My colleague Bob Sutton has a great set of "15 Things I Believe", which you can find along the left side of his blog. No. 5 is one of my favorites:
Learn how to fight as if you are right and listen as if you are wrong: It helps you develop strong opinions that are weakly held.
I was thinking about Bob's belief today in the context of innovating on a routine basis. What if I built on his belief but modified some of the language? Here's what I came up with:
Try to prototype as if you are right but listen and observe as if you are wrong: it helps you develop more valid ways of doing, and limits our tendency to settle for the merely adequate.
This awesome Director's Commentary focuses on the thinking behind the reworked BMW 7-series. Narrated by BMW design maestro Adrian Van Hooydonk, it's important on two levels.
First, it's amazing to hear an expert take us through the intricacies of making a car look good. Cars can be magnificent works of scuplture, but rarely does success come by accident. As we listen to Van Hooydonk describe the interior and exterior design details, we get a glimpse at the extreme amount of attention to detail required to pull off a product experience as complex and multifaceted as a car. Such is the state of technology and design process at BMW, even a rear tail light has become a sophisticated mechanical-eletronic subsystem, and one designed to the hilt. What a far cry from the incandescent-bulb lit taillamps of my old 1969 1600-2!
Second, once again we see the importance of having a clear point of view to guide design decisions. Listening to Van Hooydonk, it's clear what is important when it comes to the design of a 7-series: power, sport, elegance, strength, authenticity. Staying on brand means designing to those parameters and throwing out everything else. Which sounds a lot like the art of strategy making to me; perhaps the most important aspect of designs informed by a strategic point of view is that the design does come to embody that strategy and as such forms the basis for a completely coherent brand identity. In my experience it's much easier to have effective marketing communications if your offering actually is designed in manner that's congruent with your messaging.
I consider organizations such as Apple, BMW, Zappos, and Pixar to be part of a select few capable of nailing a complete and compelling user experience. They each do so by betting on the talent of their designers and creators. Clear and compelling vision, coupled with quality execution, does in fact win over the long haul.
While not trying to be flip about such a weighty topic as the state of the macro international economy, I believe this daredevil bigwheel jump by Travis Pastrana elegantly captures some of the key elements that will help consumer-facing brands thrive over the next few years.
(No, it’s not about shooting bottle rockets at night in your underwear. Skip ahead six seconds)
I reckon there are five in total:
Optimism is the New Courage: Travis wouldn’t attempt this mondo backflip if he wasn’t optimistic that he could land it. Sure it’s dangerous, sure it’s risky, but he has the skill and the experience to know that he can pull it off. That’s optimism grounded in reality. Just as the fundamental rules of the marketplace haven’t changed in our current predicament, it’s not like Travis is facing a whole new set of laws of physics — so why not be optimistic? His bigwheel is not his usual motorcycle (or a Subaru, even), but it has wheels and he can deal with the downsizing. That’s optimism.
Use planning to minimize the stupid risks: even Travis is wearing a helmet for this one. And notice that this is his third-time-charmed attempt. Now more than ever, when the price of failing is so high, it’s a good idea to minimize secondary risks even as we embrace big leaps. That might mean building an extra prototype, running another market test, or getting out in the field with customers more than usual. These days your big or small leaps really need to work, so a little extra midnight oil is probably worth it. There’s enough risk out there as it is, why not cut out all the dumb risks to better focus on the big ones?
Potential Energy = Cash: Pastrana’s maneuver is all about converting potential energy in to kinetic energy. If you’re like me, you held your breath for those scary seconds he was inverted. But if you think through your physics, you know that 90% of the success of this jump was set up at the start; with the right amount of potential energy on tap, Travis knows that he can make the jump so long as he’s able to execute all of the routine details. But without that energy, even the best execution won’t hack it. Cash is the potential energy of the business world. Without it, you can’t pull off a stunt of any size. Like Travis, you want to do anything you can to maximize your potential energy/cash. If that means canceling your trip to the nifty event across the country, or eating rice and beans instead of steak, or riding a train instead of flying, you just have to do it. Save and conserve your cash: you don’t want to be caught low, slow, and out of ideas. Or money.
It’s not about the flight…: Bombing down a ramp and flying through the air is one thing, sticking the landing is quite another. Above all, we cheer for Travis because his sheer talent allows him to nail landings like no other. So, what’s next? What happens when you make it through these Schumpterian flames? If you’re successful now, will you or can you be successful when things turn up? What’s the balance? Landings are important… where will yours take you?
Dress for success: There’s no better time than a downturn to use surface aesthetics to convey a sense of optimism, planning, and control. The posture you and your brand take in the world will define you. So put on your best, put your best foot forward, and let other people know that you’ve got your act together. Hell, even Travis wears pinstripes.
Many thanks to my friend Reilly for pointing me to this video. The weird resulting thoughts, however, are those of yours truly, and should not be blamed on him.
As I've said before, while I work at IDEO, this is not a blog about IDEO and I don't talk much at all about what's going on there. However, I wanted to point out two cool things involving IDEO which I think have broad appeal to all of us trying to make a dent in the universe.
The first one is about David Kelley. I hope you can read it. After my parents and my family, he's way up there in my personal you-changed-my-life-forever-and-ever category. He's been a teacher, boss, fellow gearhead, accomplice, hero.
The second is Fast Company's list of the world's most innovative companies. Yes, IDEO is in there (we're in the top 10! Woo hoo!), but it's also super instructive to read through the list of 50. It's also a really nicely designed web experience. For me, it's affirming to see that so many innovative companies are also ones whose brands are part of my life or consciousness. If I were to draw up this list on my own, it might look a bit different (where's Mozilla?), but here are some of the Fast Company 50 that are part of my life (some are major time sinks: hello Hulu and Facebook and Zappos!):
Here's a fabulous talk from last week's TED conference.
Listen as Elizabeth Gilbert provides us with a Director's Commentary about her own creative process, and then shows us why we might be better off if we thought differently about where creative leaps come from.
"Stuff I'm liking." Grammar? I think it works. It's somewhat Borat-ish, but I think it works. Hey, if I have a blog, and I publish something to the web, then it exists, right?
Here's some stuff I'm liking, with commentary as to what I see in it:
Pink's Travel Tips: Mr. Pink has a future in broadcast media, I think. These are witty and they teach you something, too. HAHU!
Creativity and the rise of optimism: this essay by Paul Bennett (full disclosure: Paul is a colleague of mine at IDEO) is really inspiring. If a blog post could be an anthem, this would be my anthem for 2009. We have to be optimistic. This one helps us be that way.
The Honda Fit: I love the way it looks. It's more Mini than the Mini. It's a modern interpretation of space maximization within a tightly constrained footprint, and it's not beholden to stylistic flourishes from the Eisenhower period. I dig it. With a more hyper iVTEC or a turbo diesel mill in there, it would truly be one for the ages.
The Monocle Weekly: I'm surprised how much I enjoy listening to content streaming over the web. Ah! It's like radio for your house; or, more precisely, I'm rediscovering the joy of listening to intelligent people go deep on an interesting subject, something I only ever experience when driving in my car. I'm liking it.
Miracle on the Hudson: we all know about the incredible feat of calm thinking and flying that lead to an Airbus being safely ditched in the Hudson. Leave it to Bob Sutton to pull some very interesting team dynamics lessons out of that episode. Fascinating stuff.
… what your politics are. In my book, any week where Lewis Hamilton can become World Driving Champion and Barack Obama can be elected President of the United States of America is a very good week.
A very good week for humanity, indeed.
Optimism, perseverence, and courage will take us far.
I participated in The Business Summit at Harvard Business School earlier this month. If you were to plan the most interesting time possible to gather 2,000 business leaders from across the globe, you couldn't have found a better time than October, 2008.
A highlight of the conference was hearing Professor Niall Ferguson lecture on the origins of the current macro economic climate. His lecture was instructive and riveting. You can see the video here.
He also penned a great article for Time magazine earlier this month: The End of Prosperity?
He provides a very crisp definition of what design thinking is about. Design thinking is about creating better things, while traditional analytic thinking is about choosing between things. We need both, but surely the world would be in a better place if there was a bit more design thinking in play out there. Which is why we now have places like Rotman and the d.school and the entire design thinking movement.
By the way, if you don't read Rotman magazine, you should. And if you haven't read Martin's book The Opposable Mind, go out an grab a copy today!
Exactly: a point of view is the set of conscious constraints a design thinker adopts in order to make a specific statement. In the case of Anathem’s Millenium Clock, it is about a design which can be complex and nuanced because of a ready supply of labor to run and maintain its myriad mechanisms. Another point of view could have been to design a very simple clock with few moving parts, the extreme version of this point of view being a sundial.
I submit to you that, as a rule, things that are remarkable are born from a strong point of view. Those that are not remarkable are often the result of a muddled point of view, or no point of view at all. Having a point of view requires making choices among many possible alternatives. Having a point of view means having a vision of what good looks like as a means to make those choices. You can feel it when something was created with that vision in mind. And when that vision was not in play, you can feel the lack of it.
