January 2007
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Pens I Can Live With
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2 min read
Late last year I finally became frustrated with using whatever lame pen happened to be on hand. I did some research, tried several options, and corrected the situation. Here’s a summary: On the inexpensive end, many people like the Pilot G2, though I think the Uniball Signo 207 is as good. Both are refillable rollerballs.…
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Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
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2 min read
…that’s the spoiler from Michael Pollen’s Unhappy Meals, in which he expertly dissects the food industry at the personal, commercial, industrial, and societal levels in just a few thousand words, helping us see the problems with Western nutrition are worse than we thought. I’ve been working in this industry lately, and fascinated by the meta-designs…
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The Social Media Bandwagon
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1 min read
So big companies are adopting social media. As they take a shortcut by buying software from BigCo-friendly vendors like Pluck, one has to wonder how long it’ll take before customers experience social media fatigue. And, in the rush to install the software, I wonder if they even think about being in competition with Blogger, Flickr,…
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Lombardy Design Discourse
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1 min read
HBR finally succumbs and publishes a design-is-great article, Roberto Verganti’s Innovating Through Design. Here’s his lead-off argument: If you shop at Target, you may have seen a distinctive teakettle designed by architect Michael Graves. Target’s version is a knock-off (by Graves himself) of his original 1985 design for Alessi, the northern Italian home-furnishings manufacturer. Alessi…
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12 Tenets of Social Media Marketing
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1 min read
The 12 Tenets of Social Media Marketing… I. The public is the Lord thy God II. Thou shalt covet all media III. Ignore not peer-to-peer media IV. Thou shalt think globally and speak in tongues V. Thy communications must pass the “who cares?” test VI. Thou shalt learn to create artful blog and forum comments…
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Time and Service Design
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2 min read
A great outcome of Overlap is that the New York attendees — plus other peeps in our network — have been meeting up and continuing the conversation. Some of the same themes keep surfacing, such as the culture of business consulting firms and design firms, and social action. Another is service design. A fundamental question…
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A New Internet Strategy Course
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1 min read
Though there is much punditry on the topic, I’ve found a paucity of books, classes, and other educational materials about Internet strategy. Guessing Internet practitioners would appreciate a formal review, I’ve created a course called Introduction to Internet Business Strategy and will be teaching it first at the Information Architecture Summit in Las Vegas this…
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Jack Welch on Green Products
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1 min read
Jack Welch and his wife, former HBR editor Suzi, were at the 92nd St Y in New York last night in an on-stage interview with the editor of BusinessWeek. It was great seeing them in person, and Jack’s persona was especially refreshing: large doses of common sense spoken with brutal honesty. One point he made…
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Marketing Experimentation
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1 min read
Last year I hacked away at an article about the need for a greater degree of experimentation in marketing organizations, but it never really seemed to gel quite right, and eventually I abandoned it. I’m happy to see that Joseph Jaffe completed the task in Manifesto for Experimentation. Successful executives I’ve seen already embrace this…
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Feedback Leads to Expert Performance
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1 min read
Of course we know feedback in human and product performance is important, but this study from K. Anders Ericsson is still interesting. He spent 25 years interviewing and analyzing high-flying professionals and is the coeditor of the recent 918-page book Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. You have to seek out situations where you…
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Reviving How We Used to Think and Write
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1 min read
Richard Powers, winner of the 2006 National Book Award, reports how his speech recognition software has altered his experience of writing to be more like that of traditional oral culture… …I can write lying down. I can forget the machine is even there. I can live above the level of the phrase, thinking in full…
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Wilson on Change
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1 min read
It was recently the birthday of former American president [[Woodrow Wilson]], someone who knew about trying to be innovative and bringing about change. He pushed major legislation through Congress, entered World War I, and sought to establish the League of Nations. He said, “If you want to make enemies, try to change something.“
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Old School Scrappy Innovator: William Norris
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1 min read
Thomas J. Watson Jr., the head of I.B.M., which was famed for its militaristic corporate culture, was incredulous over Norris’s operation. So lean, so ragtag, so bafflingly humane. In a 1963 memo, Watson wondered how Control Data achieved with just a few dozen people what he had not with several thousand. Control Data later went…