Category: d.school

How is that for hands-on executive education?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Huggy Rao and I, along with a great team from the Stanford d.school and Graduate School of Business, just completed a week-long executive program on Customer-Focused Innovation.  This year, we got the program off with a bang: Andy Papa (really Andy Papathanassiou, but he uses Papa because his last name is hard to remember) from Hendrick Motor Sports led the group of 35 executives in a competitive team building exercise where they learned how to change tires quickly on a real NASCAR racing car.  Hendrick is one of the biggest names in NASCAR and fields multiple teams at every event. Their cars are driven by some of the most famous names in the business including Jeff Gordon, Kyle Busch, and Jimmie Johnson.

Andy Papa makes a point.

The competition between the teams is about to start.

Andy did a similar kind of thing a few months back in d.school class that Michael Dearing and I taught on innovation in organizations — see this post.  Andy knows what he is talking about as, after graduating from Stanford (he was on the football team) he was taken with the NASCAR scene and started working on pit crews at Hendrick, then work his way up to managing one pit crew, to head of all pit crews, to head of personnel at Hendrick.  He is also serving as the Executive Director of the North Carolina Motorsports Association these days — NASCAR’s main industry association.

d.school coaches Adam French and Alex Ko admire the machine.

As the pictures show, the executives had a great time, and also, the teaching team led an interesting conversation about how much innovation and learning occurs at NASCAR despite (and perhaps because) of the severe constraints — rules, time pressure, and constrained resources.  Perry Klebahn — d.school stalwart and CEO of Timbuk2 — wrote me a few days ago that I HAD TO blog about this and put some of pictures up because it was one the coolest design thinking exercises he had ever been part of because they learned to much so fast, it was so much fun, and Andy did such a fantastic job of leading them through the exercises.  We are doing all we can to get Andy back to Stanford as often as we can for executive programs and d.school classes — he is fantastic.

Now that is teamwork!

Michael Dearing and I are teaching this class again. We had a blast last year, changing tires on a NASCAR racing car, doing quick "consulting jobs" to a host clients with real problems, reading Orbiting the Giant Hairball and the Innovator’s dilemma.  This class is a bit different from other d.school classes as it entails a bit more reflection, reading, and conversation than most — but that conversation is made "real" by talking with managers and executives from real companies, and trying to help them a bit with the tough struggle of sustaining innovation in a complex organization. We consider, critique, and try to improve some of the ways that big organizations innovate (a tough challenge, as this post shows)

Here is the scoop, including testimonials:

Innovation in Complex Organizations
Applications due by Dec 1, 2007 – email mdearing@stanford.edu with a statement of interest and a
writing sample of any length

(MS&E 282 A, B)

Time – Thursdays 3-6PM, 3 Units, Enrollment limited to 12

The purpose of this course is to offer students a chance to
pause, discuss, and integrate design thinking and innovation in business in a small seminar, case-study format. This centerpiece of
this small seminar will be three or four "live" case studies where,executives from large, complex organizations come to class
and describe their efforts to move creative new ideas from inception to implementation. Past cases have included Google AdSense,
P&G, NASCAR, Method Home, and General Motors. They will describe
how their organizations screen and move along promising
ideas and how their organizational practices facilitate and impede that
journey. Student teams will analyze each case and provide
recommendations to the executives, who along with the teaching
team,will judge the work. The final project will be a general
analysis and set of recommendations about this vexing organizational
problem.

This course is co-sponsored by
the d.school and STVP (Stanford Technology Ventures Program).

Teaching Team: Robert Sutton, Management Science &
Engineering

Michael Dearing, d.school

"If you’re looking for a small class on big ideas, this is it!  This course provides the perfect setting for a rich, intellectual discussion on challenges that large organizations face in trying to remain innovative.  When I took the class, I loved the unique opportunity to engage with top-level executives in companies like P&G and General Motors.  The fact that they listened to our ideas and took notes was very rewarding." — G.B. MSE Masters Student

" When you have Claudia Kotchka from P&G in the room asking you your
opinion on her organizations design process, you know you are involved in something unique.I loved 282 not just because of the incredible projects, but working together as a team made it even more amazing. As a group, we formed this amazing bond that ended up feeling like a few hours with good friends, rather than the usual weekly class. I would recommend this class to anyone who wants a rich, and deep learning opportunity."
— K.W., Masters Student in the Joint Program in Design

P.S. The picture above is from our NASCAR day — we can’t promise that will happen again, but we will have fun.

I  recently wrote a
post aimed at Stanford students that announced the courses that we are
going to be teaching next term. One of
the classes that I am teaching next term — with Debra Dunn and Kris Woyzbun –
– is called Business Practice Innovation, where the focus is on treating
organizational practices as prototypes. This is part of a series of classes that a group of us are developing where
we try to bring design thinking to business problems. I got a note from a Stanford MBA about the
class, and I thought it would be interesting to share both the question and the
(lightly edited) answer. These d School
classes are so different than most other university classes (at least that I
know of), that I am constantly giving long explanations that sound something
like what you see below. This one is a
bit more detailed than usual, so I thought it might be interesting to anyone
who is interested in how we are teaching innovation. Plus it will give me
something to show to other Stanford students that ask similar questions.

The
question was:

Dear Professor Sutton,

Would it be possible to receive additional information regarding
this course? Specifically, I would like
to better understand what you mean by "changing business practices?" Is this
coming up with a change to the business model / company strategy / new
businesses or products? Additionally, who is going to implement the changes:
the student teams / the company employees with the student teams? I guess what
I am asking is: is this a management consulting type project? What are the
aspects of design in the course?

I
answered:

Thanks
for writing. I wouldn’€™t exactly call it a management consulting class. I guess some of what we will do in class is
sort of like consulting, but the hallmark of this class —  and others in the
design and business initiative — €“ is using design thinking to tackle business problems (not just to advise others, to get in there and do it).
This means developing a point of view about the problem, observing people in
context, developing some potential solutions, picking one or two prototype
solutions that seem most promising, implementing them, and in the basis of what
happens, keeping the solutions, revising them, or discarding them, and
iterating on and on.

Clearly,
in a 10 week class, we can’t do something like, say, a merger or change an
organization’€™s manufacturing strategy. Instead, in this class, you would work
in a small team (two or three students) directly with people in companies to
develop and then implement prototype solutions. So, let’s take one project we
might do (listen to the might, these are not clean and pretty and organized
classes like most business classes. We have real companies and things come up.
Sometimes we are set to go, and then it falls through. But we have firm
commitments from two organizations, and are "€œin talks" with two others). So, let’s
consider one rapidly growing high tech company. The process of getting new
employees on board is kind of a mess (in fact, the word "mess"€ isn’€™t meant to
be negative here; they believe that their messiness is one of the keys to their
success).  But let’s say we applied the design process to improving the
first 24 hours that a new employee is on the job –€“ that is the design problem.
Teams in the class would go through stages that look something like this (all
in 2 weeks, 3 weeks tops):

1.
Develop a point of view on the first
24 hours of the new employee experience. For example, one point of view might be: "What can the employee do him or
herself that first day to make the experience better, without any additional
resources, management, or peer action." This is just one possible point
of view: peers and bosses could be involved too, but those would be different
points of view.

2.
Your team would observe —  take
notes, pictures, shadow, do interviews, and so on — two or three new employees
during their first day on the job.

3.
Your team would then brainstorm ways
that a new employee could better survive the first day. You would pick a few of
the best ideas — prototype solutions — and develop ways to implement them and communicate them to new employees.

4.
Your team would then work with the company to test your prototype solutions, say, on one to three new
employees. You would implement it very
quickly and (even on the fly) and keep refining and improving it as much as you
can given the severe time constraints that you will work under.

5.
You would then do a presentation to the class that describes your method, what
you did, and what you learned.  The presentation would not only be to the
class and teaching team, it would be to members of the company where you did
your work. People from the company would not only would give you comments, they
would also evaluate (yes, grade) your solution.

This class is a prototype itself, and we as the teaching
team will no doubt ask you to do something slightly different than above, and
change things on the fly too. But I think that my fantasy above communicates how
these classes are different than my image of a "management consulting€
class." I think of consulting as mostly
offering advice; although I guess that is part of what we do, our emphasis is
on trying to change things. There
is less talking about what the company ought to be doing, and more emphasis on
finding (often small) ways to get them to do it RIGHT NOW. And  getting our hands dirty in the messy  initial  stages of implementation.

I
hope this helps some; it is about as clear as I can be, as our process is fuzzy
and messy. Thanks again for asking, and feel free to send this to other
students.

Bob

P.S. The napkin above is the original "d.school manifesto," produced a couple years ago (after
going through a process much like that described above) by George
Kembel and Diego
Rodriguez. I think it still pretty much describes what we are trying to accomplish.

If you are a Stanford Master’s student, you might be interested in taking a d.school class this winter. Below are brief descriptions of the classes we are teaching (or go here for a pretty version Download CloserLookWinter2008.pdf)

Design for Agile
Aging

(MED 279Y; CS
379Y)

TTh 3-5, 4 units
per quarter

Email:
winograd@cs.stanford.edu

Maintaining mobility
is critical to successful aging. Impaired mobility limits daily activities and
independence. For individuals who are already mobility-impaired, or are at risk
of becoming so, small improvements in mobility can dramatically improve quality
of life. This two-quarter interdisciplinary course sequence is designed to
explore innovative ways to integrate computer and device technologies with
behavioral and social interventions to maintain and enhance mobility in
seniors. In project team, students draw upon perspectives from Computer
Science, Design, Social and Behavioral Sciences, and Medicine to develop
interventions that will address the potential of people to maintain vitality
and mobility as they age. Students need not take both courses, although
students must take the Winter course in order to enroll in Spring.

Teaching Team:

Anne
Friedlander, Stanford Center on Longevity

Carol Winograd,
Medicine and Human Biology

Terry Winograd,
Computer Science

Paul Yock, Medicine
and BioDesign

 

Transformative
Design

(ENGR 231)

MW 5:30-7PM, 3-5
Units

Email:
broth@stanford.edu

Designed products
have always had tremendous impact on individual, social and cultural behavior.
This project-based course investigates how interactive technologies can be
designed to expressly encourage behavioral transformation. Class sessions will
be structured around interdisciplinary discussion of topics such as
self-efficacy, social support, and mechanism of cultural change in domain such
as weight-loss, energy conservation or safe driving; accompanying lab sessions
will familiarize students with basic hardware and software tools for
interaction prototyping. Students will work in teams to create functional
prototypes for self-selected problem domains for the final project.

Teaching Team:

Bernard Roth, Mechanical Engineering Design Group, d.school

Sarah S. Lochlann
Jain, Cultural and Social Anthropology

Wendy Ju, d.school

Bill Moggridge, IDEO

 

K-12 Learning Lab
Independent Projects

Times and Units
Flexible

Email:
swise@stanford.edu

The K-12 Learning
Lab has major projects with the Nueva School, East Palo Alto Academy Charter
School and the Henry Ford Learning Institute. We’re building spaces, courses,
and partnerships to bring design thinking to young people. We are looking for
students who want to bite off parts of the projects and work on them
independently. The overall team will meet together every other week to share
learnings and prototypes.

Lab Director: Susie
Wise, d.school

Entrepreneurial Design For Extreme Affordability

(OIT 333/334; ME
206A/206B)

MW 10-11:45AM, Th
Lab 7-9PM

4 Units,
registration in both Winter and Spring quarters required

Limited
enrollment via application available at extreme.stanford.edu on Nov. 5, 2007.
Due no later than Nov. 16.Email: extreme-info@lists.stanford.edu

Entrepreneurial
Design for Extreme Affordability is a two-quarter project course in which
graduate students design comprehensive solutions to challenges faced by the
world’s poor. Students learn design thinking and its specific application to
problems in the developing world. Students work in multidisciplinary teams at
the intersection of business, technology, and human values. All projects are
done in close partnership with a variety of international organizations. These
organizations host student fieldwork, facilitate the design development, and
implement ideas after the class ends.

The first quarter of
the course (Winter 2008) immerses students in the fundamentals of design
thinking. Students learn the design process experientially as they are coached
through a number of fast-paced design projects, culminating in a real-world
project with local partners. In parallel, the course gives students a
background on business, technology, and development, and an introduction to our
international collaboration partners. By the end of the quarter, students will
form teams and begin their capstone spring quarter project. The second quarter
(Spring 2008) is devoted to developing comprehensive solutions to these design
challenges. Teams will develop empathy with all stakeholders so that they can
develop a solution that fits into the culture, aspirations, and constraints of
their target users. Teams will iterate on their designs and business models
through a rapid sequence of prototyping and testing. Students also will
interact with entrepreneurs who have launched ventures in the developing world,
including several alumni from the class. The final deliverable is a product or
service framed in a comprehensive implementation plan including the business
model, the technical innovations, the cultural rationale, and the appropriate
next steps. The course culminates in a professional presentation to the
international partners and a panel of industry experts.

Teaching Team:

Jim
Patell, Graduate School of Business

Dave Beach,
Mechanical Engineering

David Klaus,
d.school

Innovation in
Complex Organizations

(MS&E 282 A,
B)

Time TBD, 3
Units, Enrollment limited to 12

Email:
Robert.sutton@stanford.edu

The purpose of this
course is to offer students a chance to pause, discuss, and integrate design
thinking and innovation in business in a small seminar, case-study format. This
centerpiece of this small seminar will be three or four “live” case studies where,
executives from large, complex organizations come to class and describe their
efforts to move creative new ideas from inception to implementation. Past cases
have included Google AdSense, P&G, NASCAR, Method Home, and General Motors.
They will describe how their organizations screen and move along promising
ideas and how their organizational practices facilitate and impede that
journey. Student teams will analyze each case and provide recommendations to
the executives, who along with the teaching team, will judge the work. The
final project will be a general analysis and set of recommendations about this
vexing organizational problem. This course is co-sponsored by the d.school and
STVP (Stanford Technology Ventures Program).

Teaching Team:

Michael Dearing,
d.school

Robert Sutton, Management Science & Engineering and d school

Business Practice
Innovation (BPI)

(MS&E 287)

WF 3:30-5PM

Email:
Robert.sutton@stanford.edu

3-4 Units, Letter
Grade, Enrollment Limited to 12, No Auditors

Treating Business
Practices as Prototypes. In this small, team-based, multidisciplinary class,
students will work in dyads or larger teams. They will apply the design process
to specific practices (like talent management, organizational design, and
communication with external stakeholders) in organizations that may include a software
firm, a professional services firm, and an airline, and treating the targeted
practices as prototypes. The course will provide hands-on experience in
collaboration and design, in the context of tackling real problems in real
businesses.

Teaching Team:

Debra
Dunn, d.school

Kris Woyzbun, IDEO

Robert Sutton, Management Science & Engineering and d school

A group including Scott Doorley, Alex Ko, Kim Saxe, and Susie Wise worked like crazy this summer to design the space, furniture, curriculum, and
program for a new lab that teaches design thinking skills to kids. Check out the complete story at d.school news.  The first lab is at Nueva School in Hillsborough, and is pictured above. As the story says "Coaching support and prototype development will continue through the
school year and work to take the curriculum to Stanford’s East Palo
Alto Charter School has already begun." 

As Diego has written about on Metacool, Brain Witlin captures the spirit of the d.school as well as anyone we know.  I first got to know Brian when he was a member of a student team in our Creating Infectious Action class that came up with a website called www.firefoxies.com, which led thousands of people to download the Firefox browser. Since Brian graduated from Stanford a couple years back,  we have been lucky to have him as a coach in some of our d.school classes over the last couple years.  But what has been astounding is all the different ways that Brian has been combining his design skill with his keen sense of what people want and think is cool.  Earlier in the year, he was written-up in Wired for inventing a device called a  "Lamitron" for the hip bag company, Timbku2, where Perry Klebhan is CEO. Here is how Wired put it

The goal here is to turn recyclables into chic laptop and messenger
bags. Witlin, 28, hatched the idea at Stanford’s Institute of Design
(where Klebahn doubles as a professor). By heating polyethylene bags
just enough to fuse them together, he creates a tough, flexible
material that he hopes will become a stand-in for Cordura or canvas.
Using specs from Timbuk2, he built a $100 machine to make 8-foot-long
sheets of the stuff, suitable for cutting and sewing. Lamitron 1.0 may
be crude, ugly, and potentially flammable, but it works. "Innovation is
not a clean sport," Klebahn says.

The finished totes look super cool, in a battered, Blade Runner sort of way.

Check out the prototype bag from the Lamitron — Timbuk2 is working with Brian’s company RootPhi to bring these precluded bags to market — above is one of the prototypes and you can read more here.

At the same time the Brian has been working on these other projects (including helping me a bit to spread the word about The No Asshole Rule), he has been coming up with all sorts of other ideas for other products and businesses — as Diego says, he is the ultimate "just do it" entrepreneur and designer.  Perhaps the most promising of these ideas is product called "Golaces,"  which are these stretchy  rubber sort of things that you use on our sneakers instead of laces — which look cool and turn your sneakers into slippers (which also allow you to get your shoes on and off fast — very hand for airport security screening lines — and help kids who want tie shoes now but, well, aren’t quite ready for them yet).  Golaces has garnered a lot of interest from both major shoe companies and retailers, and is starting to appear in stores.  But if you can’t wait find Golaces near you right now, or are just curious about this new product, check out www.golaces.com, which just launched.

I hope that Golaces are huge hit, and things sound like they are going great.  But no matter what happens, Brian has so many ideas and acts on them so quickly, we will see A LOT more new products and cool business ideas from him in the coming years.  Brian ‘s ability to do brainstorming and rapid prototyping — and to be a constructive part of a team — are among the keys to his success.

The Stanford d.school continues to expand its offering of classes and still feels like a sort of crazy start-up with all sorts of energy.  For the the third year in the a row, we — not me, a our Executive Director George Kembel and a host of fantastic d.school fellows — are putting on what we call "bootcamp" informally.   This class introduces Stanford master’s students to the fundamentals of design thinking.  The d.school is all about building teams composed of people from diverse disciplines, so if you are a master’s student from any part of the university, please apply for the class!

Here is the official description:

ME377: Experiences In Innovation and Design
Thinking

We invite all masters students to attend the first class and apply for
enrollment online at: http://www.stanford.edu/group/dschool/projects/classes.html

Course Description:

Immerse yourself in experiences in innovation and design thinking. Blur the
boundaries between technology, business, and human values. Explore the tenets
of design thinking. Be human-centered, prototype driven, and mindful of process
in everything you do.

Topics include design processes, innovation methodologies, need finding, human
factors, rapid prototyping, team dynamics, storytelling, and project
management. Experience hands-on projects. Redesign the ramen noodle experience.
Design a morning radio experience with WNYC, the New York City affiliate of
National Public Radio. Expect in-class exercises, guest lectures and a Thursday
evening lab for design thinking workshops and team time.

Nine weeks, rich in frameworks and methods that support breakthrough thinking.
Students and faculty collaborating from all areas of the university – business,
earth sciences, education, engineering, humanities and sciences, law, and
medicine. Preparation for advanced d.school courses and real world innovation
leadership.

Course Details:

Units: 3-4
Grading: Credit/No Credit
Instructors: d.school Faculty and staff
Class Meetings: M, W 3:15-5:05pm, Th Labs 6-8pm
Location: Sweet Hall, 2nd Floor
Enrollment capped at 32.  Please apply before midnight on Monday,
September 24th and attend the first class

Guy
Kawasaki is one of the most intriguing people I know in Silicon
Valley because he has had the courage to try so many things. His
initial fame came at Apple, where he was renowned as their all-star marketing evangelist
(Guy remains one of the most engaging speakers I have ever seen: He is smart,
funny, and unlike too many of us, does not take himself too seriously). Then,
when the dotcom boom hit, he started his own venture firm. Garage.com. Guy
didn’t do it like everyone else either – most local VC’s stay out of sight and
lurk in boardrooms, and can only be spotted having breakfast at Buck’s in
Woodside or Il Fornaio in Palo
Alto. Guy was the VC for the masses. He held one-day entrepreneurship boot camps,
and at the height of the madness, thousands of people would attend (like rock
concerts, some would sleep in line overnight to get good seats). And he did
other crazy things: I recall waiting for the movie at a local theater, and an advertisement
appeared on the screen encouraging entrepreneurs to send their business plans
to Garage.com. Guy also wrote a few
best-selling books along the way too.  Guy
has morphed himself yet again, and has become a leading – perhaps the leading –
business blogger at How to Change the
World.

The
great thing about Guy, as you can see from his history, is he does not act like
the best he can be is a perfect imitation of what he used to be – he is always
trying new things. Some succeed, some
fail, and no matter what happens, he is always learning (and adding to his pile
of stories for those great speeches he gives). In this spirit, Guy launched a new venture last week called Truemors.com. Essentially, it is a site where
rumors are submitted, and readers vote for them or against them. The current buzz on blogs is pretty mixed
about the site, with some bloggers complaining about the interface, others about
the lack of focus, some because he is moderating the comments too much, others
that he is moderating the comments too little.

I
suspect that some of these concerns are valid and having been to the site, I
found that it was less compelling, for example, than Guy’s amazing blog. I think it needs to be more visually
compelling in particular. Regardless of
the ultimate fate of Truemors, to me it is indicative of both Guy’s wisdom in
particular and how entrepreneurship in the current Web 2.0 environment (for
lack of a better term) is so much different than the first dotcom boom.

Consider
a few features of how Guy is launching the site:

1.
It was developed for about $12,000 by Electric Pulp before being launched; as
Guy pointed out in the Wall Street
Journal, during the first boom, there would be a pitch (and if he was
lucky) some VC might have thrown a few million bucks at it. And then it would
have probably failed after burning through all that money.

2.
Guy is treating this as first, quick and dirty prototype, and he is getting people
in the user community to help him come up with ways to improve it. Now, as with all designers, I am sure that
hearing negative comments is no fun, but as we teach our students in the Hasso Plattner Institute of
Design at Stanford, the fastest way to improve your prototype is to get it
in front of users and to keep iterating in response to their feedback. In the “bad old days” a bunch of venture
capitalists (none of whom had ever managed a web company, and most of whom had
never funded a successful one) would pick away and make suggestions about the
site before it was launched. In the new
world, for better or worse, you can just put it out there, and update it constantly
in response to the customer and user responses. Guy’s site may keep getting better and ultimately succeed, or at worst,
it will be a cheap failure and you will probably learn something.

3.
I also have to commend Guy for having the simple courage to do this; Guy has
spent a lot of time giving people feedback on their ideas for new companies
(and like all VC’s. most of this is usually negative, as most new things have a
lot of flaws). Guy is putting himself on
the line in a most public way.

4.
So, for me, the upshot of all this is that Guy is demonstrating the very
essence of design thinking that we teach at the Stanford d.school – get a
prototype out there that is cheap, show it to a lot of users or customers,
update quickly in response. This
increases your chances of succeeding and, if you do fail (as will often
happen), it will be cheap and fast.

I
first learned about how entrepreneurship on the web had changed so dramatically
about two years ago. Jeff Pfeffer and I had just finished our book Hard
Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense, and I was talking
about it with a group at Stanford that included John Lilly, now COO
of Mozilla
(most famous for the Firefox open
source browser). I mentioned that one of
the main ideas of the book was that the most effective leaders treat their
organizations as an unfinished prototype. John – a mighty smart guy I’ve known for about 10 years – went on to
explain that the meaning of a prototype for a web-based company had changed
dramatically since the dotcom boom:

Jeff
Pfeffer and I wrote about this in an article
in Strategy & Business, and I think
that John’s wisdom goes a long way to explain why Guy’s approach is so smart
–whether Truemors ultimately succeeds or not. To quote part of the opening two
paragraphs of the article:

‘John
Lilly, formerly the CEO and founder of a Web-design firm and corporate
incubator called Reactivity, recently recalled what it took to sell an idea to
venture capitalists during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. In a period of
30 weeks, his team generated 30 PowerPoint presentations as “prototypes” for a
diverse group of Internet-based startups. Out of these, a combination e-mail
and Web browser was chosen as the most promising. Its PowerPoint presentation
was fine-tuned and then shown to potential backers. Based primarily on this
slide show — there was very little else for the venture capitalists to go on —
Reactivity raised more than $100 million for a new company (now defunct) called
Zaplet.

“That
approach wouldn’t work now,” said Mr. Lilly, currently vice president of
business development and operations at Mozilla Corporation. “By and large,
venture capitalists only fund Web-based companies that already have proven the
ability to attract customer traffic.”’

As
John suggests, venture capitalists now want to see a website that works and
attracts traffic. And as Guy suggests, this
means that there will be times when you don’t actually need a venture
capitalists any longer, or for that matter, major corporate funding for your
web-based venture – if you have a good idea and some skilled programmers (or
can hire some for a little while), you can throw it out there and see if it
works.

Does
this all sound too easy? Perhaps it
does, and indeed, most new websites, as with most new ventures, fail. But a
very interesting student project in our current d.school class on Creating
Infectious Action shows how it works. One of the student groups came-up (this was done by 4 students in less
than 2 weeks…. and I think they have only one who can program) with something
called My eBay Fox – which is a
version of the Firefox browser that is “customized to provide you with a better
eBay experience.” The students are Tyler
Hicks-Wright, Madalina Seghete, Ana Paula Azuela Garcia, and Peter Gleason — they have a blog, of course, which you can
check out – I also include a picture of the team.

I went to class last week, and Diego Rodriguez reported that they had
overall 30,000 unique visitors to the site so far that week (it was only
Thursday) – a heck of a week. On Saturday, Tyler reported that they were up 40,000
unique visitors and 13,000 downloads.

There
is also an interesting twist: It turns
out that eBay and Mozilla have been working jointly on
a customized version that is similar to the student’s project  for months, and these students have produced
something that (I am told, I am not an eBay user) is quite good in just a couple
weeks. Check out this article,
which probably overemphasizes the competitive aspects, but is an interesting
read. Note that the students came up
with this idea without any prior knowledge that eBay and Mozilla were working
on a similar product – in fact, I was sitting near Mozilla COO John Lilly (who
visited class) when he first heard about it, while is jaw dropped a bit, he did
not make any attempt to stop the group — after all, it was their idea, they didn’t know that a similar product
was under development, and Mozilla’s hallmark is open source development (which
is why the have less than 100 paid employees and over 100 million users).

Now,
to return to Guy. He is doing the same
thing the students are doing. He put it
a quick and inexpensive prototype, he will keep improving it on the basis of
feedback, and if it succeeds, that is wonderful. If it fails, the worst thing
that happens is that he will have learned something and will have some great
stories to tell – although he will have missed the fun of all those PowerPoint
pitches to VC’s like in the good old days, and at the extreme, the chance to
burn through millions. I am not saying
the venture capital business is obsolete, it is just that if you have a
web-based company, you need to have a site up and working, and making some
money, before you try to pitch the company.

This
approach may sound new, but although web prototyping are more realistic and
faster now, they notion of doing a lot of things and seeing what sticks is a very
old idea. Failing fast and failing
forward is a hallmark of creative geniuses through the ages, at least if you
believe large scale historical studies done on one sample after another –
artists, scientists, composers, and so on —  by Professor Dean Keith Simonton at the
University of California at Davis.  He
concludes:

“Creativity
is a consequence of sheer productivity. If a creator wants to increase the production of hits, he or she must do
so by risking a parallel increase in the production of misses. ….. The most
successful creators tend to be those with the most failures!”

So
the most creative people don’t have higher hit rates, they just do and make more
stuff.

P.S.
The four students on the d.school team keep tweaking My eBay Fox, but that doesn’t seem to
be enough for them… they also have launched a Firefox tool bars for Facebook,
called My Facebook Fox, which
is already getting positive reviews too. Not bad for four young people, who each have other classes as well
.

P.P.S.
A shorter version of this post also appears on my Harvard Business Online blog,
The
Working Life, buy I wanted to post the whole thing here, as it has some
important twists and turns that were cut, and I wanted to make sure and get the
student’s names and pictures in – very important!

That is what Jeff Pfeffer’s email said this morning — he wanted to know if it was true, if I was encouraging students to cheat.  By the time he sent the note, my misadventure with the press — BusinessWeek — was pretty much over.  Or at least I hope it is over. Things looked pretty bad yesterday morning for a couple hours,  It all started when I got an email from a BusinessWeek reader that was titled "Cheating is Not Virtuous," which took me to task for my quote in the current BusinessWeek (where I was talking about d.school teaching), which was printed originally as "If you found somebody to help you write an exam, in our view that’s a sign of
an inventive person who gets stuff done." 

Both Jeff Pfeffer and the anonymous BusinessWeek reader were outraged by my apparent encouragement for cheating. And I don’t blame them, based on the words that were printed. This was not the message that I meant to convey to the reporter and I suspect that I didn’t say that sentence as we don’t have traditional exams at the d.school, mostly group projects. (The reporter, Michelle Conlin, says she checked her notes and
that I did in fact say that but obviously we had some miscommunication)

BUT regardless of exactly what happened, I am pleased to say that within an hour of getting the email from the outraged BusinessWeek reader, and then communicating it to the writer Michelle Conlin, they had changed the online version of story , which now says (I include the paragraph to give you context:

The Stanford
University Design School, for example, is so collaborative that "it
would be impossible to cheat," says D-school professor Robert I.
Sutton. "If you found somebody to help you write a group project, in
our view that’s a sign of an inventive team member who gets stuff done.
If you found someone to do work for free who was committed to open
source, we’d say, ‘Wow, that was smart.’ One group of students got the
police to help them with a school project to build a roundabout where
there were a lot of bike accidents. Is that cheating?"

In addition, BusinessWeek committed to printing a correction in a forthcoming print version of the magazine, which will read In
“Cheating—Or Postmodern Learning?” Stanford Design School Professor Robert
Sutton’s quote should have made clear that the d-school does not have individual
exams. Grades are based on work in groups and students’ ability to mobilize
outside networks."

This is a cautionary tale, albeit one with an apparently happy ending.  It all started with a most interesting interview that I had with Michelle a couple weeks back, just as the cheating scandal at the Duke Business School was hitting the news: 34 MBA’s were busted for cheating.  I made clear to Michelle that in my more traditional classes, like Organizational Behavior: An Evidence-Based Approach, where we give students individual exams and grade them on individual performance, that we do watch closely for cheating and have had issues. BUT the point I was trying to make was many d.school classes offer a different kind of education, where students work in groups, present solutions aimed at solving real problems, and those solutions often involve building and mobilizing networks of people out in the real world to help them identify and implement solutions.

In this world — which reflects the reality of how people actually do work in modern organizations — traditional cheating is impossible, or a lot harder, because we encourage groups to critique and build on each other’s solutions, and solutions and prototypes are developed through a social process that involves experts, coaches, employees, customers, users, and many others.  So, for example:

1. The student group that developed firefoxies.com lacked the computer programming expertise that they needed to put up their site, but were able to succeed because they found eager members of the open source community who wrote code from them for free. I don’t think this cheating, as we graded the students on their ability to find and activate social networks.  This is how things get done in a connected world. 

2. As the article suggests, a group in another class that did a bike safety project built a roundabout at one of the most dangerous parts of the campus — and they had students using it for a few hours (a real working prototype…. now that is design thinking).  The Stanford police helped them by identifying the dangerous area, gave them permission to install it, and physically helped them build the roundabout. In addition, the students on bikes who used the roundabout "helped" them as well, as did another group of students who came along with safety signs and pamphlets, who joined in the effort in the spot — so it became the blended efforts of two teams. See the Stanford Daily story about the class.

3. Our students who did a project for Wal-Mart on the sustainability initiative (see this post — you can even watch the student presentations if you want) recruited Wal-Mart employees and customers to help them in hundreds of ways — as well as their friends and fellow students. This project was about mobilizing excitement and support for the sustainability movement, and presenting the results to Wal-Mart, so the traditional individual exam model doesn’t apply here either.

Yet, somehow, the quote in BusinessWeek seemed to imply that we were encouraging individual cheating, when in fact, our collective and network-based model means that "helping" isn’t cheating — it is what effective groups do.  There might be some forms of cheating in the d.school (I haven’t seen it yet, anything is possible), but in this world, the "bad behaviors" we worry about are being an uncooperative or lazy team member, not helping other teams, or not giving people who help your team enough credit.  To illustrate, I became extremely unhappy with one student who told me that he couldn’t attend class very much and was missing a lot of team meetings because he was so busy with his Rhodes and Marshall Scholarship interviews, and his Google job interviews.  His team was unhappy with him, and I pressured him (successfully) to drop the class.  I don’t know if his behavior is unethical, but I do know he was being a bad citizen.  That is the kind of behavior we focus on stopping, not cheating in the traditional sense.

In short, my view of ethics or cheating hasn’t changed, but what is "cheating" in a class that tests pure individual performance is different than in a purely collaborative class that has no exams or individual assignments.  These facts were somehow obscured in the original BusinessWeek article, but I am glad they fixed it.   Returning to my little press fiasco, I take away four things from this experience:

1. Don’t believe everything you read and hear in the media — we all know that, but it is easy to forget.

2. No matter how careful that you think you are with the facts during media interviews, there is always the possibility of factual error and distortion. Try to be careful with you own facts, and ask the reporter during the interview if it is being recorded or if they are taking notes — so if something goes wrong, you have an idea of how to verify what you said.  (In most U.S. states, by the way, they have to tell you if they are tape-recording the conversation, or they are breaking the law).  In my case, I talk fast, and the reporter was taking notes rather than recording, so that increased the risk of distortion.

3. If you disagree with the facts or emphasis of a story, don’t start out by assuming that people in the media have dark motives. Getting angry and make accusations will only make things worse.  My experience is that most journalists want to get the facts right and don’t want to twist them either.  But they write under deadline pressure, try to tell stories that weave together diverse sources, and also face pressures from editors and others to write in certain ways. I don’t know exactly what happened with this BusinessWeek story, but after making some mistakes in my career, I now try to avoid playing the blame  game if I can (e.g., I once called-up a Wall Street Journal reporter and yelled at her about 15 years ago… not a wise move even though I still think the facts were twisted unfairly). In this case, I started by assuming that I could have said the sentence about exams OR that it could have been something that journalist mis-recorded, but that it didn’t really matter whose "fault" it was.  Rather than getting into finger-pointing, my goal was to get the facts corrected.  I assumed that both Michelle and I are competent and well-meaning people, but as human-beings, we sometimes will make mistakes, and fixing the mistake (rather than blamestorming, as our politicians love to do) was what mattered.  Michelle was operating under the same assumptions, so it was a delight to work with her on the correction.

4. Finally, as I have written here before about some problems I had with Amazon (and in my books), one of the best tests of people or organizations is "what happens when they make a mistake."  Humans and human organizations will make mistakes — after all,  learning and innovation is impossible without error, and we all slip-up now and then.  The real test is after the mistake, does learning occur?  Is it fixed quickly?  Or is the focus on avoiding the finger of blame and looking for a scapegoat?  It may sound odd, but the experience with Michelle and BusinessWeek yesterday was one of the best experiences I have ever had with the media, even though it could have been the worst.  We all just focused on fixing the problem, and to BusinessWeek’s credit, the entire focus was on repairing the possible inaccuracies as quickly as possible. I believe that the lack of blame and anger on both sides is one of the main reasons that this problem could be dealt with and repaired so quickly. 

Sure, I could be vindicative and angry and claim that there are still magazines out there that make it sound like I am pro-cheating.  But what is the point?  I can’t see any upside.  The only way to avoid this kind of problem for certain is to never talk to the press. The only way to avoid writing things that are wrong is to never write anything at all.  I much prefer to be around people who do a lot of stuff, make mistakes now and then, quickly admit their errors, and then learn something — and even better — use their experience to teach others.   Indeed, in the end my opinion of Michelle and BusinessWeek is higher now than when this adventure started, and as strange as it sounds, I am glad it happened.  Indeed, I think that this is a lesson I learned from hanging around design thinkers like David Kelley, Perry Klebahn, and Diego Rodriguez.

P.S. Jeff Pfeffer wrote a rather scathing Business 2.0 Column about cheating in business schools a couple years ago. You might want to read Teaching the Wrong Lesson.  Jeff gets into the topic in more detail deeper in his forthcoming book What Were They Thinking?

Check out Diego’s post at Metacool on Spreading Firefox.  The 26 students in this term’s Creating Infectious Action — Kindling Gregarious Behavior (CIA-KGB) class came up with six websites to spread Firefox in two weeks (actually, less, in 8 working days, and as Diego notes, all these students have other classes, and it is spring, when students traditionally slack-off a bit — but not this bunch). Check them out:

My eBay Fox

Firefox Got Your Back

Underdog

Firefox 4 Life

PuckFox Cup

Everyday Hero

CIA-KGB is taught by Diego, Debra Dunn, Michael Dearing — plus a cast that includes Kris Woyzbun, Perry Klebahn, and Brian Witlin (I am listed as a member of the teaching team, but mostly for decoration — these folks are teaching and coaching their hearts out).  Plus a special thanks to John Lilly, Asa Dotzler, and others from Mozilla (the organization that gently manages the development of Firefox, which is open source software) for giving so much time and knowledge to our students.