Another reason I like jetBlue: they care enough to apologize deeply for their mistakes. Here’s how the email began…
We are sorry and embarrassed. But most of all, we are deeply sorry.
Last week was the worst operational week in JetBlue’s seven year history. Following the severe winter ice storm in the Northeast, we subjected our customers to unacceptable delays, flight cancellations, lost baggage, and other major inconveniences…
It must have been Toyota Week last week in the New York Times. In addition to the Toyota-in-America story, they published a front page magazine piece on Toyota’s “world domination“.
What’s perhaps most revealing is the slideshow of their training program, a reminder of the discipline in their culture.
For a limited time only you can download the full text of Finding the Right Job for Your Product by Clayton M. Christensen et al. The article itself isn’t revolutionary — they essentially mirror the transition that marketing research has undergone in moving from demographic to affinity customer segmentation. Christensen and his colleagues describe that transition in terms of product development. It starts to get a little muddled as they come up with their own interpretation/strawman of user-centered design and then critique it, but the intentions seem noble.
With Toyota about to unseat Ford and GM as the top car seller in America, maybe the Toyota Way will finally be taken seriously among American managers, including those working for Toyota…
…analysts say Toyota’s recent and embarrassing surge in vehicle recalls was partly a failure by Toyota to spread its obsession for craftsmanship among its growing ranks of overseas factory workers and managers…
“For Americans and anyone, it can be a shock to the system to be actually expected to make problems visible,†said Ms. Newton, a 38-year-old Indiana native who joined Toyota after college 15 years ago and now works at the North American headquarters in Erlanger, Ky. “Other corporate environments tend to hide problems from bosses.â€
Jeneanne Rae spanks innovation efforts that are little more than idea-management systems…
Collecting random ideas may be an interesting exercise, but unless distinct energy is directed against solving a vexing corporate problem or exploiting a complex opportunity, you can count on low-level noise that won’t get senior management very excited. Lack of enthusiasm on the senior management front ensures sponsorship but little support, as well as attention deficits, long cycle times, and high frustration levels all around. Maintenance is high while reward levels can be very low.
Amen, sister. We can extend this criticism to consulting firms that hype idea generation as the foundation of innovation rather than those vexing corporate challenges.
I’m developing a new course, Introduction to Internet Business Strategy, that I’m pretty excited about. Ironically, though everyone in the Internet industry discusses strategy, it’s difficult to find any standard references on the topic. This presents a great opportunity for me to plunge in and synthesize the basics as well as to examine what role design has played so far.
One company I’m reverse engineering is Netflix. The store-less video subscription service claims to be “the world’s largest online movie rental service, providing more than 6.3 million subscribers access to more than 70,000 DVD titles.” They have an impressive physical presence too: “Netflix operates 42 shipping centers located throughout the United States… On average, Netflix ships 1.575 million DVDs each day.” And though they compete against giant Blockbuster as well as smaller chains and neighborhood shops as well as video-on-demand services, earnings have doubled each year the past three years.
So how do they do it?
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Just discovered this, and it looks like a good resource:
CenterNetworks was relaunched in September 2006 to focus on the “new” Internet. This includes social networking, Web 2.0, and social lending. One of my main goals with CenterNetworks is to help you create better web apps. Not so much on the coding side but on the business side. To help you, we provide content in the following areas:
* Site Reviews
* News
* Insights
* Interviews
* Conference Coverage
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.
Unlike in Europe where my friends were required to use fountain pens in school, they’re rare in America. Following some recommendations I tried The Lamy AL – an aluminum version of their inexpensive Safari plastic line. Fountain pens can be fussy, but when they work there is nothing smoother and more beautiful. I tried using this all the time, but now I reserve it for letters. It costs about $30.
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…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 that change eating and fitness on a large scale for the betterment of society — companies like Whole Foods, Curves, Jamba Juice, and Nike.
On the personal level, here’s a summary of Pollen’s eating advice:
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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, and the other quite-good industry leaders? In the past I’ve seen many efforts to consider vertical search just to realize that everyone doing search is competing with Google. I wonder if the same realization will come with social media, or if social media will simply become the new paradigm for most media?
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 has sold more than 1.5 million of the original design at five times the price of the Target version. This outstanding teakettle (also known as model 9093) emerged from a process that Roberto Verganti calls “design-driven innovation.†In this article, Verganti describes how Alessi, the lighting manufacturers Flos and Artemide, the furniture maker Kartell, and a few firms in the Lombardy region take a distinctive approach to design and innovation.
He then goes on to describe how these manufacturers — centered around Milan — nurture a community of discourse that eventually gestates into new product designs over the course of several years, contrasted with user research-generated design ideas.
What’s new here is his view that one need not have any design training to participate in this process, the executives in Milan typically having been trained in law or engineering. A radical idea?
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
VII. Thou shalt not talk shit
VIII. Thou shalt not make someone else speak for thee
IX. Thou shalt not refuse to comment when thy company is under fire
X. Concern thyself with thy overall marketing strategy
XI. Give they brand to the consumer
XII. Remember: thou must keep holy the Internet.
Amen.
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 in service design that we’ve been asking is, to be frank, is this just the same old design under a new title? I’ve spent the better part of the last 13 years designing things for the Internet that, while they result in media and code, are delivered as services. So looking at service design from this point of view doesn’t look much different: there’s a lot of emphasis on the customer and their experience rather than artifacts. But at the end of the day even a service involves making stuff that ultimately facilitates the service.
Service design does seem to be a wonderful catalyst for helping designers consider use of a product over time. Creating interaction points that happen over time isn’t easy to record or communicate, as we turn to time lines, storyboards, flip books, movies, and so on to capture these ideas. A central challenge is to help stakeholders understand what we’re creating in terms of the customer’s experience. It fails when you’re all sitting around staring at an artifact like a web page for a 10 minute critique — as if it were print — when the customer will only look at it for 10 seconds. It’s the experience that needs to be communicated and reviewed, and service design as a frame is helping us talk about these artifacts as interaction rather than just stuff. And that’s a good thing.
Incidentally, Overlap will be happening again in 2007, coordinated by the Toronto set. Stay tuned for details.
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 March.
If you can’t make it to Vegas, I’ll be teaching it again in New York soon thereafter. Stay tuned.
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 stood out. Because his politics are “right of center” and he’s obviously pro-business, he’s not quick to believe in global warming without more evidence; he took the time to cite scientists who have refuted Al Gore’s statements. So for anyone taking an intellectual position on the issue, he said, it’s very difficult. But for business people the strategy is clear: stop denying this might happen and prepare for it by developing products and manufacturing that are cleaner and greener than the competition. He was emphatic that this is the only rational way to proceed, and ended up sounding like a stronger voice for green innovation than someone else with an obvious bias.