Author Archives: Diego Rodriguez

The Name of the Game is Work

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The big thing about playing video games used to be that they were the new golf, a novel way to hang with friends and business associates in order to maybe bond, collude, or even get some productive work done.  But it’s not just about golf anymore:  Aili McConnon from BusinessWeek just published an article about the intersection of work and gaming, and I’m here to tell you that video gaming is about work.  I even landed a quote in there referencing the lessons to be had from playing MMOG’s: 

The lessons learned in these games become increasingly useful as
companies become less command-and-control and more a series of
distributed networks around the world.  The future of work
is here; it’s just disguised as a game.

The article also talks through some interesting game-related stories from McKinsey, J&J, and Philips, and also has a great insight from my Stanford d.school partner in crime Bob Sutton. 

I really do think that you can learn a lot about where this whole Web 2.0 thing is going by playing games online.  Learning by doing, serious play, and all that.

Director’s Commentary: Cradle to Cradle

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Here’s a great Director’s Commentary:  architect, designer, and author Bill McDonough speaks about cradle to cradle design.  If you’ve never heard him speak, I highly encourage you to give a listen.  And if you have, well, I learn something new each time I listen.

I first heard Bill speak on February 11, 2003 at a lecture given at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.  I remember being in that miserable state of having just recovered from a winter flu, and not really wanting to do anything more than go to sleep, but something told me to leave work early to grab a good seat. 

I’m glad I did.  His words changed my life, because for the first time I saw a potential path forward.  I took a class on environmental science in the Fall of 1988 as a freshman at Stanford, and had been aware of the science of global warming and of the importance of toxic concentrations of chemicals since that time.  But, as a design engineer, I never felt there was much I could do beyond specifying good materials and making sure they were labeled for recycling.  McDonough’s Cradle to Cradle philosophy changed all of that for me, because it helped me see clearly the value of being able to combine, at a personal, corporate, societal, and global level, the lenses of business, human values, and technology.

On being remarkable

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Seth Godin has a provocative post about what it takes to be remarkable: Is good enough enough?

Here’s my favorite part, on what being remarkable entails at a personal level:

First, it would require significant risk-taking. Which would include
the risk of failure and the risk of getting fired (omg!). Can you and
your team handle that? If not, might as well admit it and settle for
good enough. But if you’re settling, don’t sit around wishing for
results beyond what you’ve been getting.

Second, it would mean that every single time you set out to be
remarkable, you’d have to raise the bar and start over. It’s exhausting.

Third, it means that the boss and the boss’s boss are unlikely to give you much cover. Are you okay with that?

Are you willing to engage in innovative behavior?  A lot of the time it hurts.

metacool Thought of the Day

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"Doing the right thing is important, which is where strategy comes in.
But doing that thing well—execution—is what sets companies apart. After
all, every football play is designed to go for a huge gain. The reason
it doesn’t is because of execution—people drop balls, miss blocks, go
to the wrong place, and so forth. So, success depends on execution—on
the ability to get things done."
– Jeffrey Pfeffer

Innovating past the leading edge

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An extra heaping serving of power-on oversteer, anyone?

This video is a hot lap of Laguna Seca as seen by driver Michael Sheehan behind the wheel of a gnarly — gnarly! — 1968 McLaren M6B Can-Am racing car. To be precise, this doesn’t seem much like driving a normal car to me; it seems to have much more in common with being strapped to the tip of an ICBM.  Here’s what lighting the wick on a M6B feels like, in the words of Sheehan:

This was the car driven by ex-Formula 1 driver (and race winner) Jo
Bonnier. The car has in the neighborhood of 600hp and weighs in around
1,700lbs. It’s an aluminum monocoque, which is very different from
modern racecars. Think of it as sheet aluminum origami secured with
rivets. The only "safety cage" to speak of is a not very confidence
inspiring main hoop, braced only with a stringer from the center top of
the hoop back to the head on the engine, which is secured with
removable pins.

Let me honest by saying that I currently feel like someone has beaten
the crap out of me with a baseball bat. My lats, shoulders, pecs and
upper arms are sore from wrestling with the car. I have a
bruise/abrasion the size of a Coke can on my right buttock from sitting
directly on the aluminum floor. Don’t ask me how, I still don’t know.
Oh, and despite the earplugs, my ears are still ringing. All in all, I
couldn’t be happier and I wouldn’t change a thing. Every muscle ache
brings a happy memory back from yesterday.

Aside from being remarkably gnarly, the McLaren M6B is the tangible expression of a wildly successful innovation program called the Canadian-American Challenge Cup, or Can-Am.  Can-Am was a racing series which attracted the very best engineers and drivers.  What made it unique was its lack of rules.  The only real constraints facing the teams particpating in Can-Am were time, money, and the physical layout of the tracks to be raced on.  When it came to what you wanted to race, the sky was the limit — and it engendered some incredible designs, including the some very advanced aerodynamic and structural solutions.  And horsepower came oozing out of every nook and crevice, leading up to the amazing Penske Porsche 917, whose dominance effectively killed the series, because it "cracked" the code — no further innovation was possible given period technology, no matter one’s budget.

What’s the lesson for creating innovative behavior?  It’s that macro conditions matter the most when your goal is to push the state of the art.  Setting macro context is more important than mapping out a golden strategy at the micro level.  If you want to produce astoundingly innovative solutions in a revolutionary sense, perhaps the best thing you is to set a few very broad boundary conditions, such as time and money, and then let everyone go do their thing.  In this way, Can-Am was very much an early type of automotive X PRIZE, if one which pursued a very different performance vector.  Just as in an X PRIZE competition, the governing body behind Can-Am declared set amounts of prize money, told people where and when to come and do performance tests, and then watched lots of adult human beings spend lots of blood, sweat, tears, and cash in the pursuit of victory.  Can-Am was the ultimate in high-variance automotive innovation, and at the right end of the Gaussian distribution of car designs came things like the M6B.  And they were awesome.

For the serious UGG types among you, here’s a twenty-five minute video of Sheehan driving a race around Laguna Seca:

The annual Monterey Historic Races are on August 17-19, and the West Coast staff of metacool will there in force.  The races are not just a great chance to see historic pieces of machinery such as the M6B in action, but are a wonderful way to appreciate the ingenuity, courage, and sheer beauty involved in this human endeavor we call design.

Director’s Commentary: Baja Ridgeline

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Here’s another Director’s Commentary tale, this time from the design and build team behind the Honda Ridgeline Baja racer. 

Don’t let the gearhead nature of this particular commentary put you off — this is a story about attention to detail, iteration, and evidence-based management.  To create a successful race car, you have to execute a design which won’t be let down by trivial logistics ( failing due to a cheap, trivial part), but which also hews to a winning overall point of view ( balancing the weight which comes with reliability with the conflicting need for agility and speed).  Holding opposing constraints in mind, making choices – that sounds like design thinking for strategy to me.

Here’s a cool bit of detailed design thinking which might not be insignificant were it to be needed:

When done properly, the
seat attachment points are part of the rollcage, not welded to the
truck’s floor. This way, the seats can’t tear loose from the floor in
case of a severe accident or rollover. The occupants and their seats
stay inside the cage.

And of course, there’s some serious unabashed gearhead gnarlyness at work here.  Check out this elegant rollcage creeping forward over the front strut towers, and those gorgeous welds:

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And this is what informed intuition – a critical part of design thinking – looks like in action:

129_0605_03_zhonda_ridgeline_trophy

Hey Dennis, how cool is this?  😎

 

Open Source Hardware

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I’m violating the "metacool employees shall not write blog posts past 10pm on a school night" rule by posting this, but I’m simply too excited not to.  As a recovering mechanical design engineer who has a thing for software in general — and a big thing for open source software in particular — Brad Feld’s recent post about Bug Labs is just plain cool.  I can’t wait to see what comes out of this.

Of course, there’s nothing that says that only software creation can benefit from an open source approach.  Mozilla has shown that you can take an open source approach to marketing.  And Threadless says something (if not something deep) about open sourcing content.  These are exciting times to be in the business of creating stuff.  Yes indeed.

This notion is nothing new.  The ur open source piece of hardware is the Chevy small-block V8.  Hubba hubba.

Spreading the Conchords

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Have you seen Flight of the Conchords on HBO?  It’s a new show about a New Zealand folk duo trying to make it in The Big Apple.  I love it.  It’s like Curb Your Enthusiasm meets The Odd Couple meets Forrest Gump meets The Royal Tenenbaums.  Here’s a video blurb from the show to show you what I mean:

It’s certainly not for everyone, but if you like your humor on the quirky side, you’ll probably like it.

But I’m not here to talk about television.  I’m here to talk about marketing.  Flight of the Conchords is a great example of thoroughly executing Step 3 of my three-part recipe for Creating Infectious Action.  Here are those steps again:

  1. Create something remarkable  (viz the video above)
  2. Weave a sticky message around it (Tenacious Dundee)
  3. Design the system to spread it

If you point your browser to the Show Your Love section of the Flight of Conchords website, you’ll see a comprehensive set of spread tools kindly provided by HBO for your maven pleasure.  There’s a full set of embedable video clips, a set of IM icons, video podcasts, background images for your fan website (see above as well), and even a set of color hex values so that your fan website is on-brand.  This is great marketing at work, because it releases control while it enables brand-appropriate behavior.  Instead of trying to fight the entire fight yourself, designing to spread means spending at least part of your energy on enabling others to do it for you.  It’s about walking around, pouring gas on a bunch of little fires, rather than endeavoring to build one big bonfire yourself. 

And, the more you consciously design a system to spread the word, the more likely it is your cool thing will fly.