I'm now contributing an occasional bit about what's cool and interesting over at the The Daily Beast's Buzz Board.
To date I haven't found a good way to include book reviews and the like here at metacool, so the Buzz Board should be a good outlet for that stuff.
Last year I participated in a Harvard Business School colloquium titled Creativity, Entrepreneurship, and Organizations of the Future. I had a great time contributing to the conversation there and learned a lot, too — in other words, it was a classic HBS experience (I really love the place).
The October issue of Harvard Business Review has a summary of the colloquium written by professors Teresa Amabile and Mukti Khaire. It is titled "Creativity and the Role of the Leader", and it’s available for free right now on their site. I’m quoted in it, and so is my blogging and teaching buddy Bob Sutton, among others.
Here’s my favorite portion of the article:
By the colloquium’s end, however, most attendees agreed that there is a role for management in the creative process; it is just different from what the traditional work of management might suggest. The leadership imperatives we discussed, which we share in this article, reflect a viewpoint we came to hold in common: One doesn’t manage creativity. One manages for creativity.
What do you think?
The New York times ran a great article yesterday called "Design is more than packaging". Of course, if you’re part of the metacool community, you already know that. But it is great to see this meme getting out there and sticking. I’m very happy to see that the article was published in the Business section. Cool!
Among others, the article mentions IDEO, my employer, and the Stanford d.school, my other employer.
A couple of quotes.
Tim Brown:
Design thinking is inherently about creating new choices, about
divergence. Most business
processes are about making choices from a set of existing alternatives.
Clearly, if all your competition is doing the same, then
differentiation is tough. In order to innovate, we have to have new
alternatives and new solutions to problems, and that is what design can
do.
George Kembel:
It would be overreaching to say that design thinking solves
everything. That’s putting it too high on a pedestal. Business thinking plus design thinking ends up being far more
powerful.
Well put, gentlemen!
Little did I realize upon starting this humble blog several years ago that it would be a ticket to some strange and wonderful trips. For instance, over the past year this blog has introduced me to many of the folks behind the magazines (this was pre-web browser historical timeframes) that taught me about the worlds of cars, engineering, aesthetics, design and marketing. These new friendships have been very meaningful to me.
And now I’m writing about glamour. Deep Glamour, that is. If you’ve ever met me in person, you know that I’m not quite a full-blown sartorialist (though I’d like to be). So thinking about what glamour is and what it does is a nice challenge from a personal growth standpoint, and an exciting one. Deep Glamour looks like it will be a fun and interesting blog about all the things that orbit this fuzzy but oh so compelling notion of glamour. I hope to post something every week or so as long as the management will have me.
Part of being innovative and creative is finding safe ways to take a first step. So, faced with an unknown domain, I wrote about cars, which is a cozy domain for me.
My intent in writing metacool was to have a personal sandbox for playing with ideas, so there you go. Please check out Deep Glamour — I’ve been a huge fan of Virginia Postrel for many years, and in fact her writing was a significant point of inspiration behind my return the mainstream of design thinking a few years ago. As you’ll see on the blog, her thinking is deep and will make you think and think and think.
I was floored by this opening paragraph from a recent Economist article about Barack Obama:
Eight years ago Barack Obama was thoroughly humiliated at the
Democratic Convention in Los Angeles. He had recently lost a
congressional primary in Chicago, and both his political and personal
bank accounts were empty. The rental car company rejected his credit
card. He failed to get hold of a floor pass and ended up watching the
proceedings on a big screen in a car park. He returned home with his
tail between his legs before the week was out—and left the celebrations
to the people who mattered…
Imagine that: Obama’s credit card was rejected and he watched from the outside. And yet today he is in the middle of it all. How do you go from the parking lot to the center stage in just eight years? There is much suffering in life, and also the potential for great happiness and accomplishment, and often the difference between the two is a matter of persistence. Luck plays a part, but by exerting energy toward a goal, you can make your own luck.
This is what Dan Pink means when he says that "Persistence trumps talent" in his book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko. Persistence trumps talent. In other words, all things being equal, those that try are more likely to be the ones who do. Here’s an excerpt from Obama’s acceptance speech from this evening that echoes that sentiment:
And when I hear a woman talk about the difficulties
of starting her own business, I think about my grandmother, who worked
her way up from the secretarial pool to middle-management, despite
years of being passed over for promotions because she was a woman.
She’s the one who taught me about hard work. She’s the one who put off
buying a new car or a new dress for herself so that I could have a
better life. She poured everything she had into me. And although she
can no longer travel, I know that she’s watching tonight, and that
tonight is her night as well.
Someone who would agree with Obama on these points is Oprah. And, as you know, she has. I have to thank Dan Pink for introducing me to Oprah’s magazine in his book A Whole New Mind. I’m avid reader of Oprah magazine. I find it to be a reliable monthly source of a good kick in the pants. It’s a monthly reminder to be think big and to be persistent. I’ve been reading it for about four years now. As an aside, I’m mildly tickled to tell you that I’m briefly mentioned (and only by first name) on page 307 of the September issue of Oprah. Check it out.
But I digress.
In life, pick where you want to go as much as you can, work like hell to get there, and be persistent. Learn all the time. Do good. Engage everyone around you by pursuing your passions. Help others. Do good work. Bring cool stuff to life. Above all, start.
Here’s a video overview of the Simplicity Conversation I had the pleasure to be a part of earlier this year.
Enjoy!
… had a serving of Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness lately?
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:
Designing is the process of linking need with desire.
It’s easier (and better) to sell something which is desirable, rather than (un)desirable.
Desirability is value by another name. A more insiring and emotive name.
Would you rather be valuable or desirable?
We’re in the business of creating desirability via innovation.
Personally, I haven’t had much luck with RSS readers. I suffer from the "weekend barrier" — I’d rather not spend the time to curate my own collection of RSS feeds, and I often wonder what I’m missing out there that I simply don’t know about.
Enter Alltop, a new experiment from Guy Kawasaki and friends. I like it as brain food: it feels like the New York Times in terms of breadth, but deeper in passion due to the laser focus of each of the "contributors". It’s curated RSS, or perhaps even an edited newspaper, but with a radically streamlined business model, with each of the "contributors" having an individual revenue stream of their own design. As such, Alltop represents a disruptive business model relative to the New York Times. Let’s see where it goes.
And yes, metacool is part of Alltop! Definitely take a few minutes to wander through the various sections — lots of cool stuff!
