Noise Between Stations

Trevor van Gorp just pointed me to the Engage site which — once you’ve completed the free registration — has a wealth of resources for doing research and design with emotions in mind (which, given we’re emotional creatures, should be pretty much always). Trevor, incidentally, just finished an impressive master’s thesis at the University of [...]

I attended an interview last night with Michael Linton, CMO of Best Buy, sponsored by Fortune magazine. He expressed the same healthy attitude toward trials that I’ve heard from other successful executives, e.g. “We have the programs we do regularly, the ready-aim-fire activities. Then we have the ready-fire-aim activities, the new programs we’re trying out. [...]

Fortune magazine has rewritten Jack Welch’s rules on management to reflect changes in the business environment. Jack’s first rule was Big dogs own the street and Fortune says that rule should now be Agile is best; being big can bite you. With the rate of change in business today, it’s hard to argue with the [...]

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, VP of Technical Strategy and Innovation at IBM, on the need to move away from a purely hierarchical approach to strategy: “…for technologies and markets, the hierarchical approach is too rigid and must be complemented with more dynamic, bottoms-up approaches that constantly probe and react to what is going on within the business [...]

Last week a friend of mine was telling me about how new products are created at her software start-up. Essentially it consists of salespeople talking to current and potential customers about an existing product and asking, “What else would you like it do to?” That in itself is a fine question that acknowledges the customer [...]

Jamais Cascio on Artifacts from the Future: “If scenario creation was the poster-boy for futurism in the mid-1990s, artifact creation looks to play that role for mid-2000s futurism…. I can’t imagine doing a major futurist project now without using some kind of tangible element of the future, even if it’s just an article from a [...]

In City Planet, Stewart Brand describes the current massive migration to the world’s cities and the reality of squatter cities. The piece changed the way I understand cities and how the world population is evolving. Here’s some quotes… The growth of cities has led to demographic trends exactly the opposite of what many experts have [...]

I just noticed Kevin Kelley’s New Rules book is online. From Chapter 8 comes another reason innovation is hard to sell: “A real innovation is sufficiently different to be dangerous. It is change just this side of being ludicrous. It skirts the edge of the disaster, without going over. Real innovation is scary. It is [...]

The Satorialist has suddenly made a big splash in both the blogging and fashion worlds with a very simple idea: take photos of wonderfully-dressed everyday people on the street and post them on a blog. The author’s eye and insightful commentary create little moments of education and beauty. We knew about the threats to classifieds [...]

In Why Managing by Facts Works, Pfeffer and Sutton urge us to manage-by-evidence rather than gut instinct. This is less an argument against Blink-style decisions than it is an argument for prototyping… …treat the organization as an unfinished prototype. Executives who use evidence-based management best encourage their employees to learn even as they act on [...]