Noise Between Stations

  • Management Advice: Which 90% is Crap?

    I like everything Bob Sutton has written, including this anti-bullshit manifesto:

    I wish I could wave my magic wand and provide you with a 100% reliable and shock-proof “management advice crap detector.” Alas, life is too messy and uncertain… But we’ve found five guidelines that can increase your hit rate, that will help you do a better—if imperfect—job of deciding which advice to ignore, study more closely, and perhaps implement on a trial basis.

    1. Treat Old Ideas As If They Are Old Ideas.
    2. Be Suspicious of Breakthrough Ideas and Studies.
    3. Understand The Incentives For The People Who are Selling You The Idea.
    4. Are They Telling You That “All The Best Companies” Or “Most Of The Fortune 500” Do It?
    5. Most of The Best Ideas Are Remarkably Simple.

  • Tangible Futures in Philly on Wednesday

    I’ll be discussing tangible futures in Philadelphia next Wednesday, courtesy of the nice folks at PHICHI and Colony Interactive. I hope to provoke the audience with a new look at an old practice and hear some feedback. I hope to see you Philadelphians there.

  • IDEA 2006

    Registration is open for the Information: Design, Experience, Access conference happening at the Seattle Public Library, October 23-24, 2006. It looks to be a fun, thought-provoking event.

  • Overlap photos

    Overlap

  • Curing the pattern disease

    Do you walk down the street and notice patterns all around you? If so, you might suffer from apophenia — a serious malady that goes undiagnosed for years in most people.

    Talk to your doctor to see if Metavor is right for you.

    Satire courtesy of Chris Baum.

  • Overlapped

    We overlapped and now my mind is too busy sorting things out to write. More later.

    photo by Steve Portigal

  • Why Your Employees Are Losing Motivation

    Sirota, Mischkind, and Meltzer suggest some ways individual managers can motivate employees…

    1. Instill an inspiring purpose.
    2. Provide recognition.
    3. Be an expediter for your employees.
    4. Coach your employees for improvement.
    5. Communicate fully.
    6. Face up to poor performance.
    7. Promote teamwork.
    8. Listen and involve.

  • Exporting management techniques

    The chief executive of Cognizant Technology Solutions, an outsourcing company that is based in Teaneck, N.J., but has most of its employees in India, says it can compete against giants like I.B.M. and Accenture partly by borrowing American-style management techniques.

  • Analyzing the past, designing the future

    If you follow Edward de Bono’s writings, you already know about his drive to improve the quality of thinking. It’s an important message he continues in Why so stupid? “There is always some risk with design…. Judgment and routine behaviour is low risk so it is the preferred method of thought… You can analyse the past, but the future has to be designed.“

  • Process Explained

    Here’s a wonderful little diagram from Central Office of Design…

  • oDesk for design & field research

    I know a lot of designers in the New York area, so frequently people ask me for references. But lately it’s very hard to find freelancers or anyone between jobs. The industry is booming, but the traditional place-an-ad, receive-a-million-resumes (or not), and interview-a-dozen-people way of finding someone is fairly inefficient.

    The globalization of the programming industry has resulted in oDesk, a website that allows employers to post a contract description which applicants from around the world then bid on. The site also facilitates payment transfers and tracking the work by taking screen shots of the programmers computer every 10 minutes.

    It would be trickier to hire designers and field researchers this way, but I’m betting it will happen eventually.

  • Business models for designers

    About every third or fourth design student I meet has a concept for helping the elderly call for help from their homes. I just saw another one last night at the Parsons show. One might wonder why such devices aren’t widespread by now.

    I ran into my friend Bill recently who works as a CTO for a company that sells such a system. He says the challenge isn’t at the device level, it’s downstream of the device: having a widespread network of installers who understand the system and who have an incentive to sell the system, maintenance, infrastructure, and so on. The device is the easy part.

    Reinventing this wheel isn’t all bad, it probably helps students learn a lot about device design. But solving this problem (which is what design is all about) won’t happen until one considers the whole system and also designs a business model within which the device operates.

    To quote John Thackara, “…connectivity is at least as much about [the design of clever business models] as it is about the private ownership of technological devices. The Doors crowd learned this lesson ten years ago when the extraordinary Sam Pitroda spoke at Doors 4, in 1996. Pitroda enabled hundreds of millons of people to gain access to telephony in India by designing the Public Call Office (PCO) concept – a low-tech, high-smarts system based on the clever sharing of devices and infrastructure.“

  • Big companies as collections of small companies

    A completely nascent idea: are big companies more successful when they are organized as collections of small units, as opposed to bigger, less personal, hard-to-manage large units?

    I asked this question while commiserating with a friend whose medium company was swallowed up by their giant competitor last year after a prolonged and contentious aquisition period. What is the future for this smaller business unit? As a thought experiment I conjured up Wal-Mart. While not the poster child of PR these days, they are extremely good at many things. And we could think of them as a collection of many small units, each store being one unit.

    And then I looked at the rest of the Fortune 10…

    1 Exxon Mobil
    2 Wal-Mart Stores
    3 General Motors
    4 Chevron
    5 Ford Motor
    6 ConocoPhillips
    7 General Electric
    8 Citigroup
    9 American International Group
    10 Intl. Business Machines

    Let’s disregard the oil companies since they sell an expensive commodity we’re addicted to. Let’s also disregard the auto companies who have decades of growth on which to coast and aren’t doing well lately. That leaves us with Wal-Mart, GE, Citigroup, AIG, and IBM. Each of these is broken into many smaller units. In fact, in AIG’s case there are so many units working autonomously from the corporate hand they actively compete with one another. These companies seem to go beyond the modern corporation structure to become cluster corporations.

  • The Creative Age from Rotman

    The Spring/Summer 2006 Rotman Magazine (.pdf, 5.3MB) is out with design-happy articles by Richard Florida, Jeanne Liedtka, Roger Martin, and more.

  • Design thinking at the Alberta College of Art & Design

    Lance Carlson, president and CEO of the Alberta College of Art and Design, is — somewhat ironically — one of the only art and design colleges incorporating design thinking into the curriculum in a comprehensive way…

    “Our new Institute will explore and foster work in these areas, and provoke internal dialogue at the college as well. The reaction from the corporate community has been encouraging. We have been in discussions with several companies exploring pilot projects and the provincial government and community-based groups have been supportive. Who doesn’t want to nurture innovation and creative action?“