I finally caught up with a few of my podcast subscriptions this weekend. One that got me thinking was from the University of Stanford - the "Entrepreneurship thought leadership" lecture series. I have been following it for several weeks; each lecture is with another entrepreneur and, it being Stanford, they have had an impressive collection of names, but the last week's with Steve Case (ex-CEO of AOL) was particularly interesting.
He spent most of his time talking about his "glory years" (though of course he did not formulate it quite like this) and came across as an authentic and reflective guy, but I particularly liked the structure of his overall talk - his 3-Ps for entrepreneurship: People, Passion and Perseverance.
Working for a fairly large organisation, I was pleased that he tipped his hat to the entrepreneurial spirit that can be achieved in the best big companies and reducing it to passion and persevance with the right people is a nice simple formula.
Listen in if you get a chance.
The title of this entry is "The" 3-Ps (with the "The" in inverted commas) because a short search of the web reveals that there appear to be dozens of 3-Ps (of success, sales, business etc. - most often they seem to be People, Process, Product...)
Case's flavour seems more immediate and actionable than most, and it also mirrors my own thinking on hard work, coaching and enthusiasm in the workplace. Perhaps this makes me biased but I am going to stick with Case on this ;-).
Sunday 28 March 2010
Saturday 20 March 2010
Design thinking & strategy - a book review
As threatened in an earlier post, this entry is another book review.
"Design thinking; integrating innovation, customer experience and brand value", edited by Thomas Lockwood (of course, available via amazon), brings together a bunch of big names in design management and provides a nicely balanced overview of current ideas about the role of design in innovation, service delivery, but in particular in developing brands.
I especially liked the contributions by Kevin Clark & Ron Smith from IBM Corporate Markting (on the value of leveraging design professionals and skills to provide insights in all aspects of the business), Erik Abbing & Christa van Gessel (who provide a 4-step method for brand-driven innovation) and Mark Jones & Fran Samalionis from IDEO (who have put together a nice framework to design new service innvoations).
Despite the many interesting essays, I was underwhelmed by the book as a whole. I guess it is my nature (or background, or both), but I was looking for a more complete answer, showing how design thinking can be applied / integrated into the business - beyond the straightforward application of ideation and visualisation techniques to the product and brand development process.
Using design thinking (and at the very least design techniques) combined with more analytical/structured methods in the business strategy space to bring the "outside-in approach" into an organisation and to give those ideas traction feels like an idea on the brink of maturity - in a couple of years this is going to be entirely mainstream.
Nevertheless, if this book was anything to go on, there is a lot of work to be done before then. The tools need to mature to be applied in the broader business strategy arena (ie. outside of the product development space where they are most at home). It feels like progress is being made quickly (with new blogs and companies popping up daily) - it is a fun time to dig into this space!
Given my own more analytical background, I personally find it rather frustrating trying to create rather than deduce, but also all the more rewarding when it pays off - I hope to be posting later this year on the topic of design thinking in the context of business architecture as my ideas mature.
As such any help that can be found in books like this on methods and approaches are thoroughly welcome!
"Design thinking; integrating innovation, customer experience and brand value", edited by Thomas Lockwood (of course, available via amazon), brings together a bunch of big names in design management and provides a nicely balanced overview of current ideas about the role of design in innovation, service delivery, but in particular in developing brands.
I especially liked the contributions by Kevin Clark & Ron Smith from IBM Corporate Markting (on the value of leveraging design professionals and skills to provide insights in all aspects of the business), Erik Abbing & Christa van Gessel (who provide a 4-step method for brand-driven innovation) and Mark Jones & Fran Samalionis from IDEO (who have put together a nice framework to design new service innvoations).
Despite the many interesting essays, I was underwhelmed by the book as a whole. I guess it is my nature (or background, or both), but I was looking for a more complete answer, showing how design thinking can be applied / integrated into the business - beyond the straightforward application of ideation and visualisation techniques to the product and brand development process.
Using design thinking (and at the very least design techniques) combined with more analytical/structured methods in the business strategy space to bring the "outside-in approach" into an organisation and to give those ideas traction feels like an idea on the brink of maturity - in a couple of years this is going to be entirely mainstream.
Nevertheless, if this book was anything to go on, there is a lot of work to be done before then. The tools need to mature to be applied in the broader business strategy arena (ie. outside of the product development space where they are most at home). It feels like progress is being made quickly (with new blogs and companies popping up daily) - it is a fun time to dig into this space!
Given my own more analytical background, I personally find it rather frustrating trying to create rather than deduce, but also all the more rewarding when it pays off - I hope to be posting later this year on the topic of design thinking in the context of business architecture as my ideas mature.
As such any help that can be found in books like this on methods and approaches are thoroughly welcome!
Thursday 18 March 2010
"Save the online damsel, save the world!"
Having recently posted a presentation from the somewhat frightening Jane McGonigal (games designer and director at the Institue for the Future), I have been on the lookout for more from her that perhaps backs up her claims regarding the user experience of reality.
I am very pleased to be able to write that her voice-over on the presentation (well, at least on a very similar presentation that she gave at TED recently - see below), is much more positive and pretty convincing - the basic message is as follows; millions and millions of people are spending serious amounts of time building "virtuoso" skills (her word not mine) in these online games and they can be harnessed to achieve breakthroughs in the "real world" (ie. the non-digital part of the world). She goes on to give some nice examples of games adjusting behaviours in the real world.
At the very least, the presentation was uplifting (and made me think back to the notion of passionate engagement that I posted on recently).
I am intuitively enthusiastic about her belief in the online generation, the value of "MMORPGs" in developing real skills and am absolutely convinced in her assertion on human need for meaningful exertion (ie. for a valuable cause, for an "epic" in her words), rather than "just" work.
On her website she sums it up nicely: "What the world needs now is an epic win." - So finally my younger brothers have all the justification that they need to get back online and start gaming.
Thanks Dr McGonigal!
Here is the post from TED:
I am very pleased to be able to write that her voice-over on the presentation (well, at least on a very similar presentation that she gave at TED recently - see below), is much more positive and pretty convincing - the basic message is as follows; millions and millions of people are spending serious amounts of time building "virtuoso" skills (her word not mine) in these online games and they can be harnessed to achieve breakthroughs in the "real world" (ie. the non-digital part of the world). She goes on to give some nice examples of games adjusting behaviours in the real world.
At the very least, the presentation was uplifting (and made me think back to the notion of passionate engagement that I posted on recently).
I am intuitively enthusiastic about her belief in the online generation, the value of "MMORPGs" in developing real skills and am absolutely convinced in her assertion on human need for meaningful exertion (ie. for a valuable cause, for an "epic" in her words), rather than "just" work.
On her website she sums it up nicely: "What the world needs now is an epic win." - So finally my younger brothers have all the justification that they need to get back online and start gaming.
Thanks Dr McGonigal!
Here is the post from TED:
Wednesday 17 March 2010
BA Body of Knowledge 2.0 available online for free
OK, I admit it; I am a little miffed that the IIBA has released the latest version of the BABOK (see also previous entry) for free at Google Books, but it is definitely a good reference.
Beyond the convenience of the whole online book experience, I like the fact that book comes with a neat little web-cloud that gives you an immediate overview of the book. Once this is expanded to work across all the books and into a snazzy visual navigation widget I will be more than happy ;-).
Beyond the convenience of the whole online book experience, I like the fact that book comes with a neat little web-cloud that gives you an immediate overview of the book. Once this is expanded to work across all the books and into a snazzy visual navigation widget I will be more than happy ;-).
Sunday 7 March 2010
Microsoft is not all bad
As much as I hate to admit it, the guys at Microsoft really do some pretty cool stuff. A couple that have caught my eye recently:
Xbox - project Natal
This is going to be transformational like the Wii
Pivot from Live Labs
This is the kind of data visualisation tool that I love - you can just feel what this is going to mean for managing and traversing large chunks of data and information (think Jonathon Harris' universe - see also previous entry). It build on the wonderful seadragon technology (not that I really understand what that is, but it allows you to zoom in and out of pictures really quickly and I like that - see also this link for great examples).
Bill and Ballmer are not all bad.
Xbox - project Natal
This is going to be transformational like the Wii
Pivot from Live Labs
This is the kind of data visualisation tool that I love - you can just feel what this is going to mean for managing and traversing large chunks of data and information (think Jonathon Harris' universe - see also previous entry). It build on the wonderful seadragon technology (not that I really understand what that is, but it allows you to zoom in and out of pictures really quickly and I like that - see also this link for great examples).
Bill and Ballmer are not all bad.
Tuesday 2 March 2010
Propaganda meets visual thinking
I was just catching up on the latest from adaptive path and stumbled across an interesting if slightly depressing blog entry on the bush vs obama administrations. Nice simple graphics, entirely inappropriate music for the context.. propaganda meets visual thinking...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)