Business Design

  • Whenever I feel downtrodden and powerless I channel my inner Edna Mode and imagine it’s me, not Elastic Girl, she’s whacking over the head… Confront the problem! Fight! Win!

  • Why We Fail is available in eBook form at O’Reilly and all the reviewers there gave me 5 stars! Yay! Paul in Austin writes: The case studies alone provide an very interesting read to anybody who has some interest in technology in general. Each case study has been thoroughly researched with plenty of references. The…

  • While I was researching my book Why We Fail: Learning from Experience Design Failures I spent some time reading about people’s experience with RealNetworks, particularly the RealPlayer, and wondering if they were worthy of inclusion in the book, particularly the don’t be evil chapter. At that point there was no smoking gun, no hard evidence…

  • Love this Steve Jobs story: …Jobs turned around Apple and did it pretty quickly. He did two primary things as far as I can tell. First, he got his people into the top jobs and got rid of the executives who had been calling the shots before he showed up. And second, he brought focus…

  • This blog has been quiet for so long because I’ve been working on my first book, and it’s finally published. Why We Fail: Learning from Experience Design Failures is about websites and consumer electronics that were successfully launched and hailed as great designs, but failed unexpectedly when people used them, plus my attempt to explain…

  • John Cassidy penned a powerful piece for the current issue of the New Yorker titled, Mastering the Machine: How Ray Dalio built the world’s richest and strangest hedge fund. Part of Dalio’s success in creating massive financial returns while controlling risk stems from his financial wisdom, but the success of his 1000-person organization that runs…

  • I’m a huge fan of the ‘old’ Readability — I hit a button which sucks out the content of a web page into a nicely formatted view, then I usually hit the Evernote button to save it for reading on my Macs or iPhone. The Readability folks recently amp’d the feature into a business. They…

  • As reported in FT: “We are at the end of a difficult generation of business leadership … tough-mindedness, a good trait, was replaced by meanness and greed, both terrible traits,” said Mr Immelt, who succeeded Jack Welch, one of the toughest leaders of his generation, at the helm of the US conglomerate. “Rewards became perverted.…

  • A few years ago I wrote an essay on “Strategic Delivery Points” to try and show how great product/service design, customer service, and other points where we deliver service to a customer can actually be a strategic advantage. There’s nothing new about this idea, of course, except that the emphasis on this approach is more…

  • Note: Over the next few weeks I’m blogging my notes on Amy Shuen’s book Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide: Business thinking and strategies behind successful Web 2.0 implementations. (O’Reilly Media). The book is both a good introduction and a synthesis of diverse theories that should offer something to even experienced strategists. Background: What is Web…

  • If you’re a member of the AIGA and in New York, you might enjoy a fun little breakfast gathering planned for Tuesday, January 13, 2009… Redesigning the RFP response Maybe you’ve gotten one: the RFP that asks for mountains of miraculous work, for no money, delivered in 20 minutes. Or the one for a project…

  • Not long I was talking to a project manager who was writing her first request for proposal, explaining the common wisdom on budget disclosure: “You’ll want to give them a ballpark idea of what your budget is without telling them your actual budget; agencies will sometimes configure the work to take all the money on…

  • So we all know that at the heart of creativity lie constraints. And one constraint I love is money. I thought of this today as I read about a friend’s company who spent “tens of thousands of dollars” on legal fees just for their domain name. Maybe that was money well spent, but from personal…

  • There was a New York City IxDA event at Roundarch last night that challenged 10 teams of designers to invent the portable electronic ink magic paper of the future. In addition to the usual functional stuff, fun ideas emerged like using it as a yoga mat, a DDR mat, or modules that could be connected…

  • You need a great design to please your customers, and a great business model to pay for the design, so we’re offering classes on both topics to help user experience practitioners, managers, and entrepreneurs thrive in New York City. For 10% off any class, enter the code NBS when registering. If you plan to attend…