Noise Between Stations

Month: April 2005

  • It’s Synergistic!

    I saw this posterboard in a conference room in corporate America recently:

    definition of synergistic, which is the same as synergy

    …and I just had to take a picture of it. While at first it strikes me as a funny word, I’ve been seeing more and more corporate language bashing, and I find it discouraging. It’s too easy to position people who use corporate-speak as the other and label them corporate drones. Language is learned, and so this language acts as useful shorthand to the initiated — which is true in any discipline. If creative and analytical people are going to work together, we need to jump this hurdle.

    Synergy is usually the word I think of to illustrate this. It’s hard not to say it without sounding silly because of its use in dot-com exuberance. And yet it has a specific and important meaning to business; the merger of AOL and Time Warner could have resulted in synergy, and that should have been a focus of their integration efforts.

    Corporate speak really only fails in two cases:

    1. When the speaker incorrectly assumes the audience knows the vocabulary, as when government speaks to the public
    2. When fancy words substitute for substantive ideas. This is really a case of bad thinking and not a language issue.

  • Orpheus-style leadership

    This book review reminded me of the conductor-less Orpheus Chamber Orchestra…

    …which has forged a successful recording and performance career without the need of a conductor. Their group is not leaderless, members are keen to emphasize; rather, the leadership role shifts among them within a performance and even within a piece. Echoing Peter Drucker, the author writes, “The Orpheus approach may be the harbinger of leadership trends to come in the business world.”

    I love this example of putting power in the hands of the people doing the work, yet I’m still a little skeptical about how much your average classical musician wants to be on the board and schmooze with rich patrons to keep the endowment funded. Still, I’d like to experiment with the model in businss environments, especially in employee-owned companies.

    The Orpheus Process is built on eight principles:

    1. Put power in the hands of the people doing the work.
    2. Encourage individual responsibility for product and quality.
    3. Create clarity of roles.
    4. Foster horizontal teamwork.
    5. Share and rotate leadership.
    6. Learn to listen, learn to talk.
    7. Seek consensus (and build creative systems that favor consensus).
    8. Dedicate passionately to your mission.

  • Business design in Fast Company

    Bill Breen’s new article on business design in Fast Company does a good job at bringing the topic down to a more concrete level than other articles to date.

    The below quote resonated with me emotionally, as I encountered this situation exactly during a seminar I taught last week:

    The trouble is, when confronted with a mystery, most linear business types resort to what they know best: They crunch the numbers, analyze, and ultimately redefine the problem “so it isn’t a mystery anymore; it’s something they’ve done 12 times before,” Martin says. Most don’t avail themselves of the designer’s tools — they don’t think like designers — and so they are ill-prepared for an economy where the winners are determined by design.

    The link is courtesy Diego Rodriguez, whose blog entry has an interesting discussion of where the “good enough” in design thinking should be applied.

  • Tool: chain of meaning

    If you ever get a chance to hear Andrew Zolli make sure you do. He’s a great speaker, weaving compelling ideas and statistics into a story and injecting it with the right amount of humor.

    I saw him last week where part of his talk included his idea of the “chain of meaning” where a raw material can go from commodity to product to service to experience (see a summary at Core77 and in an older deck from Zolli). It’s not too different from Tom Peters’ progression of products -> services -> experiences -> dreams.

    from coffee beans to coffee grinds to coffee to starbucks

    It occurred to me this is not just a way of understanding what has been done, it’s another business development tool. And it’s not just a one-way progression; there may be times when, for example, you’ve created an experience but also see an opportunity to compete on price and move down the chain to product.

    Lately I’ve seen the result of not understanding the chain of meaning. In Manhattan on 23rd St. between 7th and 8th Aves two businesses opened in the past few weeks: a bakery and a barbeque restaurant. Both are charging well above market prices, presumably because they think customers want to trade up. But neither offers an experience, and neither has the brand pull of a Nathan’s on Coney Island (where they can charge something like $4 for a hot dog). As I stood at the window of the BBQ place reading the menu I heard a man next to me talking on a cell phone: “They want twice as much as anyone else for barbeque? They’re crazy.” When New Yorkers call you crazy, you’re really crazy.

  • Beta is the new black

    Brett tracks the coinage of the phrase beta is the new black. While the idea isn’t news to the web-savvy, it’s still a scary concept to product developers in the corporate world.

  • Tool: levels of abstraction

    In 1960 Theodore Levitt wrote “Marketing Myopia” which questioned which level of abstraction was right for businesses to match their capabilities with the desires of customers:

    Those behind the railroads are in trouble not because the need for passenger transportation has declined or even because cars, airplanes, and other modes of transport have filled that need. Rather, the industry is failing because those behind it assumed they were in the railroad business rather than the transportation business. They were railroad-oriented instead of transportation-oriented, product-oriented instead of customer-oriented.

    In the dot com boom this was taken to absurd extremes, but I’m finding it using as a tool for product development, considering different levels of abstraction as an idea-generation tool. For example, we might generate different ideas for Sony as a portable cassette player business, a portable music business, a portable entertainment business, a ubiquitous entertainment business, and so on. Each time you go up a level, the possibilities also branch out.

    But I figure someone must have already done this. Does it already have a name?

  • Daniel Pink’s “A Whole New Mind”

    Recently I was emailing with Andrew about Daniel Pink’s new book “A Whole New Mind”. Andrew caught Dan’s great talk at SXSW and was reading his book, one chapter of which is devoted to design. There’s a review at the CEO Read site.

    “His key thesis is that the future no longer belongs to analytical professionals—the linear, logical knowledge people (the “SAT people,” he calls them), It belongs instead to creators and empathizers.”

    Dan writes in big strokes, talking about the right-brain in revolutionary terms to make his audience of left-brain-heavy business people sit up and listen. The reality of the situation is probably more subtle: we need to build on, not replace, the left-brain thinking of the last century or two. Arthur D. Little introduced science to management in the 1880’s and it has benefited us greatly. Adding creativity and empathy to that will improve management even more.

    Looking for examples, I think of people like Paul Ford who can think and discuss politics, literature and programming simultaneously without switching gears. We might ask if this isn’t just another way of talking about “Renaissance Men” or polymaths. What I think is different — especially in America where we’re not shackled to titles and degrees — is the blurring together of these fields so that it resembles the early days of science when everything was simply philosophy.

    What’s important, as Dan Pink says, is that we need this thinking more than ever. He cites the three-headed terror of “Asia, abundance and automation” that forces us to respond with higher-performance thinking. Austin identifies what I think is a fascinating but no less daunting other side of this coin:

    …in the past business had to manage constraints (time, money, products, manufacturing, markets) to create possibility. In the new age (of imagination, conception, or whatever), we’ve removed all of the constraints (except for time), so now businesses have to create constraints to manage possibility.

  • Herbert Simon on design

    Everyone I’ve come across thus far who has written about design thinking cites Herbert Simon’s book The Sciences of the Artificial. Simon was a great thinker in economics (Nobel Prize), computer science and cognitive science. For considering the construct of design at the cognitive level, this book is part of the canon. In it he identified one aspect as what we now call abductive thinking — the mental creation of something new — as opposed to inductive or deductive thinking. A favorite quote:

    “Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting
    are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent —
    not with how things are but with how they might be —
    in short, with design.”

  • Dan Pink podcast

    Todd of 800-CEO-READ interviewed Dan Pink, author of A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age.

  • A short history of progress, the lecture

    “Now is our last chance to get the future right.”

    When you’re in a mood for a bit of philosophy and history, get comfy and listen to A Short History of Progress, Part One (real audio, ~50 mins), a wonderful, eloquent lecture by Ronald Wright which starts to ask how and why we make progress as a civilization. There is one giant and disturbing insight that connects capitalism to the emergence of homo sapiens.

    The rest of the lectures and the book are also available.