April 2005
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It’s Synergistic!
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2 min read
I saw this posterboard in a conference room in corporate America recently: …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…
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Orpheus-style leadership
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1 min read
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…
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Business design in Fast Company
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1 min read
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…
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Tool: chain of meaning
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2 min read
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…
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Beta is the new black
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1 min read
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.
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Tool: levels of abstraction
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1 min read
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…
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Daniel Pink’s “A Whole New Mind”
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2 min read
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…
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Herbert Simon on design
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1 min read
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…
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Dan Pink podcast
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1 min read
Todd of 800-CEO-READ interviewed Dan Pink, author of A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age.
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A short history of progress, the lecture
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1 min read
“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…