Work Matters

Tag: Creativity

  • Launch Pad: A Stanford Class Where Students Started 11 Companies

    IMG_5857
    There are many entrepreneurship classes taught throughout the world, in some students talk about how what explains the success and failure of start-ups, and very often, such classes include a business plan competition, where groups pitch ideas for new companies.  These classes often do help people start companies, and at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, our faculty have taught classes that have helped future entrepreneurs in many ways.  But this last term, two Stanford d.school faculty members (and experienced entrepreneurs and bosses) Michael Dearing and Perry Klebahn ran a class called Launch Pad where students were just expected to talk about starting a company, the focus on was on launching the company during the 10 week class.  To be part of the class, student teams — and many more applied than were accepted — had to pitch their idea to Michael and Perry, and if they believed the idea was viable and the team was motivated enough, then they were accepted in the class to try to launch their company. 

    The class has been over for a few week and was one of the most successful things ever done at the d.school.  (To be clear, a lot of what do fails, and I have been involved in some less successful classes with Michael and Perry, but they like most people at the d.school have the attitude that if you are failing a fair amount, you aren't trying hard enough or taking enough risks).  Here is what the d.school website says about the class:

    From the first day, students pushed to both launch their own products,
    while using their experience and expertise to help classmates do the
    same. Throughout the quarter, teams constantly cycled through the design
    process, often making major changes to their initial idea in order to
    hone in on what their potential customers wanted, and what would be
    viable in the market    .
     
    The result? Eleven products or service were launched.
    Collectively, the teams had over $100,000 in revenue by the last day of
    class. Eight teams are now incorporated in four countries. Add in a bit
    of press from the New York Times and NBC, as well as a shout-out from
    Steve Jobs during his talk at the World Wide Developers conference, and
    you’ve got Launchpad: lifting design thinking teams into entrepreneurial
    orbit.

    Not bad for a 10 week class, Huh? As just two example, check -out this story about Pulse, which Tech Crunch described as a "must have" app for the iPad, it is a news reader that you can but at itunes for 3.99, and is selling quite well. The students who founded it are Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta.  They already have a company called Alphonso Labs, and two employees, and are the one's who got the shout out from Jobs — note that they just graduated from Stanford two weeks ago and are off to quite a start!  And check out this story on the d.school blog from as few weeks back, they were up to 50,000 downloads and were the #1 paid app at the iPad store.

    A much different, but also very promising, is a service called Worker Express that was founded by Pablo Fuentes and Joe Mellin, which helps unemployed construction workers find jobs.  Check out this story on on the local NBC affiliate and this one at Fast Company.  I think the picture above is especially interesting because it shows how the prototyping process worked during Launch Pad, essentially, in the d.school space, the founders of the 11 companies had a "beta" or practice trade-show where they set-up booths and pitched their ideas to a a host of diverse people on campus and to the classes coaches and teachers too, so they could develop and refine their messages.  The picture captures Pablo and Joe pitching their service.

    I am very proud of all the students in the class, of Michael and Perry, as well as d.school Fellow Corey Ford, who were part of the teaching team that made this all happen.  Great work.


  • Innovation Will Always Have Messy Parts: Wisdom from IDEO’s David Kelley and 3M’s Bill Coyne

    After all these years that I've studied and taught creativity and innovation, I am starting to believe that one element of the process is tougher for many people to accept than the rest — that it is a messy and uncertain process and efforts to make the early messy stages more rational, safer, and generally neat and clean comforting get in the way of the process. 

    I confess that I suffer from wanting to get rid of this messiness now and then too, and in fact, during the early days of the Stanford d.school, I went to our founder and inspiration David Kelley and asked him to make things less confusing and upsetting, and in the nicest possible way, David said he couldn't, that we were involved in messy process and if I couldn't deal with it, perhaps I should do something else.  I see the same instinct in how some university administrators and faculty react to the d.school, in that the love the innovation and creativity, but the physical messiness and lack of orderliness disturbs them.  Now, we have developed techniques to help people navigate the messiness more effectively (notably the Bootcamp Bootleg) but the process is still messy and uncertain.

    I was thinking of this because I was reading an article by Bill Coyne, who led R&D at 3M for over a decade. I met Bill about ten years ago, and he is very wise  And he understands both the messiness and misguided impulse to clean it up. I loved this quote:

    Finally, don't try to control or make safe the fumbling, panicky,
    glorious adventure of discovery. Occasionally, one sees articles that
    describe how to rationalize this process, how to take the fuzzy front
    end and give it a nice haircut. This is self-defeating. We should allow
    the fuzzy front end to be as unkempt and as fuzzy as we can. Long– term
    growth depends on innovation, and innovation isn't neat. We stumble on
    many of our best discoveries. If you want to follow the rapidly moving
    leading edge, you must learn to live on your feet. And you must be
    willing to make necessary, healthy stumble    s.

    Given all this, innovators still are often surrounded by people who want to give their process "a nice haircut."  How can this be stopped?  And perhaps I am being to closed-minded.  Do any of those haircuts ever work?

  • Assholes Who Turned Out to Be Right and Other Thoughts About Creative People

    In the fog of my first couple weeks after surgery, I missed some intriguing developments.  Thanks to you folks who read this blog, I got some great emails to help me stay in the loop.  As I was wrestling with my email inbox last night, I found a note from Patrick with a link to a fantastic — troubling, enlightening, and funny — story at cracked.com (which looks to me like a cross between Mad magazine and The Onion, but is more fact-based — they apparently have been around since 1958) on The Five Biggest Assholes Who Ever Turned Out to Be Right, which was posted on April 23rd. 

    I was taken by the post because the author, Dan Seitz, did such a great job of finding people who were annoying, nasty, stubborn, mean-spirited, and otherwise socially inept or personally despicable, but  had championed unpopular but good ideas (or in some cases, ideas that were just different from the prevailing wisdom but they were dismissed because the ideas were advocated by an alleged asshole).  I urge you to read this quite detailed story, where you can learn about the exploits, quirks, and ideas of alleged assholes including baseball player Jose Canseco (he claimed that many stars, including himself, were using steriods, which turned out to be true), scientist  Peter Duesberg (very unpopular because he claimed that AIDS is not caused by HIV, which made him so unpopular that his colleagues and others have — until recently — been ignoring his potentially breakthrough work on the causes of cancer), Harry Markopolos (who admits that he combines the worst characteristics of a math nerd and frat boy — but spent 9 years pressing his accusations that Bernie Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme).  

    My favorite asshole who was right, however, is Fritz astronomer.  See this description from the American Museum of Natural History for more details.   But as Seitz tells us:

     

    21945 To give you an idea of how charming Fritz Zwicky was, when he was
    working at Aerojet, a bunch of customers from the military, including
    two admirals, showed up for an appointment to check on his progress.
    Zwicky met them at the gate demanding that they     leave
    because they weren't scientists and were therefore absolutely
    unqualified to look at the stuff they were, um, buying. Outside of work,
    his solution to winning arguments was to try and punch people, which
    was mostly found adorable because he was a little old man who could be
    pummeled easily. It became less adorable when he said things like "I myself can think of a
    dozen ways to annihilate all living beings in one hour," and his
    scientific partner was afraid Zwicky was out to kill him.

    BUT he was right in serious ways, even though it took decades  for his colleagues to find that out because they thought these were just wacky ideas from "Crazy Fritz" (pictured to the left).  As Seitz tells it:

    Needless to say, the whole "total lack of people skills" thing made
    him so popular and beloved he got the nickname "Crazy Fritz." So it was
    easy to ignore Zwicky while he was off doing crazy things like inventing
    most of modern astronomy.
    The term "supernova"? He invented it.

    Plus:

    He also developed the theory that allows us to know how old the
    universe is. Dark matter? He was among the first to theorize about it.
    Gravitational lensing, i.e. using stars to look at other stars? He laid
    out the theory 40 years before it was actually proved correct. Zwicky was so ahead of his time, and so annoying, that it was
    basically routine in the 70s to say "Yeah, Fritz Zwicky thought of this
    40 years ago but nobody took him seriously because he was a crazy
    douche    ."

    Stories like these, especially the one about Fritz, are important to remember because — although people who are stubborn, trample over everyone else, are unable or unwilling to use the most basic social graces, and treat others like dirt clearly deserve to be called assholes and may not be worth the trouble no matter how brilliant they are — they are less burdened than most of us by pressures to think like everyone else. They may be  in a better position, as the first scientist to isolate Vitamin C — Albert Szent-Gyorgi — famously suggested (I am paraphrasing),  "To look at the same thing as everyone else, but to think of and see something different."  

    I wrote a lot about people with this talent in Weird Ideas That Work, especially in the chapter on "slow learners."  I would also add, however, that there are many people who think for themselves and stubbornly stick to unpopular ideas regardless of social pressures and prevailing wisdom, but aren't assholes.  A good example was Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, who did irritate people by pushing ideas they disagreed with, but was known as usually charming and well-loved.  He won a  Nobel Prize on Physics and many experts believe he deserved one, possibly two, others (e.g., Feynman solved a problem that another researcher won another Nobel for years later — but the paper with the solution just sat in his drawer for many years because he never got around to sending the paper to an academic journal).

    He also "went rogue" as member of the Rogers Commission that investigated the explosion of the Challenger Space Shuttle — and despite pressures to stop from the head of it — did his own interviews with NASA scientists and engineers that led him to believe that the explosion was caused by O-rings that failed under cold temperatures.   If you have never seen it, his demonstration to congress (which some members of the commission tried to stop) that when an O-ring was put in beaker of cold water, it became brittle and more likely to break, was the pivotal moment in the investigation — it is a beautiful example of breaking down a problem to its esssence. Feynman's role on the Rogers Commission is instructive because, although he fought with the head of the commission William Rogers about the independent action he took and was famously called "a real pain" by Rogers, he wasn't doing it to be an asshole. He was doing to get to the truth.  Rogers probably thought he was an asshole, which reminds me that it is label that people should hesitate to use and accept as true, because it is often applied simply to people who disagree with us, are more successful than us, or who simply act or think differently than than us. 

    If you are in a group or organization where people who simply look, think, or act differently than everyone else are labeled as assholes, and the best you can be is a perfect imitation of everyone else around you, well, the odds are no one is thinking very much and there isn't much original thinking going on.

    In short, although being oblivious or indifferent (or naive, by the way) to what others thing can help people see and develop new ideas (and is a hallmark of assholes at times), I think it is important to keep in mind that not all original thinkers are assholes (the trick is to see things differently and not to cave in when people don't like your "different ideas").  I should also point out that not all assholes are original thinkers.  There are plenty of mean-spirited jerks out there who mindlessly follow the crowd and are incapable of original thinking.  

    P.S. Also note that the post at Cracked reminds us of another cost that assholes inflict on themselves and others — if you are branded as an asshole, people are more likely to reject your ideas, even if they are right.  The negative reactions they have to YOU color their reactions to your ideas.  One solution, by the way, is if you are an asshole with good ideas, you might work with a more socially adept partner who is more skilled at selling your ideas.

  • The Creative Process Gone Wrong

    One of my students, Rob, just sent me a link to this video on how the design of the stop sign is ruined by a bad creative process — unfortunately, this parody resembles the process in far too many organizations and teams that try to do creative work in real organizations.  It is funny but disturbing.  He
    saw this in Tina
    Seelig's     class, who teaches a fantastic class on the creative
    process.  

    This video brought to mind three things:

    1. One of the main sicknesses you see in this video is a failure to kill ideas. Most of the ideas are, on their own, sort of logical. But when you mash them all together, the complexity ruins the experience for the users and the designers end up doing many things, but none very well.  See this post about Steve Jobs on the importance of killing good ideas for more on this crucial point. 

    2. Th process in the video, where a good idea isn't shown to users or customers, but each internal voice adds more and more, and forgets the big picture in the process, also reminds me of the stage gate process at its worst, where it each stage, the product or service is made worse as it travels along. 

    3. Finally, if you want a great companion innovation video, check out Gus Bitdinger's amazing song "Back to Orbit," which he wrote and performs. I wrote a bit more about it here.  It was Gus's final project for an innovation class that Michael Dearing and I taught a few years back, and he does an amazing job of summarizing the key points of my favorite creativity book, Orbiting the Giant Hairball.   It sort of addresses both the problems in the stop sign video and the solutions — and in general is a delight and very instructive on the creative process. 

    This all raises a broader question: What are the most important things a boss can do to speed and improve the creative process.  Certainly, talking to customers and users to identify their needs and test your ideas is standard and increasingly, so is the advice that you've got to kill a lot of good ideas, not just bad ones.  I have also always been enamored by the power of a fast and civilized fight, and touch on a lot of other related topics in Weird Ideas That Work.  Also, don't miss Diego's 17 Innovation Principles at Metacool;I especially like #17: It's not the years, it's the mileage. But I also know that there are some essential elements being left out here… what would you add?

  • David Kelley Nails It Again: “The d.school teaches creative confidence.”

    Last Friday, we had an opening gala for the new building (actually it is a massively reconstructed old building) that houses the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford — or as everyone calls it, the d.school.  In fact, if you can take a video tour of the new building.  We were swimming in university officials of all kinds, although since it was the d.school, there were more students and former students than anything else.   Hasso gave a lovely and quite funny speech and the good feelings ran high all afternoon.

    Many interesting things were said that afternoon. Yet, as is pretty much always the case, our founder and inspiration David Kelley (who also was the co-founder, first CEO and driving force behind IDEO) made the most striking observations.  David commented that, yes, we teach many elements the design thinking process to our students (in fact, many are cataloged in this amazing and free document called "The Bootcamp Bootleg," which I think is better than any book on how to practice design thinking than you can buy). He argued however, that the most important contribution that the d.school makes to Stanford students and the people we teach from outside the university too (from elementary school kids, to Girl Scouts, to doctors, to executives) is creative confidence.  David went on to explain that the main tests used to decide who gets into Stanford and who does not, as well as the bulk of the training in the technical aspects of engineering, math, and the sciences, are constructed to that there is a right answer to the question and it is the student's job to find that answer and report it back to the teacher.

    Certainly, such definitive technical knowledge is crucial.  I want engineers who can calculate the right answers so that bridges don't fall down and airplanes don't crash.  As valuable as it is, however, such training — with its focus on individual achievement under conditions under which the right answers are already known — means that a lot of the people who come to the d.school for classes lack both the skills and the confidence to work on messy problems where the faculty don't know the answer (this is very disconcerting to some of our students) and the only hope is to keep pushing forward, observing the world and the people in it, identifying unmet needs, brainstorming solutions, and trying to develop prototypes that work — and failing forward through the disconcerting process.

    The thing I liked most about about David's emphasis on "creative confidence" is that I think he nailed the single most important thing that the d.school does when we are successful.  Yes, the assignments we give people and methods we teach them help on the journey, but as David suggested, the result of spending decades in educational system (this is true of the U.S. and other countries) where those anointed as the best students rapidly uncover the one and only tried and proven true answer (look at the blend of SAT scores and grades used by most colleges for admission decisions, at least 90% of that entails uncovering known right answers) is that some of the "smartest" students freak-out the most when faced with messy and unstructured problems.

    The journeys that we take students of all ages on just about always entail helping people confront and overcome their discomfort with trying to solve unstructured problems (that the faculty have not already solved — and in most cases — don't know how to solve).  When the d.school process works right, that confidence means that, even when people aren't sure what methods to use, they have the energy and will to keep pushing forward, to be undaunted when ideas don't work, to keep trying new ideas, and — as happens — even when the deadline for the project comes and they do not have a decent solution, to believe that if they just had another few days, they would have come up with a great solution.   

    So, although many words were said about what the d.school does at our opening ceremony and many more will be said in the future.  David has, as always, come-up with the best compact summary of what we strive to do: Teach Creative Confidence. 

    P.S. A related argument was made by psychologist Robert Sternberg, who argued that creativity can't happen unless people decide to pursue it. See this post.  But I think David's point is even more crucial, because if people decide to pursue, but lack confidence they can succeed, the are likely to suffer and unlikely to succeed.

  • Why Newcomers Often See Things More Clearly Than Old Hands

    The Wall Street Journal had a fascinating story this morning about about "Fabulous Fab" Tourre, the young Goldman Sachs banker who is at the center of their latest public relations nightmare.  Writer Dennis Berman argues that Fab may be A Hero in Villain's Garb because, if you look at the emails he sent to friends, he is often questioning his "place in an-ever absurd realm of CDs, CDOs, and CDO-squareds."  Berman notes that Tourre "expresses deep doubts about some of the very things that got Wall Street in such a mess."  The inspired part of Berman's analysis is that, although Goldman called the Fab's emails "immature and embarrassing to the firm,"  he suggests that we consider that the Fab's:

    "[D]oubts and concerns reflect the virtues of newcomers in organizations — when they first arrive, they can see the virtues, flaws, and quirks of an organizational culture.  But as they become more deeply socialized, they begin to accept it all as "normal," and do not question — or even notice –what they are doing or why the are doing it."  

    Building on Berman's lovely point, the young and under-socialized are often those who see the world for what it is, and speak up about it.  Of course, it is a child who speaks the truth in the "The Emperor's New Clothes," the classic the tale by 'Hans Christian Andersen about two
    weavers who promise an Emperor a new suit of clothes invisible to those
    unfit for their positions or incompetent.  When the Emperor parades before his subjects in his new clothes, a child
    cries out, "But he isn't wearing anything at all!"

    The Goldman case aside (I am not ready to call The Fab a hero), there is a crucial lesson here for every boss and every organization.  Awareness — and innovation too– depend on listening to the young and naive, to those who are not yet brainwashed and unable to see what is odd, wrong, and what might be done differently.   As I argued in Weird Ideas That Work, if you are an expert, seek and listen to novices, as their fresh eyes can provide insights that you are unable to see.  Or as Diego puts it over at Metacool, seeing old things in new ways, depends on finding ways to adopt "the beginners mind" or "the mind of a child."  In some organization's I have worked with, senior executives accomplish this with "reverse mentoring" programs, where they are assigned to listen to and be coached by newcomers.  This is an effective strategy if the veterans actually make it safe for the rookies to speak their minds.

    Along these lines, one of my favorite stories (as told by Firefox's Asa Dotzler) was when Netscape hired a 15 year-old kid named Blake Ross as a summer intern. Blake apparently stood-up at a company meeting and explained why the website had become so crappy and was doomed to fail.  This is the same 15 year-old kid who had been working for free on the Netscape open source project that eventually led to the development of the Firefox browser — and had spent hundreds of hours stripping-out lousy Netscape code, so he knew what he was talking about. And his prediction about the demise of Netscape was on target. 

  • “From Chaos Comes Creativity, from Order Comes Profit”

    There is saying, kind of a crude little formula, I have been using for years when I write and give talks on what it takes to build a culture where people innovate routinely (which I think I stole from Charles O'Reilly at the Stanford Business School):

    Creativity + implementation = innovation

    I have always found it a useful oversimplification of the two big things that have to happen in order to innovate, to cash in on new ideas.  It is also related to one of the main ideas in Weird Ideas That Work, that creativity is about increasing the amount of variation and all around messiness and routine work is about driving out variance and driving in order and predictability.  

    John Edson In this spirit, one of
    the student groups in my class on Organizational Behavior: An Evidence-Based
    Approach, did a fantastic case study of the culture of innovation at Lunar Design. The members were Ioannis Alivizatos, Meeta Arora, Stephen Streeter, and Ben
    Merrick.  They heard the quote in the
    title of this post from John Edson (pictured to the left), Lunar product design firm that has designed many
    familiar products including the HP Touchsmart, the Oral B CrossAction
    toothbrush, and the Modu phone.  I think that "“From Chaos Comes Creativity, from Order Comes Profit” conveys a similar message to the one I borrowed from Charles – that the
    messiness and failure required to generate a new idea needs to be shut-off as
    you move into the implementation phase, where more control and order are
    required.  Knowing how and when to make
    that shift is tough, although the best firms and bosses make it happen
    routinely.  For example, Intel’s motto “disagree
    and then commit” reflects this spirit – you fight during the creative part, but
    join arms to make the idea work during the implementation part, even if you
    think the decision was wrong.

    P.S. And following my last post on failure, I also liked how a key element of their culture was that, when people made mistakes, they framed it as "Paying for education."