Category Archives: innovating
Forget strategy
An innocuous typo I saw today got me thinking: what if we used a word called "startegy" instead of "strategy"?
When faced with a blank sheet of paper, we tend to spend too much time engaged in discussions about strategy, otherwise known as "strategery", and too little time learning by doing. In this context, talking a lot about what to do and why is inappropriate because we don’t know enough about context and contraints. When you’re getting out in to the world and starting things, guiding evidence has a way of surfacing in a way which doesn’t happen within the cloistered confines of meeting rooms.
Revolutions don’t just happen, they get started. Startegy. JFCI!
What’s on Dieter Rams’ iPod?
Check out Gary Hustwitt’s cool new blog Objectified. The blog is about his upcoming movie by the same name. Here is what it is all about, in Gary’s words:
One reason that I’m delving into the world of objects in this film
is that I, admittedly, am obsessed by them. Why do I salivate over a
shiny new piece of technology, or obsess over a 50-year-old plywood
chair? What does all the stuff I accumulate say about me, and do I
really need any of it in the first place?Those of you who followed the making of my first film, Helvetica,
know that the reason I make these films is not that I have a
comprehensive knowledge of the subject matter. I wasn’t an expert on
graphic design, and I’m certainly not an expert on industrial design.
But they’re both fields that fascinate me, and that I want to learn
more about. I’m interested in industrial designers because their work
influences so many aspects of our world yet most of the time it’s taken
for granted. And I think that, especially today, it’s crucial for us to
re-examine how we make and use consumer products at every level.And if you could get all of these designers and design experts
together at a dinner party, what would they talk about? This film will
hopefully represent that conversation. I’ve been lucky to be able to
include an amazing group of participants in the film so far, and I
sincerely thank them all for their time and knowledge.The term objectified has two meanings. One is ‘to be
treated with the status of a mere object.’ But the other is ‘something
abstract expressed in a concrete form,’ as in the way a sculpture
objectifies an artist’s thoughts. It’s the act of transforming creative
thought into a tangible object, which is what designers in this film do
every day. But maybe there’s a third meaning to this title, regarding
the ways these objects are affecting us and our environment. Have we
all become objectified?
About Dieter Rams: nothing. What’s cool is what is on his reel-to-reel. Man, that thing is awesome. If Apple sold one, I’d buy it in a second.
What’s old is new again
I spied this vintage Honda Cub on the street today in Palo Alto. And yes, that is a tasty Cayman S just behind it, looking quite gnarly crouched down on a lowered suspension and some expensive three-piece wheels. But I digress. Let’s focus on the Cub for now.
As our societal context changes, value propositions that were of no value can suddenly gain back their value, and vice versa. In a world of cheap gas, a Honda Cub is an inferior mode of transportation in many ways to a Flabigator XL SUV. But expensive gas is enough to bring one out of mothballs and use it to carry quite a bit of stuff, as witnessed by the large trunk strapped to the back of this one.
Innovation is about finding ways to grow that are right for you. Do the ideas need to be new to the world? Not likely, especially since there are few new things under the sun. It may be as simple as looking back to times past in search of analogous situations. People are still people. What worked then that could work now?
There’s something about GINA.
I’ve received a large number of emails from folks asking my opinion of the BMW GINA concept car.
Here’s what I think:
- GINA is about being remarkable. And being remarkable, whether it be in the domains of design, engineering or marketing, takes guts. BMW excels across all three of these domains, and does so in no small part due to having the courage of its convictions. Sometimes these convictions are too strongly held, witness iDrive in all of its befuddling infamy. But from iDrives to flame surfaces to Bangle Butts, BMW seems to be a place where errors of commission are forgiven. It’s about guts, in other words, and GINA is an tangible expression of those held by the brave folks from Munich.
- GINA is about a return to a paradigm of flexible, articulating structures. GINA’s anthropomorhpic nature is quite sticky from an emotional point of view, but I find it most interesting in terms of a return to a structural paradigm used by early aviation pioneer such as Louis Bleriot. Being covered with a fabric is not a new idea — many cars used to have
leather bodywork (and we still have lingering fabric convertible tops
out there) — but combining that fabric with an articulating structure
is new for automobiles. The wing of a Bleriot monoplane flexed in response to pilot control inputs. To see that wing in motion is to see organic motion very different to the mechanistic slides and pivots that characterize modern airplanes. When the light hits it just right, there are few mechanical structures more beautiful than a semi-translucent Bleriot wing. - GINA is a platform for a new age of open innovation and co-creation. As Chris Bangle states in the video, attaching the fabric covering to the space frame does not require a great deal of time. Imagine the cool stuff that could happen if BMW enabled "civilians" to riff on their own fabric covering patterns. Or perhaps non-structural elements of the space frame could be easily modified within specified parameters to allow for surface improvisations. And even the parameters controlling the wink of GINA’s eyes could be made available for public hacking, so that you could upload new software routines and choose to have a sleepy car or a caffeinated autobahn stormer. Most BMW’s, I’d wager, would be the latter.
I’ll take mine in a matte finish.
Man, how are we ever going to get disruptive?
Two of my favorite books on innovation are The Innovator’s Dilemma and — you guessed it — The Innovator’s Solution. However, not all is well and good in the world when it comes to my relationship with these books: my dilemma is that I am lacking a good solution in terms of influencing people around me to actually read them. Short of actually taking a class with Clay Christensen and reading the books because you’re so afraid he’s going to cold call you on the day when you’ve forgotten to memorize the killer chart on when to spin a venture out versus leaving it inside, I can’t imagine a motivational technique for encouraging each and every page to be read (me, I’ve read each ten plus times… but I’m a geek that way).
But maybe it’s more about getting people to a disruptive state of mind? Maybe it’s about getting them on the bus? If convincing folks to read either edition of Innovators is tantamount to dragging old wild horses to water and teaching them a new trick, then I can’t help but admire this alternative solution from the Boulder office of CP+B:
A Disruptive Thinker Transport! Why didn’t I think of this? I find this fantastic piece of graphic design particularly funny, but then I grew up in Boulder and suffer from a bit of that locale’s typical twisted (or is that disruptive?) sense of humor. When this thing makes its way up to Gunbarrel, massive seas of Legacy Outbacks part and make way. Make way for disruption! Yield to the low end, Volvo 240 wagons of the world!
Read more about it at John Winsor’s fine blog.
Amazing design thinking @ D6
I attended All Things Digital last week, and — much to my surprise —
walked away with more than just a more informed view of where the
digital ecosystem is headed.
As cool a conference as it is, I didn’t expect to have an emotional experience. But there you go, my hat got knocked in to the creek by the amazing work being done by Dean Kamen’s group at DEKA. Take a look at this video and tell me that you aren’t blown away by the wicked combination of elegant engineering, high-minded problem solving, and a darn-it-we’ll-solve-this-challenge-no-matter-what sensibility:
For the impatient among you (and who isn’t in this Web 2.0 world), fast forward to about the 2:30 mark. You can read more about these arms here.
Each time I see this stuff I get tears in my eyes, and to see innovative engineering like this makes me feel optimistic about the future of the profession. As organizations age, I believe there’s a tendency for established disciplines to cease to be creative, to become more critical than generative. Success naturally leads to conservatism and a desire to preserve the status quo. Engineering, more so than other disciplines, is prone to this dynamic. Great engineers push hard to find elegant solutions to seemingly impossible problems. Mediocre ones don’t. Innovation is really about being innovative. In other words, it is a way of being, and it is a personal choice. Let’s keep thinking of these arms from DEKA in all that we do.
Why management matters
When it comes to being innovative and the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life, does the kind and quality of management matter?
Yes.
I’ve written before about the importance of having management who knows what good looks like. I think we’d all agree that a computer company should have people who
know the best computer when they see it, and that a restaurant’s menu
should be the result of a passionate chef.
Part of the reason behind the emergence of cars like the amazing new CTS-V out of General Motors is the presence of product development executives like John Heinricy, who is the one who pedaled the CTS-V to a record time around the famed Nurburgring. It may be the most obvious statement of the year, but a simple strategy for creating winning offerings is to put power in the hands of people who know what good is, and know how to bring good to market. That’s what GM is doing these days. As you watch Heinricy at work in this video of the record lap (via a camera strapped to his head), ask yourself if your management team could take their own products to the limit in their own way.
Glass Houses
A pretty good Billy Joel album, and a simply great day of design thinking I experienced just the other week at the Philip Johnson Glass House. I was fortunate to take part in a Glass House Conversation hosted by John Maeda on the subject of Simplicity. Keen readers of metacool will no doubt recall that Professor Maeda’s book The Laws of Simplicity is one of my all-time favorites (be sure to watch his brilliant TED talk here). His thinking has had an enormous influence on my work.
Each of the attendees were asked to be the guru for one of the ten laws of simplicity. I chose the 5th law, Differences, which states that simplicity and complexity need each other. I spend a lot of my time designing and implementing organizational systems which enable people to do things they otherwise couldn’t. I find time and time again that solutions that aspire only to simplicity tend toward the simplistic, and those that embrace only complexity veer off toward a morass of complexity. Balancing the two, and figuring out where to place the complexity so that it creates value, and how to position the simplicity to extract that value, is the art. Here’s the illustrative example I brought with me to the Glass House, a snapshot of the dashboard from a Toyota Prius (you were expecting something other than a car from me?):
The cockpit of the Prius is one of the simplest on the market. A digital readout replaces traditional gauges, buttons are few in number and highly considered in placement, and even the gearshift is just about going foward or backward or not. And yet the Prius is arguably the most complex car you can buy. Its gas-sipping nature stems from having not one but two motors, connected to the driving wheels by a fiendishly clever transmission orchestrated by a suite of chips of immense processing power. All of that complexity without a mediating layer wouldn’t be the car that non-car people love to own and operate. The Prius is a great example of the 5th law.
I saw the law of Differences in action at the Glass House. Having only ever seen the Glass House in history books, I didn’t have a feel for the complexity of the campus on which it stands. Over time, Philip Johnson built a family of structures which work together in quite interesting ways. For example, did you know that the Glass House has a sister structure in the Brick House? Here’s a view of the two of them:
All of the mechanical needs of the Glass House are met by the Brick House. An underground umbilical shaft connects the Glass House to a feed of heat from the Brick House. The Brick House also contains a bedroom for those times when one might like to engage in… er, some more complex acts of human nature than would be appropriate in a public setting. A Glass House without a Brick House to power and feed it would be untenable. Even from a purely formal aesthetic sense, the two houses work better together than apart. Simplicity and complexity need each other.
I really enjoyed the afternoon of conversation on design, business, technology and life. I’ve had a fortunate life of exposure to some pretty amazing people and experiences, and this was right up there. I’d like to show you some photos, not to gloat, but to share some fun stuff from the day in the name of creativity and openness.
An amazing group of chefs prepared a meal for us in the Glass House. It centered on themes of simplicty. Wine was served.
We sat at table together and talked and ate and watched the weather go from stormy to sunny and back again. You can’t help but be immersed in the weather in this architecture.
We had assigned seats. I sat in a white chair and ate more than my fair share of the edible centerpiece, which was quite tasty in its own right. This is my favorite photo from the day:
Words of wisdom from Jeff Bezos
BusinessWeek recently ran a wonderful interview with Jeff Bezos on the subject of managing and leading innovation. Thoughtful and illuminating, he had me nodding my head and saying "yes", "yes" and "yes" again. Some highlights:
On the liberating nature of constraints:
"I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do.
One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way
out. When we were [first] trying to acquire customers, we didn’t have
money to spend on ad budgets. So we created the associates program,
[which lets] any Web site link to us, and we give them a revenue share.
We invented one-click shopping so we could make check-out faster. Those
things didn’t require big budgets. They required thoughtfulness and
focus on the customer."
On cultivating a purposeful portfolio of innovation:
"With large-scale innovation, you have to set a very high bar. You don’t
get to do too many of those [initiatives] per unit of time. You have to
be really selective."
On the right timing for innovation:
"My view is there’s no bad time to innovate. You should be doing it when
times are good and when times are tough—and you want to be doing it
around things that your customers care about."