My most recent two posts on Harvard Business Online are about a class that I taught last term at Stanford with Michael Dearing called Innovation and Implementation in Large Organizations, a joint venture between the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design and Stanford Technology Ventures Program. 

My first post on the class, which went up last week, described some of the highlights of our little innovation seminar.  There were only 11 students.  We read, talked, and wrote about innovation, and our ideas fueled by guests from diverse companies who taught us about the challenges of innovation and asked the students for advice.  If you check out the first post, you can also see that we had a lot of fun the day that Andy Papathanassiou from Hendrick Motorsports visited and taught us techniques for changing tires during pit stops — and he even brought a real race car for us to learn on.

I especially urge you to check out the final exam handed in by Gus Bitdinger (he is pictured to the left, moving the tire in position for Adam Sant).  Most finals are pretty boring, but this one is special. We asked all the students to make original films for the final, and many were excellent, but as I wrote on The Working Life (see this post for more details), Gus’s six minute song "Back in Orbit" (click here to see it on YouTube) was the best.   As I wrote, Gus "wrote an original song that combined both the lessons we learned in the class with one of the books we read, Orbiting the Giant Hairball by the late Gordon MacKenzie.  Hairball
is my favorite book about the challenges of doing creative things in
organizations, the mindsets and methods that kill creativity, and the
ways to overcome them. And somehow – in this little song – Gus captures
most of the main ideas in the book and weaves together with much of
what happened in class."  Also, if you haven’t read Hairball, you are really missing something special!

My new Harvard Business Online blog, The Working Life, has a new post about the design and business initiative that a group of us are leading the Stanford d.school. Check it out if you are interested in our approach to teaching innovation and preparing Stanford masters students to be effective members of creative teams.

I’ve been working with Sally Haldorson and the gang at 800ceoread.com to develop a new Changethis manifesto. Sally edits and publishes four or five of these high-graphics articles a month. This is my second manifesto; my first was Management Advice: Which 90% is Crap? This month, the other manifestos are Lonely Planet: How Relationships Suffer and Why It Matters by Elizabeth Johnson,
Frontline Leadership: A Cycle of Engagement Manifesto by Mark Graban, 100 Ways to Kill a Concept: Why Most Ideas Get Shot Down by Michael Iva, The Silent Revolution: Peter Drucker’s Voice Still Resonates by Elizabeth Haas Edersheim, and
How Toyota Can Save Your Life…At the Hospital by  Mark Graban.  As with everything that 1800CEOread does, they are committed to quality and are some of the most delightful people you can work with.

My new Changethis essay, as the picture shows, is about The Upside of Assholes — you can go to the web page where this a link to this pdf document or load it directly.  I write about this topic grudgingly in this manifesto, as I do in the book in book at greater length.  My co-author, Jeff Pfeffer, seems to be especially enamored of this argument (although he is rarely an asshole). My reply to him, and to others who make arguments about the virtues of assholes, is that, yes, there are times and places when they get ahead, but the damage that they leave behind is often far greater than they and others realize, and most important, if you are a winner and asshole, you are still an asshole and I don’t want to get near you!

Last year, Diego Rodriguez and I led a new Stanford d.school class called Creating Infectious Action. We recruited 26 master’s students from  around Stanford — mostly engineers, product designers, and MBA’s, but doctoral student in philosophy too — and worked with companies and industry experts to spread Firefox. promote hip-hop performers, and too spread financially prudent behavior among young adults.  This year, I am playing a much smaller role, and Diego and two of our team coaches from last  (who are both now Associate Consulting Professors), Debra Dunn and Michael Dearing have taken  charge of a descendant of this class called Creating Infectious Action, Kindling Gregarious Behavior (CIA-KGB). They have also recruited  Kris Woyzbun (a product design student and veteran of at least 4 design school classes) to be the course assistant and Perry Klebahn (now CEO of Timbuk2, and a master product designer and team leader) to be a team coach. 

If you are are a Stanford master’s student in any field, I encourage you to sign-up for this class, it is a lot of work, but you will learn a huge amount, and the teaching team has diverse skills and deep experience, and are great people. If you want to read a great testimonial, see Min Liu’s post on why the d.school works. You can also see video from Alwayson where Diego and I talk about last year’s CIA  class.

Here is the description for this year’s class:

Creating Infectious Action, Kindling Gregarious Behavior (CIA-KGB): application due March 9

This small and intense project-based class is built around two team
efforts to “spread” positive behavior, which will be bolstered by
exposure to, and coaching from, industry experts and academics. The
first project will be an initiative done with Mozilla, the second a
project focused on building the user base of a social venture called
Global Giving that runs an
online marketplace connecting donors with
social entrepreneurs globally.  A limited number of summer internships
with Global Giving will be available to CIA-KGB students who wish to
continue creating infectious action in that domain.

The teaching team behind CIA-KGB brings a wealth of academic and
real-world experience to the course.  The instructors are Michael
Dearing, Debra Dunn, Diego Rodriguez, and Bob Sutton (who will be a
guest instructor).  The course assistant is Kris Woyzbun, who was part
of the inaugural version of CIA last year.  Project teams will also
benefit from the coaching of Timbuk2 CEO Perry Klebahn.

Learning how to become a better design thinker will be a major focus
of this course. Students will apply the “build to think” philosophy of
the d.school and create prototypes of everything from viral marketing
campaigns to entire businesses. While there will substantial helpings
of theory delivered throughout the quarter, this is a course for people
who want to get their hands dirty, to get out in the world and do
things.

P.S. See Diego’s post on the CIA-KGB class for more information and context — and to catch his excitement about the class.

Min Liu just graduated from Stanford at the end of the winter term.  Those of us at the Stanford d.school were lucky to have her as a student in our "Clicks-n-Bricks" class during her last term at Stanford, which among other things, did a project for Wal-Mart focused on fueling their sustainability efforts. I wrote a couple of posts about the class, including one describing the great group dynamics on our teaching team (which included Debra Dunn, Liz Gerber, Michael Dearing, Alex  Ko, and Perry Klebahn), but Min just put-up a post that has more information about what it is like to take a d.school class than any other place I know.  Check out her new post on Why the d.school Works.  Check it out, it not only has opinions, it has a couple videos from our class field trip to Wal-Mart.com.  Our students were invited to present their work to a big group of Wal-mart.com employees after presenting their projects — and having them evaluated — by 7 or 8 Wal-Mart executives plus our teaching team the prior week.  The first video is of Carter Cast (CEO of  Wal-Mart.com) and I setting the stage for the presentations and the second is of Min’s group doing their presentation on how to get Wal-Mart.com employees more engaged in their sustainability efforts. 

Min was kind enough not to talk about all the mistakes we made as a teaching team, as we worked under massive uncertainty and time pressure. Things came out well in the end, but the creative process is usually pretty bumpy, and this class was no different. Here are some of the nice things Min said:

The class gave me the breadth to do hard out-of-the-academic element
projects. For example, designing a sustainability project within a
large organization can’t solely rely on theoretical foundations of
organizational behavior. My team and I interviewed the Walmart.com
folks, talked to various individuals outside Target and Whole Foods who
were passionate or apathetic about green, developed a point of view for
our subjects, and came up with a cool solution based on our
observations and prototypes. And like no other department I’ve
experienced, we got access to the d.school 24-7 and free food and
drinks all the time……

Personally, my last quarter at Stanford was the best because I learned
that the process of doing what I love (finally!) is so much better than
living up to some abstract expectation even though it is, by
convention, the best. Sure, the realization was a good part done by
myself outside of the d.school, but it was d.school’s welcoming,
innovative, and incubative environment that helped me realize that the
riskier and gutsy-er a path is, the better.

Of course, Min’s comments warm our hearts.  It is the kind of thing that keeps us going when all seems dark and messed-up, and why we are lucky to work at place like Stanford that allows us to do such crazy things, to take risks in our teaching and research, just as we press our students to do in their projects.

We
just wrapped-up our d.school class Clicks-n-Bricks:
Creating Mass Market Experiences. When I walked in the door on Friday night after our teaching team went
out to celebrate, the first thing I said to my wife was “That just might be the
best team I will ever be on in my life.” The other team members were
Michael Dearing,
Debra Dunn, Liz
Gerber, Perry
Klebahn and Alex Ko.

I am not saying we were perfect; we made
plenty of mistakes teaching the class. I can count at least a dozen things I
wish we had done differently. But it was
such a great team because everyone was competent, we had
complimentary skills, everyone did what had to be done (no one ever even hinted
that something “wasn’t my job), and perhaps best of all, I have never been on a
team that considered so much information, argued about it all, and then made
and implemented decisions. I disagreed with at least a third of the decisions
that we made.  But since I respected everyone so much, I never felt a bit of
resentment about what we had decided to do – I just did what I could to get it
done. And I think this was true of every member of the team. I have never been
on a team where 25 or 30 suggestions and three or four possible overall
solutions are surfaced, argued over, and then a path chosen in 10 minutes or less. And it happened routinely. I can’t recall ever
feeling like we were bogged down in a stupid argument, any moment where any
member conveyed disrespect, and – although it may have happened – any moment
where any member was afraid to voice an opposing view. Debra was especially good at this, often laughing and getting us to laugh as we were arguing different points of view and — always — making decision about what TO DO.   

There
is a substantial literature on conflict in teams, and the upshot is that effective teams (especially creative teams) fight over ideas in an
atmosphere of mutual respect. I write
about this research in Weird Ideas That
Work.  Intel is the firm that is perhaps most famous for fighting over
ideas, as they give all new employees classes in constructive confrontation.
Plus argument over ideas is one of the hallmarks of Andy Grove’s management style.
Unfortunately, most teams I have been on either don’t fight over ideas, or when they
try to, they swerve into personal nastiness. 

As
I learned in graduate school, members of teams are often remarkably blind to
what is driving their feelings and actions. So I may be missing the real reasons it felt so good to work on the Clicks-n-bricks team. But three reasons strike me. The
first has to do with the amount of experience that everyone on the team has had
in groups – indeed, Debra, Perry, and Michael all have extensive experience as
senior executives in corporations, and Alex and Liz also both have substantial
experience in teams. In fact, although Liz was a "student" and we were "faculty" she usually was the one who stood up and led the group discussion  — so in a group that could have been hung-up on status differences, that didn’t happen.  The second is that
there was not one person in the team who ever acted as if he or she was
superior to the rest, there was so little arrogance it was astounding – people
consistently understood and acted as if doing what was right for the students
was all that mattered. And when one of us forgot what mattered for a moment,
another member would remind him or her in a supportive way. And third, as Perry said, we were all so
busy with other things that it was just plain rude to waste others’ time – we
just had to get it on the table, hash it out, and get it done. I love working
with people who I can have a good fast fight with, and like them even more
when it is over – even when I’ve lost.

I
will write about the wonderful work that the students did in a future post, but for
now, it is our group that is on my mind. I wanted to get this down because, to be frank, we’ve been so focused on
doing our work all term that I don’t think any of us took the time to really
think about and talk about what thing we had all been part of until it all
ended Friday night. Freud said something like "groups bring out the best and the worst in human behavior." This time I get lucky, and got the best!

If you are a Stanford masters student and want to learn the fundamentals of design thinking — not just how to talk about it but how to do it — I suggest that you go to d.news and check out Charlotte’s post on Experiences in Innovation and Design Thinking. And if you aren’t a Stanford masters students, stay tuned to d.news to catch the developments. Some really cool and crazy things happened last year, like the groups that fanned out on the Stanford campus to improve bike safety by building a roundabout, staging a fake accident, and organizing a flashmob. Here is a picture of the fake bike accident that one group staged — note
the cell phone next to the student and the lack of helmet — and the
education going on around the students. I was frankly a bit horrified
to hear that the students had been so creative at first, although I
felt a bit better when they told me that they had recruited Stanford police
officers to help them!

The all-star teaching team is Alex Kazaks (on leave from McKinsey to teach at the d.school), Alex Ko (d.school Fellow), David Kelley (founder of both IDEO and the d.school), George Kembel (d.school executive director and amazingly creative), and Scott Doorely (d.school Fellow).

As Charlotte tells us, the class offers, "Immersive experiences in innovation and design thinking, blurring the
boundaries between technology, business, and human values.  Explore the
tenants of design thinking including being human-centered, prototype
driven, and mindful of process in everything you do."

Stanford Business School recently hired the charming (and damn smart) Hayagreeva (“Huggy”) Rao from the Kellogg Business School at Northwestern –- where he had won the award for outstanding teaching (and wrote a pile of fantastic academic articles). After a “get to know you” meeting in Huggy’s office, we decided to go out to drink some wine, and, well one thing led to another, and soon we were talking about developing an executive program on innovation that combined more traditional “business school” case style instruction and lecture at the Graduate School of Business with the more hands-on “design thinking” approach that we use at the Stanford d.school.

Huggy and I soon started focusing on innovation around customers (as we both have research and teaching interests here) and on the notion that –- rather than limiting instruction to the pristine environment of the case style classroom at the Graduate School of Business — we would have the executives spend much of their time doing hands-on design work in the unfinished and somewhat grungy double-wide trailer currently occupied by the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, or as everyone (including Hasso) calls it, the d.school. 

We became quite enamored of this idea of “clean” innovation models for the morning sessions and the “messy” process of doing creative work for the afternoon sessions. We liked this approach was that it models how effective organizations do innovation: traveling between rigorous (if somewhat sanitized) theory, evidence, and case studies and the (more messy) challenges of actually identifying, developing, and trying to test real ideas with real customers. We also liked the idea because (we hoped) it would be a great experience for our customers, the 35 executives who participated in the program.  We believed that the blend of the two modes would teach them a lot and keep them motivated and engaged throughout the week.

The first iteration of Customer-Focused Innovation program took place from November 12^th to 17^th and the initial signs are that the participants loved the program, and so did the people who ran and taught in the program (although those of us in the second group have just now recovered from intensity of it all). One participant after another told us how great it was and a remarkable percentage indicated that they were going to go back and convince their colleagues to attend the next program. And the initial survey results indicate that on 5 point scale, of the 30 participants who completed surveys, 27 executives gave the “overall experience” a “5,” 1 executive gave it a “4.5,” and 2 executives gave it a “4.” And on a 5 point scale ranging from 1 (definitely not) to 5 (definitely yes),  in response to the question “would you recommend this program to others,” the mean across the 30 responding executives was 4.93.

Not everything was perfect, of course, but we are extremely encouraged by these results. I am completely biased, so I hope that some of the participants will chime in, but I was taken with overall quality of the “clean” models and cases in mornings, including Robert Burgelman’s case study of innovation strategy at Intel, Chip Heath’s session on how to design ideas that “stick,” Charles O’Reilly’s discussion of balancing innovative and routine work, Jeff Pfeffer’s session on the knowing-doing gap (I am co-author of the book, so you can’t trust me here at all), Baba Shiv’s sessions on the role of emotion in marketing decisions, and Seenu Srinivasan's  sessions on conjoint analysis in the product development process. And I was especially struck with the panel on “my favorite mistakes,” which included the deeply smart Michael Dearing explaining how –when he was a senior marketing executive at eBay – he and his colleagues raised prices in ways that ignited much controversy with the eBay community (and the steps they took to recover from the mistake) and the charming Mike Ramsey, who was founding CEO of TiVo.  Mike was refreshingly open about mistakes that his team made in developing relationships with other companies, but also quite convincing in arguing that other steps they made might have been worse.

As wonderful as these sessions were, however, the afternoon sessions in the double-wide trailer were what differentiated this Customer-Focused Innovation from other executive programs I’ve taught-in and led. The afternoon session was ran by Alex Kazaks (one of the founders of the d.school, an experienced designer who spent years at IDEO, and now a McKinsey consultant), Perry Klebahn (also a co-founder of the d.school, and a successful inventor and executive who is about to become  CEO of Timbuk2), and Sarah Stein Greenberg (now a d.school Fellow, but a recent Stanford MBA who has extensive experience in both the worlds of design and business).  We broke the participants into about 8 groups, and each had a coach.  In addition to Alex and Perry, we had a cast of wonderful young – and very skilled – designers including Alex, Ko, Liz Gerber, Scott Doorley, Yusuke Miyashita, and Brian Witlin. We also had fantastic support from the program manager from the Graduate School of Business, the flexible and persistent Stacey Gray and her assistant the "other" Sara (In fact, one of the participants gave them a “6” on the 5 point scale!).

We were fortunate to have great help from British Petroleum, who worked with us to develop a design problem (improving the customer service experience at AM-PM mini-markets, which BP owns) and to get access to local markets. Then three BP executives joined the class to judge the participants work – mostly prototypes of different ways to layout the markets and alternative customer service experiences. The 35 participants went out on Monday afternoon to observe and take pictures of these gas station/mini-market combinations. On Tuesday, they brainstormed solutions and presented alternative points of views. On Wednesday night, they built their prototypes. Then the judges came in on Thursday afternoon to evaluate their work and suggest extensions and alternatives.

Sarah tells me that participants emphasized that several parts of the experience had an especially strong affect on what they learned. One big lesson was that going out and meeting real customers gave them a sense of urgency that is often missing from their regular work. The experience of interacting with consumers was surprisingly compelling. It sounds obvious, but management and innovation are usually mastered by companies that do obvious things well. Second, we gave the teams very short – seemingly absurd — time frames to complete tasks. Sometimes, Sarah points out, we gave them 5 minutes to come up with a point of view (problem statement) based on their synthesis of a LOT of tenuously connected and hard to organize information from their observation process. Even though this rushed process felt uncomfortable at first, participants reported that they appreciated how acting fast prevented “overthinking,” and that even if they didn't come up with fully finished concepts, they were much farther along due to the bias toward action than they would have been had they been more analytical and "thorough."

It was a sort of do it yourself version of the ABC Nightline episode filmed at IDEO a few years back, where IDEO inventors developed a prototype shopping cart in four days. To give you a feel of what the executives went through, Sarah Stein Greenberg sent me some pictures and some captions. As you can see, this was an intense experience where the executives went out and observed what actually happens in these stations and then went through the messy process – with a lot of coaching and guidance from our wonderful coaches.

In this first picture, of one of the Monday observations, Sarah reports, “Stacy interviews a store employee (not pictured), while her teammate Jim keeps a low profile and observes the product mix on the shelves and in the refrigerated section.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The second picture is of Team 5 at work on Tuesday, the day the teams brainstormed and developed a point of view about their solution.  Sarah tells us, “Team 5 plastered the walls of their work space with photographs and observations from their time in the field. This emphasis on visualization and pattern grouping helped the team quickly sort through qualitative data to surface key insights and areas of opportunity.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The third picture is from Wednesday, the prototyping day. Sarah reports, “Executives built many ‘low resolution’ prototypes and discovered that a surprising amount of information can be gained from early prototyping. The activities were designed to jolt participants out of usual modes of business thinking and analysis by establishing tight time constraints and the pressure of a high-energy, fast-paced work environment.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the spirit of design thinking, we have dozens of ideas about how to make the program better next year. For example, we think that we need to blend together the lessons from the “clean” models presented in the morning more explicitly with the “messy” experience in the afternoon and we believe that we need even more coaches in the afternoon. We also believe that it can’t get any larger that 40 participants and 30 or 35 might be even better, as this is the most labor intensive form executive education I’ve ever experienced.

Finally, as with all reports, this one is biased. I am sure I left out important details, so I hope that people involved in the program – especially participants, but faculty. Coaches, staff and so on – will add their perspective as well.

 

The d.school’s blog went live this morning.  Charlotte Burgess  Auburn, our relentless Directory of Community, has been working on it like crazy and I think it looks great. It already has 15 posts and more on the way.  Check out d.news!