October 2005
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Amazon disintermediates the credit card companies
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1 min read
Why bother with micropayments when you can reach right into the bank account? For anyone familiar with European banking, this is an obvious solution. My European friends pay all their bills directly using a standard electronic system and none of them have checkbooks. Checkbooks are an American anachronism.
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Cultural capabilities: JetBlue vs. Song
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1 min read
Song Airlines is closing. It’s sad that a better customer experience alone isn’t enough to compete, but that in itself is a good lesson. The symptom of Song’s decline was a failure to replicate JetBlue’s service, while the cause is a failure to look beyond JetBlue’s product to the true source of their success. There’s…
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Bootstrap 1.0
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1 min read
In response to David Hornik’s Bubble 2.0 I responded that it looks more like Bootstrap 1.0 to me. Scott blogged this topic a month ago… With customers using a working product, decisions about what type of additional capital will be needed to scale are much easier to frame. And if you do decide to approach…
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Mintzberg and Liedtka think it’s time for design
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1 min read
In Mintzberg’s “Strategy Safari” he devotes one chapter to The Design School: Strategy Formation as a Process of Conception. But his description of the cognitive act of design is different from the classic Herbert Simon description. So I appreciated discovering Liedtka’s In Defense of Strategy as Design (pdf), summarized… This article proposes management reconsider the…
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ID Strategy Symposium and the design-business chasm
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1 min read
Yesterday I attended the Institute of Design Strategy Symposium. The remarks were along the lines of business design we’ve been reading about. What I particularly liked was that the conversation afterwards revolved mostly around the chasm between design and business and the means by which to span the chasm, mostly in terms of language (“design”…
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Worse is better (and more human-centered)
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2 min read
Nicholas Carr’s argument against peer-production of knowledge by “amateurs” has been getting a lot of attention, but I think it misses the point. It’s not human-centered. I don’t mean that in a make the interface easy to use kind of way, but in a make it something people want kind of way. For example: We’re…
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The listening-to-customers wake up call
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1 min read
Looking back through the classic management texts I realize the call to listen to customers isn’t new. Here’s a few that counsel an emphasis on customers: Innovation in Marketing (1962) In Search of Excellence (1982) Moments of Truth (1987) Relationship Marketing (1991) The Experience Economy (1999) The repetition of this message isn’t surprising as it’s…
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Steve Jobs and the parable of the concept car
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1 min read
We thought a lot about concept cars last year and how we could translate this practice to other industries. So it’s fun fun fun to hear the latest Steve Jobs metaphor… You know how you see a show car, and it’s really cool, and then four years later you see the production car, and it…
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A recent post from Jess inspired several interesting comments about who designers are really, and how to gauge the maturity of an organization’s design. Unless you really like thinking about this topic, it must seem like an awful lot of navel gazing, which is fine as that’s one thing that makes blogs useful to us:…
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Bloomberg and the open office
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2 min read
I’m a big proponent of tearing down the walls and cubicles in offices to encourage teamwork. Even Herman Miller, who introduced cubicles decades ago, is opening up the cubes and shaving down the partitions. So I love the story of how New York mayor Michael Bloomberg replicated the trading floor atmosphere at City Hall… Wandering…
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Tim Brown on design thinking
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1 min read
Organizations need to take design thinking seriously. We need to spend more time making people conscious of design thinking — not because design is wondrous or magical, but simply because by focusing on it, we’ll make it better. And that’s an imperative for any business, because design thinking is indisputably a catalyst for innovation productivity.…
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JetBlue and outsourcing
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1 min read
Bruce Nussbaum (on his new blog, congratulations Bruce!) argues that JetBlue has pushed prices down through smart operations while avoiding outsourcing. While I agree, one could say CEO Neeleman has been outsourcing in an innovative way for years, by not housing a call center and instead “homesourcing” this function to individuals’ homes. The cost advantages…
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Reframing control in social media
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2 min read
We’ve been working for several companies facing how they and their markets change with the further spread of social media. It’s creating enormous potential for more democratic media production and sophisticated tools, but a lot of it will rely on companies understanding it and being receptive to it. We’re developing a framework to help companies…
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Don’t Think of an Elephant!
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6 min read
I finally got a around to reading Don’t Think of an Elephant! in which George Lakoff applies his linguistic and cognitive ideas on framing to American progressive politics. It’s a compelling, important book, and the theory can be used anywhere, particularly the hierarchy of vision -> values -> principles -> policies -> ten-word philosophy. It’s…
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Handles On Everything
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1 min read
Remember when everyone copied the translucent color of the old iMacs and missed what made them special underneath? Here’s a surface feature that’s incredibly useful, seemingly obvious, and worthy of copious copying: a big handle to reposition your lamp, courtesy of Tobias Grau. The rubber feels great in your hand. The ball joint allows positioning…