Category Archives: meta metacool

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.

Meine erste Million

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Witlintarbag

I recently wrote a brief essay on the subject of "Der wird Millionar" for the Folio magazine of the Swiss newspaper Neue Zurcher Zeitung.  I talked about the design of the Toyota Prius — I’ve been thinking a lot about the Prius lately — and, more broadly, on the topic of how green products need to become much more red.  In essence, on what I believe is the critical importance of understanding what makes for unabashed gearhead gnarlyness and then building that sensibility in to green market offerings.

The essay is available here.  I wrote in English, but I think it sounds cooler in German.

Be sure to check out all the other "Der wird Millionar" essays in the issue by this amazing group of thinkers and doers:

Embracing Risk

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Rotmanspring2007

I have a new article about design thinking and risk in the Spring 2007 issue of Rotman Magazine (PDF download).  It’s on page 57 of what is a quite impressive collection of articles — lots to chew on in there.  Low risk, I assure you.

This one, as with Getting to Where You Want to Go, is a result of my continuing professional collaboration with Ryan Jacoby, one of my colleagues at IDEO.

As always, please let me know what you think with an email or a comment below.

update 28may07:  I’m pleased to announce that this article can now be found over at BusinessWeek magazine

My whole new mind…

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You Are 30% Left Brained, 70% Right Brained


The left side of your brain controls verbal ability, attention to detail, and reasoning.
Left brained people are good at communication and persuading others.
If you’re left brained, you are likely good at math and logic.
Your left brain prefers dogs, reading, and quiet.

The right side of your brain is all about creativity and flexibility.
Daring and intuitive, right brained people see the world in their unique way.
If you’re right brained, you likely have a talent for creative writing and art.
Your right brain prefers day dreaming, philosophy, and sports.
Are You Right or Left Brained?

Hmmm… as I experienced when taking the PSAT, the SAT, the GRE, and the GMAT, as well as anything I’ve ever done involving the IRS, I could have answered most of the questions both ways.  But I’ll take it.  70/30.  80/20 would have been more memorable, but that’s probably a right brain kind of statement.  Mostly.

Thanks to Virginia Postrel for the pointer to the survey

Some good no asshole coverage

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The San Francisco Chronicle published a nice interview with my colleague Bob Sutton about his new book The No Asshole Rule.  I have a little blurb in the article about why it’s so important to filter out jerks when you’re trying to encourage innovative behavior.

I love Bob’s book and I think the coverage it’s receiving is great — I hope that it pushes the world a little closer to a state of affairs where the pursuit of happiness in the workplace is not only encouraged, but is the norm.  My only worry stems from the power of Google; will my descendants forever associate a web search on my name with the term "asshole"?  I hope not.  English is just so damn boring when it comes to swear words for the nether regions.  If that association is going to be a sticky one, I’d much rather it be with something like the Spanish gilipollas or — even more mellifluous to these ears — the Italian cafone.

On a side note not even tangentially tied to cafones, I must apologize for two trends on metacool as of late.  All of us on the staff of metacool are dedicated to writing thoughts about the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life.  But as of late we (I) haven’t been posting that much, and what I have posted has usually been a pointer to something else rather than some (semi) original thinking.  Why?  Well, I’m not one to spend a lot of energy fabricating excuses, but I’ve been hella busy innovating.  Deep in structuring some prototypes and figuring out where to go with them.  Also, I’m busy getting the next version of Creating Infectious Action cranked up for the Spring Quarter at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design.  I’m looking forward to teaching it with a rather awesome group of individuals.  More on that to come.  One change is that it’ll probably be called "CIA-KGB" for short, instead of just "CIA".  So drop me a line and help me out with name brainstorming by letting me of any good verbs that start with a "K".

But creativity is endless. so expect a surge of posts (oh boy, has that word has been ruined forever, or what?) in the next few weeks as all this goo gels in my head.

Designing for Contagion

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I was fortunate to be interviewed by Chris Shipley as part of the Guidewire Group’s Leadership Forum.  The topic was "Finding customer zero – identifying the root of contagious behavior in emerging markets".  I really enjoyed the session, because the conference itself was small enough where we could all fit in a room and see and hear each other, so very naturally our onstage interview quickly became an audience-wide discussion.  Based on work that’s been happening at IDEO and at the Stanford d.school, I suggested a simple (but not simplistic, hopefully) model for designing for contagion:

  1. Begin with Desire:  create an offering that will bring value to people’s lives by starting your process with a focus on their needs.  Not on your killer technology.  Not on your brilliant business model.
  2. Weave Sticky Stories: design all of your messages to be stories that are genetically engineered, if you will, to be as sticky and contagious as possible.  (more on this in a second)
  3. Design a System to Spread: it’s not enough to have a great offering with an amazing story.  You’ve got to consciously design a system which is uniquely optimized to spread the story about your specific offering.

As you might expect from a crowd heavy with Web 2.0 thinkers, we quickly got into issues of co-creation and open innovation.  I only wish we could have spent another hour or two on the topic.

I had an easier time than usual talking through Point Two above because I had an easy out: the next speaker in the lineup was Professor Chip Heath from Stanford’s Graduate School of business.  Chip and his brother Dan are about to launch a book called Made to Stick.  It’s all about Point Two, so all I had to say was "wait until tomorrow, and listen to Chip".  Made to Stick is a perfect companion to two other books which are about designing systems to spread:  Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Seth Godin’s Unleashing the Ideavirus.  And like those two books, I think Made to Stick is going to be a Big Deal.  You can read an excerpt from Dan and Chip’s book here.

What makes Points 1-3 work is a human-centered design process.  Genuine, authentic stories about offerings that help people get real jobs done in their daily lives are what work.  You get there via design thinking, by putting people at the center of everything you do.  To that end, Chip recently joined my company as an IDEO Fellow.  He joins our existing Fellows Barry Katz and Bob Sutton.  They all lend their specific areas of deep expertise to our design process, and I’m very excited to see what happens with Chip in the mix.

By the way, Dan and Chip will be on the NBC Today Show tomorrow, January 3.  They’re scheduled to go on during the 7:30 – 8 AM time slot.  A great chance to hear about making stories sticky.  They’ve got a good blog going, too.

Update:  here’s the Today Show video with Chip & Dan

Roads to Innovation at Stanford

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Logo

I’ll be part of a panel discussion at the Roads to Innovation conference at Stanford this coming weekend.  All the panels are stocked with really interesting people.  Given my penchant for unabashed gearhead gnarlyness, I’m a little disappointed that Mario Almondo from Ferrari won’t be joining my panel as was previously scheduled.  But he just got one helluva promotion at work, so I can see why he’s not schlepping out to California for the conference.

Please shoot me an email if you’re going to be attending and would like to say hi.

Learning to Innovate

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BusinessWeek recently published a great piece about the growing trend of using design thinking as a means to teach people how to innovate.  I’m particularly proud that the Mozilla project from the Creating Infectious Action class I co-taught with Bob Sutton is the lead story in the article:

Tech geeks love
Mozilla’s Firefox browser, which is impervious to most viruses, but
mainstream America has yet to embrace it. How does Mozilla move beyond
invention (cool browser, neat functions) to an innovation that
translates into market success (a Net tool so hot it upends Microsoft’s
Corp.’s Explorer)? It’s a perfect problem for a classroom case study. So last
spring, Mozilla’s business development team turned to Stanford
University. But instead of going to the business school, they headed
for the double-wide trailer that housed Stanford’s Hasso Plattner
Institute of Design, dubbed the "D-school" on campus. The course was
team-taught by Stanford profs and industry professionals. Each student
worked in a team that included a B-schooler, a computer science major,
and a product designer. And each team used design thinking to shape a
business plan for Mozilla.

It made a big difference. A B-school class would have started with a
focus on market size and used financial analysis to understand it. This
D-school class began with consumers and used ethnography, the latest
management tool, to learn about them. Business school students would
have developed a single new product to sell. The D-schoolers aimed at
creating a prototype with possible features that might appeal to
consumers. B-school students would have stopped when they completed the
first good product idea. The D-schoolers went back again and again to
come up with a panoply of possible winners.

This is a great overview of both the class we taught and the philosophy behind it.  There’s a big difference between knowing how to analyze a business situation versus knowing how to create and execute on a business innovation problem.  For more on what we did in the class, here’s a post I wrote earlier this year, and best of all is this post by Bob Sutton, which rightfully celebrates the students from the class. 

One thing I’d like to make clear is that I’m not anti-MBA.  Far from it.  I value my management education a great deal, and believe that an MBA provides individuals with very useful set of analytical tools, as well as the ability to thin-slice most business situations.  However, I do think that the typical MBA program is mostly focused on becoming a master of business-as-usual, which is a critical body of knowledge when it comes to running a profitable organization.  One way (and the best way, I believe) to learn how to engage in innovative behavior is to become a master of business-by-design, and that’s what we’re doing in our Business + Design classes at the Stanford d.school.  Organizations need to know how to do both.  And those organizations need doers and innovators who can bridge the worlds of business-as-usual and business-by-design.