Noise Between Stations

February 2005

  • CrashStat: NYC pedestrian and cyclist injury maps

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    1 min read

    CrashStat maps aren’t going to win any cartographic awards, but they reveal the straight dope. My interpretation: When walking or cycling in New York City, be careful on the avenues, especially Broadway, and don’t step off the curb until you’re ready to cross.

  • Strategy + Business mag

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    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.

  • The Gates,

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    1 min read

    People At

  • Integrative Thinking

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    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?

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    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

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    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

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    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…

  • New Army combat uniform

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    1 min read

    The U.S. Army’s new combat uniform is an interesting study in apparel design. Whereas before they needed three different uniform colors for camoflage in different environments, this one does a pretty good job in all cases. It has a reflective material that allows them to identify each other at night through night glasses. And there’s…

  • Victor’s upcoming events

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    1 min read

    On February 15th I’ll be giving a presentation here in New York titled Can We Run The Company? in which I give designers instructions for taking over the world. On March 6th I’ll be at the IA Summit in Montreal partipating in a panel discussion on career development from management’s perspective. Do come and say…

  • Rotman Business Design Conference

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    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

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    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…

  • Receiving faxes on your T-Mobile phone

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    1 min read

    Just about all T-Mobile voice mail plans provide “fax mail”. Someone can send a fax to your mobile phone number and the voice mail system holds it there. When you check your voice mail you can specify the number of a fax machine to which to forward the fax. Handy when traveling and you want…

  • The essence of brainstorming

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    1 min read

    “The really good idea is always traceable back quite a long way, often to a not very good idea which sparked off another idea that was only slightly better, which somebody else misunderstood in such a way that they then said something which was really rather interesting. ” — John Cleese

  • Design as a core strategy

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    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…

  • Recycle those old CDs

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    1 min read

    We’re taking the digital+hard drive plunge and getting rid of our CDs. Ulrike discovered Second Spin to buy our used CDs. One just types in the UPC code and they tell you how much they’ll pay. After you’ve entered the discs in their system and get a receipt, you pack them up and ship them…