Category: Innovation

I made the mistake of opening the Amazon box yesterday.  It contained Bill Moggridge’s brand new 766 page book Designing Interactions. I have several talks to prepare and a bunch of other stuff to do, but I forgot all about them once I started reading the book. Bill has been at ground zero of the design thinking movement for 30+ years, starting has own industrial engineering firm and then joining David Kelley and Mike Nuttall to form IDEO, then the first full service design firm, which has now broadened to become an innovation firm that helps companies develop innovative products, processes, customer experiences and organizational designs.  I’ve known Bill for about a decade and have always been touched by both his grace and brilliance, and range of skills — and they are all on display in this beautiful book. Bill is perhaps best known as the designer of the Grid, the first laptop computer in 1981, but that is just one of the many, many designs he has contributed to developing.

This book –using interviews with many of the most influential and important people and their stories in the product design and innovation world over the past 30 years or so —  demonstrates what design thinking is and how great people do it.  Read it, study it, talk about it. I’ve read a lot of books on creativity and design, I try to study it, teach it, apply it myself, but while there is a lot of good stuff out there, this is the masterpiece, the top of the pops.

If you are going to read one book on how to do creative work in the real world, this is it.  The 700 images, the stories, the writing are all relentlessly beautiful and instructive.

Not only that, the process that Bill used to create the book also is an example of design thinking and action at its best — the process and the product demonstrate why Bill is known as one of the most skilled designers in the world (and I mean both technically and socially skilled). I had heard about the book a bit from Bill, as I was amazed to hear that he was — with help from key people at IDEO and his social network — producing  everything in the book himself, writing all the words, doing all the interviews with 40 or so designers and innovators who are the main focus of the book — everyone from Doug Englebart (inventor of the computer mouse) to Google’s Larry Page to Wil Wright (creator of the Sims) — to designing the layout and cover, to using desktop publishing and video editing software himself to bring it all together.  In fact, I confess that although I have made it through the text, I haven’t even looked at the DVD yet that is included with the book, and as I’ve implied, Bill also produced.

In the name of full disclosure, I am an IDEO Fellow and have known and admired Bill for along time. But I know and admire lots of people who write books on creativity and innovation.  This is the masterpiece in my view.  This book is published by MIT Press — which has had few if any books at the top of the best-seller list in its history — and it is about 500 pages longer than most books that are slated to be hit sellers.  But it deserves to be a best seller given the current clamoring for creativity and innovation throughout the world.  Designing Interactions only costs $26.37 on Amazon — and it has more useful information and inspiration than any 10 other books you are likely to buy that are vaguely related to the subject — and they don’t have a DVD. 

Now I have to go back to my other chores and resist the temptation to watch the DVD for another couple days.  It is 100 minutes!

P.S. Checkout the Designing Interactions Website — you can see video clips from the DVD there and read a sample chapter.

As I was waiting around the British Air lounge in San Francisco on my way to Germany, I read a story in the October issue of Gourmet Magazine that pronounced Alinea in Chicago as the best restaurant in the U.S.  It brought back memories of the meal that I had there with David Kelley of IDEO and d.school fame, just about a year ago.  I am not sure it is the best place I ever ate, but they did create an astounding experience and were without pretension at all.  Our little room — with about  5 tables — not only had a couple of dedicated waiters it also had its own sommelier, who explained each wine we had. And it really was weird food, As David put it, if he would give Alinea a 10 for his weirdest meal, his next next weirdest meal would be no more than a 6.  How weird? Well, I saved the menu from October 6th 2005 (which they say changes constantly), and the 12 courses (each just two or three bites) started with what described as olive oil — but was domino-sized disc frozen at 100 degrees below zero.  I also recall a lobster Cheeto (almost as good as regular Cheeto) that came with one dish, and the final dish was a spoonful of dry caramel.  They had things like fish, lamb, pork and bison (which was excellent), each weird and delightful in its own way. The greatest thing about the experience was the staff, who — with great knowledge and just the right touch of silliness — gave us a mini-lecture about what we were eating, how it was prepared, and how to eat it for each course(many dishes did not use traditional utensils…like the five little stuffed hearts of palm that were each placed on little pedestals that you picked-up and then used as launching pads or I guess like shot glasses to toss the food into your mouth). I sent the 29 year-old chef and owner Grant Achatz a copy of Weird Ideas That Work — I never heard back from him, but the title certainly fits the place. 

If I had to choose a place to go for my last meal, I would still probably pick the French Laundry in Napa, but Alinea might be second. The only thing that I recall that wasn’t wonderful was a house made
sweet wine that reminded my of a bad imitation of Mogen David concord
grape wine.

The experience also stands out because David and I spent the next day at a McDonald’s research and development lab near  Chicago that has several full-sized working McDonald’s kitchen and restaurant. It is called the Core Innovation Center and it is a place where they constantly experiment with new technologies, configurations, and service solutions — you can read a bit about it in this Economist story.  We made our own burgers for lunch the next day and ate them standing-up in the kitchen, while talking to the inventor of an amazing burger-cooking machine that used a kind of conveyor belt to remove frozen burgers from one compartment and then cook them in another compartment, cranking them out a rate of one every few seconds — which we then assembled with our favorite toppings.  As David said, each meal was equally enjoyable and the contrast between the two made each seem so wonderful.

Now that is metacool! Check it out at Diego’s blog.

The new BusinessWeek has a "special report" on "Design Schools" and identifies the "Best D-Schools" in North America, Europe, and Asia. Co-author Jessi Hempel talked to several of us at the Stanford d.school about the story, and I was delighted that we were on the list and even more delighted that they elected to simply list top schools rather than to do some kind of ranking from best to worst, as I think that this "category" is too new and there are too many differences among the different kinds of school  — so trying to rank the single course taught by the Harvard Business School to the MIT Media Lab to the California College of Arts doesn’t seem reasonable.  I think their perspective — that these schools all try to produce people who can do creative work — is the right take, that certainly is what we try to do at the Stanford d.school. The twist I would add is that we don’t so much try to teach people to be creative individuals (although that is certainly one goal), our main mission is to produce people who are skilled at contributing to the process of creative collaboration.

I also was pleased to see that the opening main story on The Talent Hunt started off with a description of the Firefox project, which was part of the class that Diego Rodriguez and I taught on Creating Infectious Action — which we’ve written about on both our blogs.  We love coverage and we realize that there probably wasn’t space to the name all students, but I want to give special thanks to John Lilly and Asa Dotzler from Mozilla, coach Debra Dunn, and to the four students who worked on www.firefoxies.com — which was mentioned in the article, Thomas Niss, Xiao Wang, Corrine Putt, and Brian Witlin. More evidence that sex sells — note also that those pictures sometimes are censored a bit before they are posted, as the website is rated PG!

Meanwhile, Michael Dearing, Perry Klebahn, Liz Gerber, Alex Ko and I are teaching a new d.school class this term called Clicks-n-bricks: Creating Mass Market Experiences.  The first day of class was Thursday and the first assignment is to "improve the theme park experience, especially for non-English speakers."  We have buses of students off to visit local theme parks this weekend. I can hardly wait to hear what they discover and what design changes they suggest. I attach the description of the first assignment for the curious — as you can see it is a very simple and broad description and, if you think about it, a mighty tough problem!

Download clicksnbricks_first_assignment.pdf

Diego over at Metacool has been writing some wonderful stuff on simplicity. Check out the comparison between the two different drive-through signs. Diego’s analysis of why the In-N-Out Burger sign is so effective is just lovely — and the picture of the other sign is hysterical.

I
have not been posting much lately because I went on a trip to Dubai last week
and a group of us at the d.school are working like crazy on our new class “Clicks-n-bricks:
Creating Mass Market Experiences,” which starts Thursday afternoon.  I had a fantastic trip to  Dubai, where I spoke at a conference that was
organized by the Emirates Higher Colleges of Technology and the  MIT Entrepreneurship Center.

  The
organizers were very excited because Excellency Sheikh Nahayan Mabarak Al Nahayan was going to attend the conference and giving the opening speech.  The event started over an hour late we – an audience
of perhaps 1000 people –waited for his Excellency to arrive, and when he
did arrive, there was all sorts of wonderful ceremony, an entourage of perhaps
50 people, 20 or so members of the media, and fantastic music (an IBM executive
told me that they had hoped to have indoor fireworks, but the ceiling was too
low).  After his Excellency’s speech,
there were some lovely dancers, and then Azim Hashim Premji –
Chairman and founder of Wipro, plus the wealthiest person  in India, – then spoke for
about 15 minutes.

I was next, and as I was walking up to speak, one of my hosts ran up
to me and whispered “you have to make it fast, his Excellency has to leave!”  Also, before the speech Pat Toole from
IBM whispered to me that I should start the speech by saying “Your Highness,
Your Excellencies, and ladies and gentleman.”  That was different and it was fun.

So I hit a
small number of points and hit them quickly.  Being a professor, I can talk on and on, but
one of the lessons I learned on the trip is that a good 8 minute talk is a lot
better than a bad 30 or 60 minute talk.  As they say in show business, it is
always better to leave the audience wanting more than wanting less.

I
talked about what I’ve learned about teaching people to innovate from academic research,
teaching classes in the d.school
and Stanford Technology Ventures
Program, and from working with companies like IDEO, HP, and SAP. I
emphasized five points and their implications for policy. I doubt that many of you will be surprised by
any of these ideas, but knowing is not the same is doing.  Few of these practices are used at the
university level – not just in the AER, throughout the world.  Here are the five points: 

1 Producing smart individuals is the first step;
teaching them to collaborate is the second step.

2 Teach people how to fight as if they are right and
listen as if they are wrong.

3. Teach experts to seek out novices, and novices to
seek out experts.

4. Teach people to treat innovation as an
import-export business.

5. Teaching people how to succeed isn’t enough;
teach them how to fail too.

I also added that renowned innovators – from Charles
Darwin to Steve Jobs – not only have good ideas, they also always seem to be
able to sell their ideas or to hook-up with people who can do it for them.

We had some other crazy adventures later in the day,
as Canadian Entrepreneur Evan Chrapko
and I were in car (with other speakers in four or five different cars) that
raced to
to meet another member of the royal family in Abu Dhabi (about an hour from Dubai). It turned out that his schedule wouldn’t
allow it, but racing along at 180 kilometers (with our host pressing the driver
not to drive faster and faster) was pretty fun.  Indeed, everyone kept telling us that the AER
had the highest automobile fatality rate in the world – not a shock based on my
limited experience.

P.S. Here is the Powerpoint for my talk Download teaching_people_to_innovateii.pdf

The Inside Innovation section of the new BusinessWeek has a pair of stories that are based on the research that Andew Hargadon and I did on brainstorming in the 1990s, and on what I’ve learned about how to use brainstorms since then, both from academic research and from working with teams that do creative work. The first story is called The Truth About Brainstorming and the second is Eight Rules to Brilliant Brainstorming.

As an academic, headlines that claim to be about truth and brilliance make me a bit nervous, as I am trained to make more measured claims. But Ithink they did a great job of capturing my view of brainstorming research and practice.

Diego Rodriguez has been telling me for about a year now that, as an organizational researcher, I needed to learn more about this amazing guy Joi Ito. I need to listen to Diego more closely. I just read an article about Joi in Strategy+Business called The Ambassador for the Next Economy.  I was generally intrigued by both Joi’s life and how he lives it, but that part I am fascinated by is the work he is doing to use his World of Warcraft guild as a way of prototyping a better from of innovative organization. 

I too have been struck by how inadequate the modern organizational form — which seems to stem partly from arbitrary traditions and the natural tendency for just about creatures to form steep hierarchies where those on top have all or nearly all the power. I’ve proposed solutions over the years that are pretty mundane when I see what Joi is doing.  Here is what the article says in one place:

Long frustrated by the fairly conventional hierarchies in even the most
innovative technology companies, Mr. Ito says he sees in his Warcraft
guild a new way to organize, manage, and motivate people. With his
guild doubling in size every month, he does a lot of learning on the
fly. “Every week or so, I have to add a new rank, build a whole bunch
of new rules, and throw in kind of ad hoc structures,” Mr. Ito says.
“I’m playing with all the different kinds of management ideas I’ve had
for companies with a bunch of people who are actually very dedicated.
They will set their alarm clocks for 3 a.m. to run a raid of 40 people.
They are committed to each other like people in a normal company
wouldn’t be committed to each other. So as a test bed for these ideas,
this is actually pretty amazing.”

On Friday, a group of us at the d.school were having a conversation about how you create a world where people can do rapid prototyping of a real organization, to learn quickly about variations of organizational form and its effects on performance and emotional engagement.  There are some in-person simulation games that are pretty useful for learning such lessons. Starpower comes to mind. It is an instructive game that can be used to create a hierarchical world — in a matter of minutes — where the top dogs often become incredibly abusive of those at the bottom. But the way that Joi is doing it strikes me as far more powerful, and in fact,  the structure of an online game is, increasingly, not just an analogy for how companies are organized, since more organizations are now spread throughout the world — and even when people work in the same building — people increasingly do everything over the web and phone.

So modern organizational life is increasingly an online game, but the modern organizational form hasn’t caught up yet. I know that Joi isn’t the only one using games and online communities as a place to prototype different organizational forms, and I would be curious to hear about others.

Finally, the other hint that I got that the web makes possible alternative forms that traditional theorists and consultants wouldn’t have imagined came when I gave a little talk at Mozilla earlier in the Summer. I’ve known John Lilly for years (he just moved to COO), and have had some conversations and listened to CEO Mitchell Baker and open source marketing maven Asa Dotzler now and then over the past year. But the difference didn’t really strike me until I gave a talk to the whole company. There was just 60 or so people in one room, and I realized that those few people were key nodes in a huge network that got many things done and yielded an enormous amount of power. Sure, they have some organizational problems at time.  But my comment to Mitchell Baker was that I wasn’t surprised that they sometimes has management challenges (so do General Motors and Apple), but what surprised me as a career organizational researcher was that the organization not only exists, it continues to thrive by multiple effectiveness criteria — see Mitchell’s post positive reinforcement for creativity.

In short, following that old line in the Jimmy Buffett song, I tend to divide what I see into the world into two rough categories: Those things that are still a mystery to me, and those things that are much to clear.  The question of how to identify and implement a better organizational form for innovation remains a mystery to me (although I think there are some good hints out there about the paths to travel down). In contrast, as you’ve heard me say, it is far too clear to me that too many organizations let too many assholes in the door, let them continue to abuse others, and even reward these creeps for their dirty deeds.

MP3 File  | Subscribe via iTunes

I recently
wrote about how the Stanford Technology Venture’s podcast from the Entrepreneurial
Thought Leaders had risen to #1 on the iTunes for higher education
rankings. I didn’t quite understand how
popular they were until this week, when Forrest Glick, STVP’s web guru, made
available a talk that I gave on my book,Weird
Ideas That Work: 11 and ½  Practices for
Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation.  It was just made available on Tuesday and
there already have been over 6000 downloads.  I am stunned. You can get or listen to the
podcast from this link at STVP’s
Educator’s Corner or download it at iTunes – all for free.

Julio Vasconcellos and Matt Wyndowe are students at both the Stanford Business School and the Stanford d.school (aka The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design). They’ve started a new website that focuses on podcasts about innovation and entrepreneurship.  It is called iinnovate. They just posted a splendid interview with David Kelley, founder of both IDEO and the d.school (and a person who has made my life better in many ways, he is creative and so thoughtful that it still stuns me). They also have some great podcasts coming, including an interview with Mike Ramsay, the founding CEO of TiVO. Mike served as a coach in our class on Creating Infectious Action, and is also a delightful and creative guy.