensitive to everything that…
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Design Thinking Is Like Communing With Magma
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1 min read
“He used to liken [design thinking] to climbing into a volcano: It’s messy and it’s risky and it’s dangerous.” That metaphor might work for me if I’d been inside a volcano.