Do you have a "to do" list?  Odds are you do.  Spoken or unspoken, written or not, we all carry around some sense of the stuff we should be doing (or not).  Companies and organizations do, too.  But they’re mostly secret.  Let the world know what you’re thinking of working on, and you’re screwed, right?  Competitors will copy your amazing strategic plan in a snap, customers won’t buy your existing offering as they wait for the next thing to come out, and whenever you have a key project schedule slip, shareholders will sue you for issuing misleading future-looking statements.  Clearly, it would be a bad idea to share one’s to-do list with the world.  Or maybe not, if you’re a business-by-design kind of organization interested in being innovative in a customer-centric way. 

If brands are about what you do in the world, and not just about what you say you do in the world, and if relationships are built around some notion of trust, then why not do something concrete which shows that you’re investing in your relationship with customers for the long term?  And for me, that could mean putting your organization’s "to-do" list out in public for all the world to see.  Here’s something I saw a few weeks ago while on a sneak preview of Daniel Libeskind’s new Hamilton addition to the Denver Art Museum:

This poster to-do list wasn’t hidden away in some bureaucratic space administrator’s back room.  No sir, the good people of the Denver Art Museum had the guts to print this thing in poster format and place it right smack-dab in the lobby.  Everyone could see it, everyone had to see it.  And I appreciate how open they are with the list:  we haven’t put in seating, the store ain’t done, and we know there are no signs.  We’re working on it.  And as we improve the space, we’ll check it off and let you know that we know that these are the things that make or break your museum experience.

Just think what could happen if more organizations put their to-do lists out in public.  I think we’d all feel a lot better about doing business with each other.  Say — just for the sake of discussion — that you run the FAA’s website and you’ve found some embarrassing typos on your site.  But you can’t fix them right away because your web admin is out hiking in Bora Bora (by the way, they’ve now been fixed).  What if you could add the "Fix Typos on Travelers page" on your public FAA To Do List blog, right after the entry "Make our site almost as good as that best website ever from Tenacious D"?  Knowing that someone intends to do something, that they are aware of their shortcomings and are trying to improve things, can go a long way toward making you believe.

Even better would be to open up that to-do list to anyone.  So when I find the typos on the FAA website, rather than writing a snarky post on my blog, I help ’em out by entering an item on their to-do list wiki.  Now I’m part of the solution, and probably part of the brand.  It’s about leveraging the power of the many to create the best pile of real evidence possible about what works and what doesn’t.  At some point along the line this starts to feel a lot like open source.  Might Mozilla really be one be one big public to-do list in disguise?

Back to the Denver Museum of Art.  I wish they had a publicly addressable to-do list.  I would add an entry right now.  Something like "fix those crazy interior angled walls that everyone kept tripping over."

Ouch!

Roger Martin has written a wickedly good — and important — essay about business + design in the latest issue of Fast Company.  It’s a continuation of some themes he’s been exploring recently, such as the notions of validity and reliability, and of business-as-usual and business-by-design.  In my mind, business cultures of reliability and validity are perfect companions to Christensen’s notions of sustaining and disruptive business models.  As Martin states:

And so, as a rough rule of thumb, when your challenge is to create
value or seize an emerging opportunity, the solution is to perform like
a design team: Work iteratively, build a prototype, elicit feedback,
refine it, and repeat. Give yourself a chance to uncover problems and
fix them in real time, as the process unfolds. On the other hand,
running a supply chain, building a forecasting model, compiling the
financials–these functions are best left to people who work in fixed
roles with permanent tasks, people more adept at describing "my
responsibilities" than "our responsibilities."

Knowing what type of work you’re working on is much more than half the battle when it comes to managing for growth.  It gives you a chance ot pick the right tool for the job.  After all, you wouldn’t try to fly from Los Angeles to Paris in a single-engine floatplane, nor would you try to drop in to an Alaskan fishing village in a 747.  Match the business tools you have at hand to the business outcome you desire.

"Nobody goes through life without encountering obstacles, disappointments, and problems. Nobody can keep from making mistakes or taking a wrong turn. Nobody can escape illness or avoid the specter of failure. Let me point out that coping with success is easy. How you deal with adversity, with failure, and with setbacks will reveal your true character. How nimble you are about getting back on your feet after some large or small disaster or defeat will help you to determine just how far those feet of yours will take you in the world."
– Vartan Gregorian

This coming Thursday, September 14, IDEO will be hosting the good people of Tesla Motors as part of the ongoing IDEO Know How lecture series.  The lecture is open to the public. This should be a good chance to drink from the cup of (electric) gearhead gnarlyness. 

The lecture will take place at 715 Alma St in Palo Alto at 5pm PST.  Enter via the alley off of Forest Avenue between Alma and High streets   There won’t be a public videotape available afterward.

Here are some selected quotes from Tesla’s website:

Tesla Motors designs and sells high-performance, highly efficient electric sports cars — with no compromises. Tesla Motors cars combine style, acceleration, and handling with advanced technologies that make them among the quickest and the most energy-efficient cars on the road.

“Our goal in designing the Tesla Roadster was to build a car with zero emissions that people would love to drive,” said Tesla Motors co-founder and CEO Martin Eberhard.

The real difference lies in the intent of the designers. For the most part, electric cars have been designed by people who believed we should not drive, and, if we must, then we should drive a bare-bones electric car. In sharp contrast, the Tesla Roadster is a driver‘s car: optimized for performance and handling, beautiful in every detail. Tesla Motors celebrates driving.

It‘s a no-compromise driver‘s car that can accelerate faster than a Porsche 911 and hit a top speed of nearly twice what the law permits. With a range of 250 miles on a single charge, you can use it all day long and not worry you‘ll run out of juice.

Response to the Tesla Roadster has been even greater than we anticipated, and we’ve “sold out” of our special edition Signature One Hundred Roadsters. We’re now taking reservations for our next 100 Tesla Roadsters to be built.

I, for one, am looking forward to the day when I get to lay a big, fat patch of electric torque-tortured tire rubber. 

Update 14sept06:  Tesla has a nifty blog worth checking out

I normally shy away from pointing to stuff on other blogs on a routine basis, as I figure you’ll find the good stuff anyway, and I have a bias toward creating original (or as original as anything can be in this connected world) material.

But I’ve had some big milestones with my special project lately.  This week we shipped two new material intake devices.  And we had a successful alpha launch of our upright ambulation initiative.  As with any innovation activities, these required lots of late night effort and were the source of some high drama and tears.  Par for the course when it comes to innovation!

So I’m mostly pointing.   There’s so much cool stuff out there!

Today Seth uses egg whites and wheat and peppers to write an ode to the gods of authenticity, quality, and doing stuff to the hilt.  It’s a reminder to me that delivering great human experiences (even a humble breakfast) is much more a matter of judgment than of rules.

Bruno Giussani, my fellow TED blogger and BusinessWeekOnline contributor, wrote a cool post about how innovation can come from "… an unexpected juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated ideas or concepts…", in this case the Scuderia Ferrari helping a hospital in England with process dynamics:
Pit-stop for doctors

"People are not born craftsmen; they just have the courage to screw
things up.  Embrace your inner amateur and try everything.
There will always be an expert to take your money and fix the mistakes."
– Mr. Jalopy

And, as we’re fond of saying around the offices of metacool, "Why not do something NOW?"  If half of life is about just showing up, then the other half (and more than half when you’re in the business of getting something good done) is about getting past the excuses, grabbing a wrench, and hacking away.  Fail early, fail often.  Build a prototype.  Think global, drink local.  Catch something on fire.  Why not screw something up today instead of strategizing for the next month?  You might learn something.  No — you WILL learn something.  What’s the worst that could happen?

(note that I use the word "wrench" as a metaphor for whatever it is that you need to do the thing you do)

I love that:  "Embrace your inner amateur and try everything."  Sounds like design thinking to me.

Ricardo Zonta pulls some doughnuts at the Monterey Historic Races in his 2006 Toyota F1 car.

And, be sure to watch this in-car video of Zonta breaking the Laguna Seca lap record between racing sessions of the Historic races.  The first lap is just a warmup.  The second is the record breaker. 

So fast it’s scary.

The world lost a great innovator earlier this week in Maynard Ferguson.  In my past when playing the saxophone was at the center of my existence, nothing got me more excited than the chance to play a Maynard Ferguson tune with all my friends in our jazz-rock band.  We had lots of fun using his music to blow our audiences away (and in the process removing a good deal of my hearing.  That’s life).

Ferguson was a great role model as an innovator, always open to new ideas, new technologies, new ways of seeing himself and being in the world.  And he wasn’t afraid to be way out there with some hair-raising, totally crazy, high-altitude trumpet lick.