Original. Creative. Breathtaking. Daring. Singular. Brilliant. Artistic. Practiced. Considered. Inspiring. Flabbergasting. Elegant. Ingenious. Astonishing.
Remarkable.
Author Archives: Diego Rodriguez
Innovation Principle 20: Be remarkable
Do you want to achieve something amazing, or are you just here to phone in an acceptable, if ultimately forgettable, solution? Remarkable successes are born of affirmative answers to the former. Be remarkable.
Great things come from a total, unwavering commitment to being remarkable.
This 20th principle is foundational in the sense that it is an enabler of the desirable behaviors called out in all the other principles. For example:
- Unless your audience understands your personal commitment to delivering remarkable end results, it's difficult to show a room of folks your half-baked prototype — they'll only see crappy, half-baked idea.
- If your boss doesn't understand your desire to ship something mind-blowing, she may not get why you are "wasting" valuable project schedule sitting out in a shopping mall, just watching people.
- Seeing the world through the eyes of a child depends onthe trusting understanding of others so that your observations can be seen as inspirational, not childish.
- Creating a memorable experience requires the total commitment of all contributors to the cause, for the integrity of its execution is defined by the weakest link in the system of delivery.
- Failure can be allowed to suck but instruct when it happens within a culture fill with remarkable people who understand that one achieves remarkability (and stays there) via a process of personal growth fed by a constant trial and error (with an emphasis on the error).
- Recognizing that the mileage a person has is more important than the years they've put in is a statement of the causal link between the primacy of doing and the pursuit of remarkability. Given a fair and open society, what and how you do far outstrips the importance of status, power, and tenure.
Being remarkable is the source of the grease we need to keep the process innovating moving along. A broad commitment to being remarkable reduces the friction, smooths out the bumps, and turbocharges the chuzpah we all need to bring cool thingsto life.
How you are guides how things willl be.
You can prototype anything: Ayr Muir-Harmony and Clover Food Lab
"I spent weeks thinking about and composing this. It’s very important to me, to the company, and I hope to all of you. This is a statement of the philosophy by which we are building Clover. We’re not coming to you with a product that is complete. Instead we’re hoping to engage you. We have big things we want to achieve and we’ll only be able to get there with your help.
Third, like most things Clover this wall is going to change. The white paint comes out in 3 weeks."
– Ayr Muir-Harmony, founder, Clover Food Lab
I'm a big fan of what Ayr Muir-Harmony has been doing with his startup Clover Food Lab over the past two years. I'm jealous, even. Ayr is incredibly gutsy, but also deeply thoughtful about how we goes about failing his way to success. His venture is all about learning by getting out there and engaging with customers in an authentic, honest, and open way.
Ayr lives Principle 5 better than just about any other person I've met.
More thoughts on the primacy of doing: Shinya Kimura, Jeep, Corvette, and the cultural zeitgeist of life in 2010
My last post on Shinya Kimura created some great discussions, both in email, on forums across the internets, and around my workplace. That video certainly struck a deep chord with me, as it has with many other folks. Kimura combines an extremely strong point of view with a strong bias for doing, and the combination is entrancing. As I watched it again over the weekend, it made me think of two commercials which aired earlier this year, one for Jeep, the other for Corvette.
Here's the Jeep spot, which, if you listen carefully, sounds more like the manifesto for a social movement than it does an ad trying to hawk sheetmetal (and that's a Good Thing):
And then there's these amazing 45 seconds of brand building from Chevrolet:
Warning: rant approaching.
For me, the cultural zeitgeist of life in 2010 America is clearly saying "We need to start thinking with our hands again", and that we need at least to have confidence in our decision making as we seek to create things of intrinsic value — be they forged in metal, hacked in bits, or whipped out of the air via meticulous planning and rigorous execution. It's not difficult to get to a strong, compelling point of view. That's what design thinking can do for you. But in each of these videos I sense our society expressing a strong yearning for something beyond process, the courage to make decisions and to act. Talking and thinking is easy, shipping is tough.
I think that courage comes from foundational experiences messing with stuff. We're still in hard times, undergoing a structural shift away from the economic flows which underpinned the 20th century. The imagery expressed in the Jeep and Chevy videos is from that receding economic period, which still exists here in places, but which will continue to drain away unless we can grasp the essence of what those images are saying to us. We need to start thinking with our hands again. The Corvette piece pines wistfully for Apollo rockets and the like… and implies that we can't make them anymore. Which is probably true.
However, we are indeed still creating Apollo-like icons for the future — for example, Facebook, Google, and even the Chevy Volt — but we certainly need more people who, like Kimura, can't keep themselves from hacking away at stuff. Tinkering, hacking, experimenting, they're all ways of experiencing the world which are more apt than not to lead to generative, highly creative outcomes. I firmly believe that kids and young adults who are allowed to hack, break, tear apart, and generally probe the world around them develop an innate sense of courage when it comes time to make a decision to actually do something. I see this all the time at Stanford: people build their creative confidence by doing things which are difficult, rather than by mastering theoretical concepts, which, though complex and difficult in and of themselves, are not transformative in a personal sense. In my training as an engineer, I took years of complex math, and it was incredibly useful to me as I applied it to thermodynamic and fluid mechanics issues I encountered as a design engineer, but nothing gave me the courage to act as the experience I had creating a casting pattern on a lathe and milling machine and then pouring molten aluminum in the negative space left by the handiwork of my mind. It was my I can do this moment. If we want more people to fall in love with the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life, we need to help them have that moment, wherever and however it may come.
Brian W. Jones left a wonderful comment under my Kimura post, one which I think sums it all up really well:
“The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.” – Jacob Bronowski
How will you grasp the world? What can your hands tell you? We need to start thinking with our hands again.
What can you ship today?
Shinya Kimura and the primacy of doing
My personal creative process is a source of great joy in my life. The reason I do what I do is because when I'm working on creating something, I can more often than not get to a state of flow, and living in that state, even for a few minutes, is an amazing experience. I can get there by writing a blog post, drawing up the organizational structure for a new venture, carving out a wicked reverse income statement on Excel, or improvising on my tenor sax. The medium really doesn't matter — only doing it does.
But if I'm not careful I can very easily psych myself out. If I'm not mindful of my own process, I can think all I want, as long as I want, about how I might get traction with whatever blank sheet of paper is staring back at me, but all of that mental toil never gets me anywhere, though it is extraordinarily effective at keeping me up at night. In my experience, there's nothing quite like getting started to get one tracking toward success, as trite as that might sound. By not getting started, however, I tend to create a virtual cage for myself, a cell whose bars are made up of equal parts, fear of failure, lack of confidence in process, and a vague sense that this may finally be the time when when hard work does not suffice and my talent and years of training will finally fail me. And yet, when I start, my own creative process — which is a variant of the generic "design thinking" process, I suppose – never lets me down, because it is actually built upon a premise of iterative failing. The only failure is to never begin. Whenever I finally get down to starting, all of the fear and worry melts away. Doing leads to flow and progress; thinking about doing locks one in stasis.
Over the past five years, I have been talking about the idea of design thinking, which in its essence is a repeatable, generative process focused on the creation of options. Yes, design thinking is about thinking like a designer, but what is often missed about the concept is that the thinking that a designer does is not thinking done in isolation from other aspects of life and the world. Rather, much of the thinking and processing done by a designer happens in the context of active exploration of the world, whether it be playing with metal or with piles of market data. It is very difficult to imagine any worthwhile design thinking happening from the inside of a totally white isolation cell, or for that matter, from the circumference of a corporate conference table. The critical factor is to do think while doing, and to do while thinking.
Enter Shinya Kimura, stage left.
I am always intrigued by the reflections of designers who think with their hands. Kimura, in a Harley Earl-esque fashion, does not do many of the things we expect designers to do, process-wise:
"I have images but I am not inspired by any particular thing. I don't draw, either"
Kimura, it would seem, does not have a premeditated game plan for the bikes he creates. Instead, he sketches with his materials as they are, where they are, allowing his confidence in his point of view to guide him through to the final result. I think his bikes are truly remarkable. Their aesthetics, coupled with the story of their making, are inspiring.
From a standpoint of time and material intensity, Kimura's way may indeed be less efficient than a more rational approach to prototyping, the kind I teach at Stanford. There, I preach the wisdom of baby steps, of modeling quickly with cardboard if the end result is to be resolved in sheet metal, in Excel if the object is a viable financial process. By the way, I do think this is the appropriate pedagogic approach given a room of neophyte designers, but perhaps the challenge for those of us design thinkers is to move beyond rote process; to paraphrase Charlie Parker, first you master the art of prototyping, then the design process, then you forget all that shit and just design. In other words, once you know how to do, just do. Pre think a lot less, do think while doing a lot more. If the rapid asendance and spectacular triumphs of the Web 2.0 superstars — the Zyngas, the Facebooks, and the Twitters — tell us anything, it's that doing trumps planning more often than not. It is far better to ship now and learn soon than to study for a while and ship… much later.
In doing there is knowing. Doing is the resolution of knowing. We learn via our mistakes, and we make many more mistakes of value when we take action. Kimura is a wise designer.
By the way, this amazing movie is the work of director Henrik Hansen, and was brought to my attention by my good friend, the indefatigable Jim Hancock.
Pattern recognition: Juke is the New Saab
I have to admit, I'm more than a little enamored of the new Nissan Juke. It's gutsy, like a little rally car:
I'm infatuated, even.
And then it dawned one me: the Juke is but a modern take on the venerable, hallowed Saab 96:
Do you see what I'm talking about? Both share that iconic Saab reverse swoosh…
… as well as a big-eyed face only a mother could love:
Automotive reincarnation. It's a Good Thing.
metacool Thought of the Day
Innovation Principle 19: Have a point of view
Take a minute to scan the montage of images I've collected above. What emotions do they evoke, and what thoughts do they bring to mind for you?
As I look at them, here are the adjectives bouncing around my head: alive, vibrant, crisp, beautiful, engaged, dynamic, iconoclastic, memorable, deep, intriguing, ingenious, timeless.
To pull this montage together, I made quick list of the people, ideas, and objects which have made an impression on me over the years, and then I selected a subset which represented the whole of the list. If you ask me about any of them, I could spend the better part of an hour explaining how they've created meaning for me, how they've influenced the course of my life, how they represent what's good in the world. Your list is undoubtedly different — it should be different — and you may question my taste (yes, I do have an abiding fascination with cars shaped like an Air Jordan shoe), but I'd encourage you to take five minutes now (yes, now!) and jot down your own list.
(tick tock)
Are you done?
I'd love to hear about your list. Even without being able to see it, I'd argue the following: every choice on your list represents a person who made choices. A person who knew what they wanted and what they did not, what mattered and what did not, a person who was able to listen to everyone but then do what they thought was right. In other words, a person with a point of view.
What is a point of view? Simply put, it is a crisp accounting of what matters which allows one to say no. In the process of trying to bring cool stuff to life, it is so easy to say yes to everything. It's much harder to say no to the things that don't matter in the end, and that's where the art part of the equation plays out. But I can say one thing definitively: if you don't have a firm point of view about what matters, your chances of doing something remarkable drop to zero. Great things happen when we make choices, and we make good choices when we know what we want.
Above all else, you must have a point of view. Don't leave home without it.
This is number nineteen in a series of evolving principles of innovation. As always, I humbly seek your feedback, critique, and better ideas.