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Jony Ive on problem solving

By on March 13, 2012 | Category: Link

Mark Prigg, of the London Evening Standard, recently interviewed Jony Ive – the brains behind Apple’s design team. Here is his response to a question about problem solving at the world’s largest company:

There are different approaches – sometimes things can irritate you so you become aware of a problem, which is a very pragmatic approach and the least challenging.

What is more difficult is when you are intrigued by an opportunity. That, I think, really exercises the skills of a designer. It’s not a problem you’re aware of, nobody has articulated a need. But you start asking questions, what if we do this, combine it with that, would that be useful? This creates opportunities that could replace entire categories of device, rather than tactically responding to an individual problem. That’s the real challenge, and that’s what is exciting.

Via London Evening Standard


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The Magic of Business: Imagination

By on January 12, 2012 | Category: Article

Ferdinando Buscema is the “Magic Experience Designer” at Trading Factor. He is a magician and management consultant. (Just let that sink in for a moment, but try not to overthink it…)

As part of TEDxVenezia, Buscema gave a fascinating talk on the interaction between magic and management. Below are some highlights:

Three secrets of magic:

  1. “Reality is not always what it seems to be” – the role of the artist is to shape our perception of reality
  2. “Imagination creates reality”
  3. “Reality is made of words”

In his presentation, Buscema cited IBM’s 2010 Chief Executive Officer Study. 70% of those interviewed said that imagination and intuition are two of the most important skills that modern managers must possess. To be successful in business, as in art or magic, the practitioner must be able to translate noise and chaos into signal and meaning. These skills come through self-cultivation.

via youtube.com


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What a Week! (Or, Reflections from the Disneyland Hotel)

By on May 16, 2011 | Category: Article

Last week didn’t see too many posts due to my involvement at the annual construction defect seminar hosted at the Disneyland Hotel. Over at AEC Forensics, I posted an overview of my thoughts on the 2011 WCCCDS event.

As I indicated in that post, I’ll be posting more information as I have time, but I did want to take a moment to reflect on the event from a business development and marketing perspective. Overall West Coast Casualty’s Construction Defect Seminar isn’t unlike many other tradeshows and conventions. There are speakers presenting information, opportunities for networking, and vendors exhibiting their products and services to attendees.

The vendors present at this event consisted primarily of niche providers of legal and consulting services, as well as a few manufacturers of construction products. In other words, nothing really surprising considering the demographics of the attendees and focus of the event. The question is, does spending money to exhibit at an event such as this produce a reasonable return on investment? According to my research, it depends heavily on certain factors.

In the past, I have heard from several firms working in the construction defect litigation industry that the primary reason to exhibit there is for the networking, but that no real business transpires for vendors. However, in an informal conversation with someone intimately involved in producing and organizing the event, some firms see tremendous results from their involvement as exhibitors.

In particular, firms that are promoting services and products that are innovative see the greatest results. One such example is a firm that has developed a cost-effective and novel approach to documenting observations from visual inspections and intrusive testing. Last year this company maintained a small booth located in a low-traffic area of the exhibit hall. This year that same firm occupied two adjacent vendor booths in a very prominent location. Every time I walked by their booth, I saw numerous potential clients engaged in discussions and demonstrations. In my opinion, the primary factors driving the interest were innovation through the use of technology, and a strong focus on cost savings.

Another firm that appears to have achieved positive results through their involvement as exhibitors at the annual event also leveraged innovation in order to increase business. The unique selling proposition that this firm offers is based on distributed/outsourced consulting services. The firm maintains a core group of employees that handle administrative tasks for expert witnesses involved in construction disputes. Experts involved with the company benefit from additional work, support services and most importantly, getting paid on time. According to the individual I spoke with, this firm had only four experts signed on to its outsourcing service at the beginning of last year’s seminar. Following their participation and due to the overwhelming response, that roster grew to around 40 experts. And once again this year, the buzz surrounding this unique firm was obvious.

And then there was a third firm that stood out this year. Unlike the previous two firms I’ve been discussing, this company did not pay for a booth in the exhibit hall, nor did they pay for sponsorship of any meals or parties. Instead, every employee of the company was outfitted with an iPad running the slide deck featuring their innovative approach to construction defect litigation. Every time I looked around the exhibit hall, at least one employee of this firm was engaged with a conference attendee. In addition, the firm’s principal was able to secure a speaking engagement that resulted in a packed house with several people standing in the back. By the end of the event, the company had already posted a roster including more than a dozen “preferred vendors” on its well-crafted website. If there was a “winner” of this year’s West Coast Casualty’s Construction Defect Seminar, it was them.

In conclusion, sometimes just showing up is not enough. Clients engage firms that are effective, innovative and offer real value. That is true at conventions and it is true throughout the marketplace.

Innovate Or Die.


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You Can’t Innovate Like Apple

By on April 26, 2010 | Category: Link

Let me tell you, when what you teach and develop every day has the title “Innovation” attached to it, you reach a point where you tire of hearing about Apple. Without question, nearly everyone believes the equation Apple = Innovation is a fundamental truth—akin to the second law of thermodynamics, Boyle’s Law, or Moore’s Law.

But ask these same people if they understand exactly how Apple comes up with their ideas and what approach the company uses to develop blockbuster products—whether it is a fluky phenomenon or based on a repeatable set of governing principles—and you mostly get a dumbfounded stare. This response is what frustrates me most, because people worship what they don’t understand.

In this article, Alain Breillatt (Pragmatic Marketing) takes a long hard look at Apple’s product development and marketing approach from a somewhat objective perspective. Why is Apple innovative? Some key points:

Apple “wraps great ideas inside great ideas,” and the whole experience is linked as the present concept traces concentric circles from the core outward. Apple’s OS X operating system is the present waiting inside its sleek, beautiful hardware; its hardware is the present, artfully unveiled from inside the gorgeous box; the box is the present, waiting for your sticky little hands inside its museum-like Apple stores. And the bow tying it all together? Jobs’ dramatic keynote speeches, where the Christmas morning fervor is fanned on a grand stage by one of the business world’s most capable hype men.

Pixel-perfect mockups are critical. This is hard work and requires an enormous amount of time, but is necessary to give the complete feeling for the entire product. For those who aren’t familiar with the term, pixel perfect means the designers of a piece of Apple software create an exact image—down to the very pixel (the basic unit of composition on a computer or television display) —for every single interface screen and feature…

10 to 3 to 1. Take the pixel-perfect approach and pile on top of it the requirement that Apple designers expect to design 10 different mockups of any new feature under consideration. And these are not just crappy mockups; they all represent different, but really good, implementations that are faithful to the product specifications.

Then, by using specified criteria, they narrow these 10 ideas down to three options, which the team spends months further developing… until they finally narrow down to the one final concept that truly represents their best work for production…

  • Paired design meetings. Every week, the teams of engineers and designers get together for two complementary meetings.
  • Brainstorm meeting—leave your hang-ups at the door and go crazy in developing various approaches to solving particular problems or enhancing existing designs. This meeting involves free thinking with absolutely no rules.
  • Production meeting—the absolute opposite of the brainstorm meeting, where the aim is to put structure around the crazy ideas and define the how to, why, and when.
  • Pony meetings. These meetings are scheduled every two weeks with the internal clients to educate the decision-makers on the design directions being explored and influence their perception of what the final product should be… In other words, I want a pony.

Some other things Apple does differently:

  1. Apple does not do market research.
  2. Apple has a very small team who designs their major products.
  3. Apple owns their entire system.
  4. Apple focuses on a select group of products.
  5. Apple has a maniacal focus on perfection.

And finally, Apple’s most valuable resource is the talent it hires and retains:

The designers at Apple are paid 50% more than their counterparts at other organizations. These designers aren’t working at Apple simply because they’re paid more. They stay at Apple because of the amazing things they get to do there. Rewards are about salary and benefits, but they are also about recognition and being able to do satisfying work that challenges the mind and allows the creative muscles to stretch. Part of this also comes down to ensuring your teams are passionate about innovation and dedicated to the focus of the organization. As Jobs says, he looks for people who are crazy about Apple. So you need to look closely at the people you are hiring and whether you have the right team in the first place.

Via: Pragmatic Marketing


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Building a Culture of Innovation Requires a Good Foundation

By on April 20, 2010 | Category: Article

American Express created the OPEN Forum a few years back to connect with the business community and especially with small business owners. The editors behind the site have clearly done their homework, seeking out some truly great thinkers in the small business space. At least once a week I come across an article on OPEN Forum that really resonates. Recently Matthew May authored a piece on how to build a culture of innovation within an existing company.

Once of the most frequently asked questions I field from managers is: How do I start to create a culture of companywide creativity and innovation?

I love the question because I believe that innovation must occur at every level of the company. Now, that doesn’t mean (necessarily) that the receptionist is going to create your next breakthrough product. But it does mean that everyone must look for and find a way to do their work better than it’s ever been done before, and to do that at as often as possible, even every day.

But the answer to the question is very challenging, because I so often hear the sound of “idea silence” in both big and small businesses. It sounds like this:

“I can’t get my ideas heard.”

“I’ve suggested several improvements, but nothing came of it.”

“We have a command and control culture. Forget creativity.”

Sound familiar? So what’s a manager to do?

Step one is understanding that innovation is everyone’s job. Think about it: where does the greatest cumulative potential reside? On the front lines. There are simply more people on the front lines, more working with your system every day, more serving customers daily. So it all starts with understanding that building a portfolio of cross-company ideas is like building any other high-performing portfolio: it’s a numbers game.

The challenge then is how to draw out the creative power of people in an organized, systematic way that provides a safe haven for everyone involved, declaws the fear of failure, and begins to embed a real discipline around finding and solving problems.

Via: http://www.openforum.com/idea-hub/topics/the-world/article/how-to-start-building-a-culture-of-innovation-matthew-e-may

May proceeds to outline a very coherent approach to achieve this goal through a formal team with excellent ideas regarding what to do and what not to do. Unfortunately it seems that May has overlooked perhaps the biggest obstacles of all: fear and stagnation. There isn’t a need to champion a so-called culture of innovation initiative in a company that is inherently innovative culturally. Corporate culture isn’t as easy to change as a logo – it is embedded in the DNA of the company. And although May does mention accurately that such campaigns are essentially a numbers game (establishing data points for benchmarking as a means of persuading executive management), there needs to be an openness to innovation in upper management to begin with. This is not to say that developing a culture of innovation through a series of meetings and team building activities, etc. can’t work, it just depends on the company itself. More importantly: how strong is the prevailing corporate culture?

The thing is, growing a business is tricky. An entrepreneur usually takes a risk with little more than a hunch, and a business is born. Once the business transitions from the start-up/bootstrapping phase, the entrepreneur often moves on – not necessarily leaving the company, but their personal investment in the company changes. Some entrepreneurs are good managers, most are not, so day-to-day operations are overseen by someone else. There is often a conflict and tension between the outward facing entrepreneurial business leaders and their inward facing operations managers trying to make the best use of resources. As operational managers craft a well-oiled machine, the focus for the corporate culture often becomes one of efficiency and maintaining the established workflow. The types of innovation that are recognized in this environ are typically in the realm of saving a few thousand dollars a year by switching to cheaper printer paper.

Real innovation however, is disruptive. It goes against the flow. It causes pain sometimes, and sometimes people get their feelings hurt – the ego is a powerful mythology that stifles the culture of innovation within each of us sometimes. Real innovation turns everything upside down. Sometimes. But not always. In the corporate culture that is beyond the start-up phase, real innovation is a real cause for concern. It takes years to develop efficient workflows and establish hierarchies and formal processes based on lessons learned, best practices and other jargony terms. But one simple campaign to replace the nasty old Bunn coffee maker with a neat single-serve commercial coffee program that is cheaper in the long run results in accusations of subterfuge and mutiny. Why? Fear and stagnation.

Trying to build a culture of innovation on a foundation of fear and stagnation isn’t likely to be effective. It is like making a New Year’s resolution to be more spontaneous.

Talking about music is like dancing about architecture…


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