Comments (0)

By rphillippi, July 29, 2005 12:22 pm

This is a lot one can do with typography… express emotion… make a statement… with only a word or even a letter… one can say anything. Typography is visual imagery.

Having never taken a typography class this is fun for me!

Comments (0)

By rphillippi, July 28, 2005 7:04 am

If ever in doubt, go underground.

Comments (0)

By rphillippi, July 27, 2005 11:52 am

Gartner’s Mark McDonald says its 2005 survey shows corporate tech chiefs are gaining influence and their departments can play bigger roles [LINK]

There’s an old joke that CIO (chief information officer) really stands for Career Is Over. Well, that can’t be the case if you accept the Watergate-era advice from Deep Throat and follow the money. According to consultancy Gartner’s 2005 survey of 1,400 CIOs, two-thirds of their companies are actually raising their information technology budgets faster than their operating budgets for the first time in years.

“It’s not so much that they’re expecting miracles [from technology] as much as they’re expecting serious contribution and significant results,” says Mark McDonald, Gartner’s head of executive-programs research. “We see companies that are looking to grow fast coming back to recognizing that there’s an investment in technology that they need to make.”

CIOs that turn in solid results get asked to join CEOs in mapping out corporate strategy and entrusted to manage projects outside of IT, says McDonald, who’s in charge of administering Gartner’s annual survey.

McDonald, who prior to joining Gartner was a partner at management consultancy Accenture, met recently with BusinessWeek Online reporter Olga Kharif to talk about how CEOs can use information technology to their best advantage and how they should evaluate the performance of their CIOs and IT departments. Following are the edited excerpts of the interview. Continue reading ““The Door Is Unlocked” for CIOs” »

Comments (0)

By rphillippi, July 26, 2005 5:38 pm

Business Week (special report – July ‘05) [LINK]

That’s due to “near-monopolists” in many areas, says futurist Mark Anderson, whose newsletter is read by the likes of Gates and Dell

Mark Anderson just might be one of the most influential technology futurists around. His weekly newsletter, Strategic News Service (SNS), is widely read by a who’s who of investors and tech visionaries.

“Overall, your newsletter is good, which is why I ordered it,” reads one reader comment on Anderson’s Web site. Scant praise? Not when it’s coming from Microsoft (MSFT ) Chairman Bill Gates, an avid reader. Another fan is Dell (DELL ) founder Michael Dell. At least once a week Anderson says he gets an e-mail from Dell seeking his counsel. “He always wants to know what’s wrong with what he is doing,” says Anderson.
Who is Mark Anderson, and why are some of the biggest names in tech reading his newsletter? Anderson, 53, founded two software companies before becoming a consultant for computing and telecom clients, such as Dell and Microsoft. Most of his efforts nowadays focus on his “Future in Review” conferences, designed to showcase the hottest new technology ideas. Past conferences have attracted the heads of Hewlett-Packard Labs (HPQ ) and Microsoft Research.
When Anderson began publishing SNS in 1989, his newsletter was a tech pioneer. It was one of the first subscription-based newsletters on the Internet. An issue of the newsletter, which has a standard subscription price of $595 annually and can run between 15 and 50 pages, touches on everything from an analysis of a particular company’s earnings to Anderson’s thoughts on worldwide broadband penetration.
So what does Anderson see in his crystal ball currently? He says the tech industry is battling “a dearth of innovation,” due partly to near-monopolies that have formed within various tech sectors, from chips to PC software. But don’t fret. He says this status quo could be short-lived thanks to the rise of Linux.

His other major prediction: If companies would only use their computers more efficiently, say linking them in networks called grids, they might solve a myriad of problems — even helping to find a cure for cancer. Anderson talked with BusinessWeek Online reporter Olga Kharif on July 20. Edited excerpts of the interview follow:

Q: Are companies making good use of technologies they already have?
A: They’re not. Case in point: grids. A grid is where you manage all your PCs together as one computing resource. What you get is a supercomputer made up of individual computers. Companies today have nearly all the assets to make grids work. And CEOs are always concerned with return on assets. But if you’re not using grids, then you’re wasting computer cycles that are worth a lot of money.
Most businesses have not yet asked deep questions about their business, they still view computers as bean-counting machines. But [when that changes], once you have the power of a supercomputer, you could ask questions such as: Are there patterns in my customers’ relationship to me of which I’m unaware? Are there pricing patterns of which I’m unaware?
I think that my friend Jeff Immelt, [CEO of General Electric (GE )], who is making a point of driving technology into every one of his products, is not making use of the most obvious technology. What would be the change to GE if, instead of turning the lights off at night on their PCs, that company turned them into a giant, worldwide supercomputer? It could solve many of their problems.

Q: Do you think that, perhaps, companies aren’t implementing grids and other new technologies because they’ve become disappointed with the return on their technology investments?
A: There was a lot of hype about Y2K, and it’s true that many people felt betrayed. It’s also true that people reduced spending as the economy fell apart. But they got over that back in 2002. Now, they’re more interested in technologies that can perform specific tasks, reduce expenses, and have ties into revenue growth.

Q: Isn’t it difficult to find a direct correlation between IT and a company’s revenue growth, though?
A: This is brand-new stuff. There are very few companies that are good at this right now. But let’s, again, look at the grid example. Today, your customers might be in one place. Tomorrow, they might be somewhere else. And you need to be able to watch for patterns to know this is happening.
Just think about this: If people in retail as well as in other industries could effectively match day-by-day weather with product-sales results, they’d find lots of correlations. And that might be very useful. Or you might be able to find that people who buy toilet paper also buy toothpaste, and you’d put them on the same aisle. There are lots of patterns that grids can unearth for you.

Q: What are some other emerging technologies that companies need to be aware of to stay competitive?
A: If you look at communications, the reason that BlackBerry [mobile e-mail] devices are so successful is: It turned out we needed to improve communications when people travel. Next, what’s going to happen is improved communications not just between people, but also between people and machines.
Radio Frequency Identification [RFID, which are electronic tags used to track goods within the supply chain], and RFID-related technologies have opened a huge new area. All the people who run warehouses are going to have real-time information about what’s inside, which they don’t actually have today.
The definition of what a warehouse is is already changing. Volkswagen and Dell might store their products in the same warehouse, but where one warehouse ends and the other begins is determined by a dividing line on the floor. So getting to know where a product is becomes very important. Wal-Mart (WMT ) has gotten it, but most others have not. In the next five years, we’ll see an absolutely massive change in our ability to communicate with devices.

Q: We’ve gone through massive technology changes over the past decade, what with the spread of PCs and the Internet. Where does innovation happen now?
A: We tend to see it at the intersection between different markets. Places that are very interesting to me right now are where one industry overlaps with another, such as PCs, RFID, and grids. PCs, on their own, aren’t very interesting. RFID tags, on their own, aren’t, either. But how these technologies work together — [for instance, how grids can derive patterns from information gathered by RFID tags] — that’s really interesting.

Q: Which other industries are at this intersection?
A: The most exciting answer is computing and biology. As these two worlds start talking to each other, as we use computers to understand more about biology — like how the cell works — we can solve many problems, such as [find a] cure for cancer.

Q: Stem cells could, potentially, cure a wide array of disorders. Yet, there’s been a slowdown in stem-cell research in the U.S. because of ethics concerns. Is the U.S. falling behind other countries in research in this and other areas?
A: I think this is a deep mistake to allow religion to enter conversation about science. I do believe we need to look at ethics. But we certainly need to be careful not to hobble ourselves through our own biases and prejudices as we’ve done with stem cells. Stem cells offer so much promise, we will look like jerks [for not supporting research in this area].

Q: So many companies are moving their R&D overseas.
A: You bet. You know who’s gotten our stem-cell program? China. We’re just saying: “Here’s the most promising research in the world, and we’re not going to do it. Go ahead.” And [countries like] China are going as fast as they can, as they should.

Q: In the future, will companies do all their R&D and manufacturing in China? If so, what kind of an impact will that have on the U.S.?
A: There’s a big story in the question of how much outsourcing is there? A new study recently came up with a number that was five times the Dept. of Labor’s [number of jobs outsourced]. They’ve done the study by reading the newspapers every day about how so and so just announced a new outsourcing project affecting 30,000 people. They just added up the numbers.
The problem is one of pay. You can get a $30,000-a-year PhD in India, instead of a $140,000-a-year PhD here. We’ve got to solve this problem. Some people talk about free trade. But what if it turns out that one country — say, China — became the low-cost producer of all goods, or all goods and services? What would the implications be in terms of the human capital in the U.S.? Would it destroy human capital? At what point do you stop being an economy?

Q: Some futurists say the U.S. will become an economy of ideas, which will be turned into products elsewhere. Do you buy that?
A: I’m not buying any of it, I think that’s [bullsh--]. The people who’ll be the greatest innovators will live in an office above the shop floor. We’re not going to have all these storytellers.

Q: Do you see any new technologies that have been overhyped?
A: Right now, I see a dearth of innovation. The various innovations that I’ve mentioned are happening at the fringes.
One reason is, [as is the case with Wal-Mart suppliers,] companies’ margins are getting sucked up. Another reason is there are lots of dominant players — near-monopolists. There, the lack of innovation is natural. Areas that are more competitive are the areas of innovation.

Q: Do you expect this situation to change any time soon?
A: A lot of competition will arise. We haven’t yet seen an offering from the Linux crowd in terms of device drivers, [which help a particular device interact with an operating system,] or ease of installation. But if those two problems are fixed, I think you’ll see real competition to Windows.

Comments (0)

By rphillippi, July 26, 2005 1:05 pm

In order to do a better job of developing, communicating, and pursuing a strategy, the head of Ideo says, you need to learn to think like a designer. Here’s his five-point plan for how to make the leap. [LINK]

It’s remarkable how often business strategy, the purpose of which is to direct action toward a desired outcome, leads to just the opposite: stasis and confusion. Strategy should bring clarity to an organization; it should be a signpost for showing people where you, as their leader, are taking them — and what they need to do to get there. But the tools executives traditionally use to communicate strategy — spreadsheets and PowerPoint decks — are woefully inadequate for the task. You have to be a supremely engaging storyteller if you rely only on words, and there aren’t enough of those people out there. What’s more, words are highly open to interpretation — words mean different things to different people, especially when they’re sitting in different parts of the organization. The result: In an effort to be relevant to a large, complicated company, strategy often gets mired in abstractions.

People need to have a visceral understanding — an image in their minds — of why you’ve chosen a certain strategy and what you’re attempting to create with it. Design is ideally suited to this endeavor. It can’t help but create tangible, real outcomes.

Because it’s pictorial, design describes the world in a way that’s not open to many interpretations. Designers, by making a film, scenario, or prototype, can help people emotionally experience the thing that the strategy seeks to describe. If, say, Motorola unveils a plan to create products that have never existed before, everyone in the organization will have a different idea of what that means. But if Motorola creates a video so people can see those products, or makes prototypes so people can touch them, everyone has the same view.

Unfortunately, many people continue to think of design in very narrow terms. Industrial products and graphics are outcomes of the design process, but they do not begin to describe the boundaries of design’s playing field. Software is engineered, but it is also designed — someone must come up with the concept of what it is going to do. Logistics systems, the Internet, organizations, and yes, even strategy — all of these are tangible outcomes of design thinking. In fact, many people in many organizations are engaged in design thinking without being aware of it. The result is that we don’t focus very much on making it better.

If you dig into business history, you see that the same thing occurred with the quality movement. As business strategist Gary Hamel has pointed out, there was a time when people didn’t know what quality manufacturing was and therefore didn’t think about it. Nevertheless, they were engaged with quality — they created products of good or bad durability and reliability. Then thinkers such as W. Edwards Deming deconstructed quality — they figured out what it was and how to improve it. As soon as people became conscious of it, manufactured goods improved dramatically.

The same thing needs to happen with design. Organizations need to take design thinking seriously. We need to spend more time making people conscious of design thinking — not because design is wondrous or magical, but simply because by focusing on it, we’ll make it better. And that’s an imperative for any business, because design thinking is indisputably a catalyst for innovation productivity. That is, it can increase the rate at which you generate good ideas and bring them to market. Where you innovate, how you innovate, and what you innovate are design problems. When you bring design thinking into that strategic discussion, you join a powerful tool with the purpose of the entire endeavor, which is to grow. Here is Ideo’s five-point model for strategizing by design.

Hit the Streets

Any real-world strategy starts with having fresh, original insights about your market and your customers. Those insights come only when you observe directly what’s happening in your market. As Jane Fulton Suri, who directs our human-factors group, notes in her book Thoughtless Acts? (Chronicle Books, 2005), “Directly witnessing and experiencing aspects of behavior in the real world is a proven way of inspiring and informing [new] ideas. The insights that emerge from careful observation of people’s behavior . . . uncover all kinds of opportunities that were not previously evident.”

Very often, you can build an entire strategy based on the experiences your customers go through in their interactions with your organization. Service brands have a horrible habit of focusing on the one interaction where they think they make money. If you’re running an airline, there’s an awful temptation to focus all of your attention on what it’s like to fly a particular route on a particular aircraft. In fact, you can track backward and forward a whole series of interactions that consumers have with you that are very relevant. If you start to map out that entire journey, you begin to understand how you might innovate to create a much more robust customer experience.

Recruit T-Shaped People

Regardless of whether your goal is to innovate around a product, service, or business opportunity, you get good insights by having an observant and empathetic view of the world. You can’t just stand in your own shoes; you’ve got to be able to stand in the shoes of others. Empathy allows you to have original insights about the world. It also enables you to build better teams.
“We look for people who are so inquisitive about the world that they’re willing to try to do what you do.”

We look for people who are so inquisitive about the world that they’re willing to try to do what you do. We call them “T-shaped people.” They have a principal skill that describes the vertical leg of the T — they’re mechanical engineers or industrial designers. But they are so empathetic that they can branch out into other skills, such as anthropology, and do them as well. They are able to explore insights from many different perspectives and recognize patterns of behavior that point to a universal human need. That’s what you’re after at this point — patterns that yield ideas.

These teams operate in a highly experiential manner. You don’t put them in bland conference rooms and ask them to generate great ideas. You send them out into the world, and they return with many artifacts — notes, photos, maybe even recordings of what they’ve seen and heard. The walls of their project rooms are soon plastered with imagery, diagrams, flow charts, and other ephemera. The entire team is engaged in collective idea-making: They explore observations very quickly and build on one another’s insights. In this way, they generate richer, stronger ideas that are hardwired to the marketplace, because all of their observations come directly from the real world.

Build to Think
“Design thinking is inherently a prototyping process. Once you spot a promising idea, you build it. In a sense, we build to think.”

Design thinking is inherently a prototyping process. Once you spot a promising idea, you build it. The prototype is typically a drawing, model, or film that describes a product, system, or service. We build these models very quickly; they’re rough, ready, and not at all elegant, but they work. The goal isn’t to create a close approximation of the finished product or process; the goal is to elicit feedback that helps us work through the problem we’re trying to solve. In a sense, we build to think.

When you rapidly prototype, you’re actually beginning to build the strategy itself. And you’re doing so very early in the innovation cycle. This enables you to unlock one of your organization’s most valuable assets: people’s intuitions. When you sit down with your senior team and show them prototypes of the products and services you want to put out in two years’ time, you get their intuitive feel for whether you’re headed in the right direction. It’s a process of enlightened trial and error: Observe the world, identify patterns of behavior, generate ideas, get feedback, repeat the process, and keep refining until you’re ready to bring the thing to market.

Not long ago, we worked with a large food-processing company on the possibility of incorporating RFID technology into its supply chain. After many rounds of prototyping and getting feedback, we made a three-minute video that described a very complex interaction of suppliers, customers, logistics, weather, geography, and a host of other real-world conditions that showed how RFID might work. The video rapidly accelerated the development of a potential RFID-based strategy, because the company could instantly give us even sharper feedback and help us refine it. Rapid prototyping helps you test your progress in a very tangible way and ultimately makes your strategic thinking more powerful.

The Prototype Tells a Story

Prototyping is simultaneously an evaluative process — it generates feedback and enables you to make midflight corrections — and a storytelling process. It’s a way of visually and viscerally describing your strategy.

Some years ago, a startup called Vocera came to us with a new technology based on the Star Trek communicator — that “Beam me up, Scotty” device. They had worked out the technology — an elegant device the size of a cigarette lighter that you could wear around your neck and use to connect instantly with anyone on the network. But the team had no way to describe why people would need the thing. We made a five-minute film that played out a scenario where everyone in the company had these gadgets. The storyline followed how one person used the communicator to rapidly assemble a crisis team dispersed across an office campus. The film showed that while fixed communications and mobile phones are very good for expected interactions, this device was ideal for reacting to the unexpected.

The team used the film to tell their story; it helped them raise VC funding and it acted as the guiding framework for the development and marketing of the product, which is called the Vocera Communications Badge. But there’s an interesting twist to this tale. We thought the badge would work best on big office campuses. The market thought otherwise. Vocera’s two largest markets are hospitals and big-box retail stores.

In the end, it didn’t really matter that the market opportunity morphed into something different. Because you’re testing and refining your strategy early and often in the design process, the strategy continually evolves. When the market changes, as it did with Vocera, the strategy can change along with it. This gives you a big jump start over abstract, word-based forms of strategy, in which the first time you get to test the strategy’s outcome is when you actually roll it out. You can’t gauge the strategy’s effectiveness until you achieve the end result and do your postmortem. I don’t see why that’s useful. By building your strategy early on, in a sense you’re doing a premortem: You’re giving yourself a chance to uncover problems and fix them in real time, as the strategy unfolds.

Design Is Never Done

Even after you’ve rolled out your new product, service, or process, you’re just getting started. In almost every case, you move on to the next version, which is going to be better because you’ve had more time to think about it. The basic idea for the notebook computer came out of Ideo some 20 years ago: Ideo cofounder Bill Moggridge is listed on the patent for the design that lets you fold a screen over a keyboard. Since then, the laptop has been redesigned — and greatly improved — hundreds of times, because design is never done. The same goes for strategy. The market is always changing; your strategy needs to change with it. Since design thinking is inherently rooted in the world, it is ideally suited to helping your strategy evolve.

It all comes back to the fact that in order to really raise innovation productivity within organizations, at the strategic level and everywhere else, you have to increase the amount of design thinking inside organizations. Doing so helps you get to clarity faster, helps your organization understand where you’re taking it, helps you figure out whether you’re on the right track, and enables you to adapt quickly to change. Those are pretty valuable survival skills.

Some companies already understand this and are working design thinking into their organizations. It’s not such a hard thing to do. The toughest part is taking that first step — breaking away from your habitual way of working and getting out into the world.

Tim Brown is the CEO and president of Ideo, one of the world’s leading product-design firms.

Comments (0)

By rphillippi, July 26, 2005 1:03 pm

[LINK]

In October 2003, several hundred graphic designers gathered in Vancouver for the American Institute of Graphic Arts’ biennial conference. For three days, they argued, debated, and fulminated over what seemed a daunting question: How could they make the world — especially the business world — understand the power of design? Today, that challenge seems quaint, even antiquated. If anything, companies now face the question’s inverse: How can you not see the power of design?

Look around you: The evidence of design’s power is everywhere. It’s apparent in the mere fact that the bar has been raised. Customers expect, even demand, more from the design of everything they buy. As Walter Herbst, CEO of the product-design firm Herbst LaZar Bell, has said, “Good design is not good enough anymore.” Companies as varied as Adobe, Nokia, Toyota, and Virgin understand that great design is a prerequisite for turning consumers into customers. Whether it’s software or sippy cups, when something works right, looks right, and feels right, it sparks an emotional connection. People come to love it and loyalty soon follows, along with the three Rs: repurchase, reuse, and recommendations — benefits that fall directly to the bottom line. Such is the power of design. Continue reading “Power of Design” »

Comments (0)

By rphillippi, July 25, 2005 6:42 pm

Golden Section: Ratio between two sections of a line or the two dimentions of a plane figure, in which the lesser of the 2 is greater as greater is the sum of both. Expressed as such:

a/b = b/a+b

“A regulating line is an assurance against capriciousness. It’s a means of verification, which can ratify all work created in fervor. It confers on the work the quality of rhythm. The regulating line brings in this tangible form of mathematics which gives the reassuring perception of order. The choice of a regulating line fixes the fundamental geometry of more…It’s a means to an end; It’s not a recipe.”

What? Designers speak their own language. No wonder the business world looks at them funny. Granted I was one and am returning to the design world but I think I need a “design language 101″ course. Here’s another:

“But if there is not order, there is no way of telling what the work is trying to say.”

That’s far and makes sense. The teacher today said to get a sketchbook and start learning to illustrate your ideas visually. Right…