In an effort to resuscitate a riff about venture design that I wrote about a few months ago, I’m going to point you (and myself) to this nice Bill Breen Fast Company piece about design thinking, Roger Martin, and the Stanford d.school.  Here are two paragraphs I particularly like:

The trouble is, when confronted with a mystery, most linear
business types resort to what they know best: They crunch the numbers,
analyze, and ultimately redefine the problem "so it isn’t a mystery
anymore; it’s something they’ve done 12 times before," Martin says.
Most don’t avail themselves of the designer’s tools — they don’t think
like designers — and so they are ill-prepared for an economy where the
winners are determined by design.

And:

Organizations that embrace a design-based strategy also employ the
practice of rapid prototyping. Whereas conventional companies won’t
bring a product to market until it’s "just right," the design shop is
unafraid to move when the product is unfinished but "good enough."
Designers learn by doing: They identify weaknesses and make midflight
corrections along the way.

The subtlety here is that "design shops" don’t typically ship products, they only create them.  The trick is to create a culture within a product organization that is willing and able to ship products that are only "good enough", as this is the enlightened path to creating products that are "wow".  I think this may require having design thinkers working across every discipline in the organization — finance, marketing, sales, service, manufacturing, engineering, etc…  one needs to design a venture that can only be staffed with design thinkers.  I’ll be revisiting this topic as I get into Dan Pink’s new book.  Stay tuned.

I just finished reading Seth Godin’s All Marketers are Liars, an ode to the art of crafting, telling, and transmitting authentic stories (or lies).  Seth was kind enough to set me up with a galley of his new book, and if you have even one iota of interest in storytelling as a tool to create good stuff, put this one on your reading list. 

But, you may ask, is Liars really about design?  Yes.  Think of it as Purple Cow II: if Purple Cow was about mindfully applying visceral, behavioral, and reflective design to create remarkable offerings, then Liars is an extended riff upon the subtle art of reflective design alone.  Reflective design is about creating meaning, and in Liars Godin offers a design process to help make your stories sing.  As usual, you always know where Seth stands on an issue, and as a result the stories he tells, such as one about the genesis of Fox News, are engaging and instructive all at once.  The companion blog for the book is nifty, too. 

What would happen if you approached your next presentation as a design challenge?

When not blogging, or thinking about blogging, all of us here at metacool spend our waking hours scouring the net for other blogs that might help all of us get to a better place vis a vis the art and science of creating cool stuff.  In short, metacool aims to provide you with a fully edited user experience, saving you time and energy.  Kind of like Costco.

So, here are the latest additions to that most dynamic of lists, COOL BLOGS (at lower left):

• Future of Marketing:  from the people at IFTF, this is Gizmodo for marketing types.
• Noise Between Stations: thoughts on design & business.  Like metacool without the fluff.  Oh, wait, I just scanned his site and he’s linking to me.  Ships that pass in the night, indeed.
• Orange is the New Pink:  Daniel Pink’s blog about this new book.  Should be interesting!
• Simplicity:  I wrote about John Maeda’s simplicity workshop last year.  Here’s the blog — it’ll blow your mind.

The Bugaboo Frog