Tuesday December 4, 2007 / 4 Comments

For those of you in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, I’ll be speaking tomorrow night at refresh. The topic? Star Wars and UX. No, I won’t be quoting Yoda (“Hard to see the dark side is”). Rather, I’ll be looking at the movie as a case study for entrepreneurial endeavors—exploring lessons we can learn from the making of the original Star Wars movie. Here’s the description:

The Force Behind Star Wars: Turning Design Ideas into Reality

You’ve got an idea. Maybe it’s a new idea for a web application. Maybe it’s a new product idea you need to push through your organization. The question is: How do you turn an idea into reality?

To answer this question, we’ll look at the making of Star Wars. We’ll look behind the scenes at what it took to get George Lucas’s space fantasy from script to screen. From assembling the right team to navigating the Hollywood corporate studio environment to tapping into powerful universal patterns — we’ll look at a dozen lessons UX designers (and developers!) can learn from this adventure.

And here’s a sample of the types of things I’ll be presenting (thanks Mark!).

I hope to see you out there!

Tuesday November 13, 2007 / 1 Comments

I came across the following comment in an interview with Robert B. Tucker (pdf)

What should leaders do to foster a culture of innovation?

I advise leaders to make sure they are creating an environment in which mavericks are tolerated. The maverick is a well-documented personality type: These people would much rather change the system than simply perfect it. Mavericks don’t “go along to get along,” they don’t “dress for success” and, as the vice chairman of Medtronic puts it, they are a pain in the neck to manage. But they are absolutely necessary because they can make those “ah ha!” connections that lead to solutions.

If mavericks are not valued and respected, they will leave the organization and make their talents available to a company that will value them. Or worse, they’ll go off and start their own companies and compete with you.

Wednesday October 24, 2007 / 3 Comments

Last Friday, I was pleased to be a part of the Design Thinking 2007 conference. While I’ve spoken publicly on information architecture, interaction design, and interface related topics, behind the scenes I spend much more of my time focusing on design as it relates to business. Corner me for more than five minutes and the conversation will inevitably trend toward this larger, more strategic view of Design, a view regularly discussed by folks such as Jess McMullin, Victor Lombardi, Bruce Nussbaum, and DFW’s very own Paula Thornton, the person who arranged this event.

Needless to say, when Paula invited me to speak, I was delighted. Design is certainly getting it’s share of media attention right now. However, I believe there is a much larger design story that needs to be told, one that is much larger than the bright shiny objects that are so exciting. This story is one about design as a process, and why a ‘design mindset’ is critically needed from our business leaders.

I have to credit Andrew Hargadon for many of the ideas. His paper Leading with Vision: The Design of New Ventures is an excellent read that sums up the opportunities—and perils—the design profession faces right now.

Thursday April 6, 2006

In the newest issue of the Harvard Business Review, historian Robert A. Caro shares some insights on leadership and power that he’s observed studying the life of U.S. president Lyndon Johnson. It’s interesting to see some of the (very shrewd) tactics Johnson used to accomplish his objectives, and how his apparent change on issues was actually strategic, allowing him to push through a much larger agenda.

Here are of few of the comments on pragmatism and idealism that I feel are worth sharing:

But while pragmatism is essential to the pursuit of power and the achievement of goals, so is idealism. You may not be conscious of it, but if you are a great leader you are inevitably thinking in terms of larger ends. It both fuels your drive to amass power and forces you to decide what you will do with that power. In Johnson’s case, the larger end was helping 12 million poor blacks in the South.

Having a larger end like this has always been important for political leaders, of course, but it’s a relatively new idea for business, I think. Traditionally, business leaders have been seen as pragmatists concerned with the bottom line rather than as idealists in pursuit of the public good. But today, when CEOs have acquired more and more power to change our lives, they have become like presidents in their own right, and they, too, need to align themselves with something greater than themselves if they hope to become truly great leaders.

Tuesday April 4, 2006

from SXSW 2006:

“It’s not about the productor tool, it’s about what people DO with the tools…”

and stated a little bit differently…

“It’s not about the tools, it’s about what the tool allows you to do.”
-Kathy Sierra

“Brains care about conversational language.”
-Kathy Sierra

“How do people think? Technology should map onto that.”
-Rashmi Sinha

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
-Herbert Simon

“User research is the thing from which you innovate—not the thing you create to.”
-Jeff Veen

“He who can define the problem can define the solution.”
-???

from the IA Summit:

“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”
-John Zapolski

“I cannot understand, nor do I want to understand! I want to believe!”
-Michel Foucault

“The MFA is the new MBA.”
-Dan Pink, A Whole New Mind

“Business Education does not prepare leaders for dealing with uncertainty.”
-Patrick Whitney, Institute of Design, IIT

“We need a broad generalist to successfully run large, complex organizations.”
-Richard Kovarevich, CEO Wells Fargo & Co

“Businesses that are fundamentally successful empower people to do things.”
-Scott Hirsh

“We make our buildings, and thereafter they make us.”
-Winston Churchill

“Strategy balances contradictory forces.”
-Victor Lombardi

“Designers are the engine of organic growth.”
-Victor Lombardi, discussing good financial growth

“I’m technology agnostic until the technology interferes with my designs.”
-Chris Farnum

“We’ve organized ideas based on how we organize things.”
-David Weinberger, commenting on taxonomies in the virtual space

“Any question you ask of the web (systems) is going to reveal cracks in many other areas.”
-James Melzer, discussing Enterprise Information Architecture

“Content has not changed. But the message has changed based on form.”
-Trevor Van Gorp, commenting on submissive vs dominant designs in interaction design

“The interface needs to mirror the user to a large extent.”
-Trevor Van Gorp

“People need information in their real life, and the web is not real life.”
-Thomas Vander Wal

“What action follows information use?”
-Thomas Vander Wal

“Any successful console game now allows a user to jump right in and start using it, and teaches along the way.”
-???, commenting on how user interfaces might work in the near future

Saturday March 18, 2006

I’ve now encountered the same theme from several places: rest—and getting away from everything—is critical.

First, from the business world:

“So many managers and CEOs are consumed by the pressures of managing the present, which is really managing the past. It’s easy and it’s mind-numbing. I encourage people to set aside time, away from the office, to work on strategy. In India recently, I heard Bill Gates tell an audience that he takes a week, twice a year, to go off and think and read. You’ve got to have a quiet place to think and see what bubbles up. If you’re focused only on today, you aren’t inventing the future. This is a survival issue. The 21st century will reward managers and leaders who take time to rekindle their imaginations, stimulate creativity in others, and foster an environment that embeds innovation into the company’s culture.”

—Robert B. Tucker, in an interview Innovation points the way to growth (pdf file)

Secondly, from the spiritual world, as I received a copy of Pete Briscoe’s book Secrets from the Treadmill for Christmas:

“Sabbath Rest is a term foreign to our progressive thought. Yet we are drawn to such an idea, as though it were an exhibit in a museum, a masterwork we are not allowed to touch. We have rewritten God’s design for humanity, which inherently contains a time for rest, and then called the rewriting of His architecture God-pleasing.
Having lived most of my life in overdrive, I had reached a point of dryness and exhaustion. Wisdom dictated that I take a two-month leave from the pulpit—a sabbath rest. It was a decision that opened a fresh stream of thought into the desert of my life.”

—Pete Briscoe, Secrets from the Treadmill: Discover God’s Rest in the Busyness of Life

Now ask me if I’ve had time to read more than the first chapter…!

Monday January 30, 2006 / 1 Comments

I’ve been thinking a bit about Designers, Entrepreneurs, Managers, and Leaders. I guess it started with this passage:

“Artists are by nature entrepreneurs, they’re just not called that… They have the ability to visualize something that doesn’t exist, to look at a canvas and see a painting. Entrepreneurs do that. That’s what makes them different from businesspeople. Businesspeople are essentially administrators. Entrepreneurs are by definition visionaries. Entrepreneurs and artists are interchangeable in many ways.”

—Bill Strickland

Which led me to thinking about my last post (part observation, part personal reflection), describing how ‘designers envision unseen opportunities.’ Creating is part of my DNA. From new ideas to better processes and products—I design. So in that sense, I’d say that I have the “ability to visualize something that doesn’t exist,” as described in the quote above.

But I don’t think of myself as an entrepreneur. Why not? I’m not a risk taker, which is of course the other half of being an entrepreneur: It’s not just the ability to envision unseen opportunities, but the fortitude to take the risks necessary to make that vision reality. Entrepreneurs are not afraid to take risks. Me, I’m terrified. Granted I’ve taken a few, but in those cases the risks tended to be the safest of my options (I take that back, Bright Corner was the riskiest option, but definitely more exciting than the alternatives…). But, to my point, passion doesn’t always translate into performance.

So then I started thinking about other key personalities: Managers and Leaders.

Leaders “effect desired results by positively affecting others’ actions” (thanks Don for the definition!). Some leaders are visionaries. Very few are designers. Some will take strategic risks. But not all.

And managers? Well, let’s just say one of these four is not like the others. Like leaders, a good manager will rally the troops and motivate people to action. But unlike designers, entrepreneurs, or leaders, managers aren’t necessarily visionary (not that they can’t be). I’ll go ahead and say it—a good manager should not be visionary, at least not at the macro level. I’ve worked with some brilliant visionaries, and they need managers who can anchor their ideas. Or at least a snapshot of their idea at a particular point in time. Accordingly, the mark of a good manager is the ability to carry out orders. To manage people and processes to produce a desired outcome. This is necessary, for without managers (and good workers!) the visionary people would never complete anything. Trust me, I know, as I sit on about a dozen good ideas.

To bring this full circle round, is there something the designer has that the entrepreneur doesn’t? Yes. I think (and we are speaking in general terms here!) it might be the relentless focus on details and the ‘humanness’ of whatever is being designed. My first post was about the human focus that design-minded people bring to the table, and in future posts I’ll comment on more of these distinctions.

So where is this going? I’m not sure, except to explore the similarities and distinctions between Designers, Entrepreneurs, Leaders, and Managers, and to better understand my own strengths and weakness within an organization. Or perhaps this is to explain why there is so much distance between Managers and Designers…

Cheers!

Sunday November 20, 2005

I got my copy of Swanson’s Unwritten Rules of Managment in the mail today:

This “anthology of common sense” from Bill Swanson (Chairman and CEO of Raytheon) presents 33 little nuggets of wisdom he’s accumulated over the years across various roles. Dubbed “The CEO’s Secret Handbook” by Business2.0, it has until recently been an ‘underground’ publication distributed exclusively among senior executives and management thinkers. For more information, definitely go check out the Business 2.0 cover story . You can also read 25 of the 33 rules (no explanations) over at Noise Between Stations.

In this quick read, Swanson makes some great, pithy statements. As a designer, I especially enjoyed…

“Rule #4: Look for what is missing. Many people know how to improve what’s there; few can see what isn’t there.”

I often describe what I do as ‘helping businesses to envision unseen opportunities’—regardless of whether that opportunity is describing an innovative new business process or recommending a better typeface.

“Rule #28: You remember 1/3 of what you read, 1/2 of what people tell you, but 100% of what you feel.”

Storytelling is so very central to design. People like to be shown how something—a product, an application, whatever—will work in their lives. This is especially true when pitching a new or unfamiliar idea to stakeholders. I’ve found that couching a ‘different way to do things’ in the context of a real (or imagined) situation people can relate to makes the idea seem more real and urgent. The conversations that follow are typically more productive.

Oh yeah, Jim Collins also weighs in on Swanson’s thoughts, commenting that 21 of swanson’s rules “exhibit[ed] a positive fit with the operating philosophy of the good-to-great CEOs.”