Reinvention through "design thinking"

I want to work with the fast company part of my organization!

 IBM faces a dilemma. How can they continue to reinvent themselves so they can meet the growth targets Wall Street demands?

IBM has more than 370,000 employees. While its revenues are huge, the company’s quarterly reports have shown them steadily declining in the last two years. The falloff in revenue is partly intentional, as the company sold off less profitable operations, but the sometimes disappointing profits are not, and they reflect IBM’s struggle with its transition. Last month, the company shaved its profit target for 2015.

In recent years, the company has invested heavily in new fields, including data analytics, cloud computing, mobile technology, security, social media software for business and its Watson artificial intelligence technology. Those businesses are growing rapidly, generating revenue of $25 billion last year, and IBM forecasts that they will contribute $40 billion by 2018, through internal growth and acquisitions. Just recently, for example, IBM agreed to pay $2 billion for the Weather Company (not including its television channel), gaining its real-time and historical weather data to feed into Watson and analytics software.

But IBM’s biggest businesses are still the traditional ones — conventional hardware, software and services — which contribute 60 percent of its revenue and most of its profit. And these IBM mainstays are vulnerable, as customers increasingly prefer to buy software as a service, delivered over the Internet from remote data centers.

Virginia M. Rometty, IBM’s chief executive, has warned that this will be a difficult transition year. It will take time, she says, before its new businesses are large enough to become engines of growth for the whole company. The strategy, she insists, is the right one. What remains is to move ahead faster. “People ask, ‘Is there a silver bullet?’” Ms. Rometty said in a recent interview. “The silver bullet, you might say, is speed, this idea of speed.”

One key strategy is called "design thinking". Here is a brief explanation:

Mr. Gilbert answers that question with something called design thinking. (His title is general manager of design.) Among other things, design thinking flips traditional technology product development on its head. The old way is that you come up with a new product idea and then try to sell it to customers. In the design thinking way, the idea is to identify users’ needs as a starting point.

Mr. Gilbert and his team talk a lot about “iteration cycles,” “lateral thinking,” “user journeys” and “empathy maps.” To the uninitiated, the canons of design thinking can sound mushy and self-evident. But across corporate America, there is a rising enthusiasm for design thinking not only to develop products but also to guide strategy and shape decisions of all kinds. The September cover article of the Harvard Business Review was “The Evolution of Design Thinking.” Venture capital firms are hiring design experts, and so are companies in many industries.

This laser focus on customer needs can lead to new insights. Here is an example of how IBM trains its personnel in "design thinking":

Defining problems more expansively is part of the design-thinking ethos. At a course in New York recently, a group of IBM managers were given pads and felt-tip pens and told to sketch designs for “the thing that holds flowers on a table” in two minutes. The results, predictably, were vases of different sizes and shapes.

Next, they were given two minutes to design “a better way for people to enjoy flowers in their home.” In Round 2, the ideas included wall placements, a rotating flower pot run by solar power and a software app for displaying images of flowers on a home TV screen.

IBM is competing for talent against top names in technology like Apple and Google. Here is how they recruit prospective college graduates:

The recruiting pitch made by Mr. Gilbert and his colleagues has been essentially twofold: First, you can make a difference in socially important fields because IBM’s technology plays a crucial role in health care, energy, transportation, water and even agriculture. Second, you can be part of a groundbreaking effort to apply design thinking in business.

At Stanford, the prevailing view of working for IBM, Mr. Burnett said, has shifted from “Are you kidding me?” to “This is a pretty interesting opportunity.”

Joe Kendall thinks so. Mr. Kendall, 28, finished a two-year graduate design program at Stanford and joined IBM in June. He chose IBM over Apple, where he would have worked in its iPhone business. At Apple, he figured, his opportunity would be to help make a great product a little bit better. At IBM, Mr. Kendall sees a different opportunity. “No one is using design thinking to solve problems on this scale,” he said, adding that he could be part of “changing the future of this giant entity.”

The article goes on to note that all of the top senior executives have taken the training. Here is an example of how the work is being executed with one customer:

That proved to be the case for GameStop, a video game and electronics retailer. Jeff Donaldson, a GameStop technology executive, recalled that IBM’s reputation at the company’s suburban Dallas headquarters was as a slow-moving corporate bureaucracy, dominated by a sales culture offering expensive hardware and software. The reputation, he said, was “certainly not positive.”

But in the last year or so, the two companies have worked side by side — often in IBM’s Austin studio — to figure out better ways to serve GameStop customers with mobile devices and data. The floor staff at GameStop’s more than 4,100 stores in the United States can now tap iPads to look up the past purchases of customers who have downloaded the GameStop app or joined the company’s loyalty program. Coupons, trade-ins and loyalty-point rewards can be offered on the spot, as well as game recommendations.

The cloud software to make it happen was built in a few months, tested in a small group of stores and then quickly rolled out nationwide. Further projects are in the works to study how online behavior affects buying patterns.

“They’ve completely turned us around,” Mr. Donaldson said. “We’re working with the fast company part of IBM.”

Here is the link to the full article:  http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/15/business/ibms-design-centered-strategy-to-set-free-the-squares.html

Perfecting Pixar

Original post:  Nov 9, 2015

We recently took the boys to the Boston Museum of Science. There is an exhibit now on "The Science Behind Pixar". It discusses the incredible amount of research that goes into creating the wonderful movies Pixar produces.

The exhibit shows the entire process of moviemaking from the original idea to the first sketches to the animation to the final finished product. Behind it all is incredibly sophisticated technology that at its root relies on a combination of standard film processes merged with powerful processing using extremely complicated mathematical models.

Interspersed throughout the exhibit are video interviews of the team members who work in each of the various disciplines. I found their stories inspirational as a way to show how an education in science and technology can actually be merged with an interest in creative arts to come up with an entirely new career.

The team at Pixar also does an enormous amount of work behind the scenes. They research their subjects in painstaking detail. This helps provide the films with grounding in the basic science of the real world. The exhibit gives some of this background in a variety of multimedia displays. This article in Wired also helps explain some of their work.

Pixar is as much a research firm as it is an animation studio, and a new exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City does an expert job at showing us how. For Pixar: The Design of Story, the movie studio supplied Cooper Hewitt with 650 renderings, mockups, illustrations, and storyboards of its characters and landscapes, along with background. Taken together, these artifacts illuminate the painstaking level of research that goes into the creation of every character, right down to the folds in an old man’s jacket sleeve, or the texture of the curls in a heroine’s hair.

Take Carl Fredricksen’s house in Up. The residence is as central to the movie’s plot as Russell, the dog Dug, or Carl himself, and Pixar’s designers treated it as such. It’s based on a Victorian-style home in Berkeley, California, and an annotated diagram on display at Cooper Hewitt shows where the designers specified nearly microscopic details like patina’d copper at the base of the chimney and the scale and frequency at which cracks in the paint would appear.

“When the house floats up and you’re looking at the infrastructure, it was really important that pipes connect in the right way, so if a plumber was watching the film they wouldn’t go, ‘oh, they took a lot of license,’ ” says Cara McCarty, curatorial director at Cooper Hewitt. Same goes for designing something as everyday as water: “In Finding Nemo the water is so incredible, but it’s hyper-realistic,” McCarty says. “If it’s too realistic, like a realistic painting, it almost becomes dead. They find ways to tweak it so that if someone who knows a lot about water is looking at it, and they’re already seduced by the movie and along for the ride, they don’t think, ‘it’s so phony.’ ”

Keep all of this in mind the next time you watch your next Pixar film.

Here is the link to the full article:  Perfecting Pixar's Movies Takes a Crazy Amount of Research | WIRED

Be consistently good

Original post:  Oct 22, 2015

We're all seeking for success. Everyone wants to be a winner. While no one can guarantee that we will reach the ultimate prizes that we seek, we can certainly maximize our chances by giving our best efforts.

In this article, "Secrets to Success: 6 Tips From the Most Successful People", you might be able to pick up a tip or two that can help you increase your odds of winning.

The first tip talks about the need to be creative. I found it rather eye-opening. The city of Chicago in the 1800s was suffering from serious disease because of its sewage problems. They also realized that they couldn't dig tunnels under the city for new sewers with the existing technology. Ellis Chesbrough came up with a novel solution:

But here Chesbrough’s unique history helped him come up with an alternate scenario, reminding him of a tool he had seen as a young man working the railway: the jackscrew, a device used to lift multiton locomotives onto the tracks. If you couldn’t dig down to create a proper grade for drainage, why not use jackscrews to lift the city up? Aided by the young George Pullman, who would later make a fortune building railway cars, Chesbrough launched one of the most ambitious engineering projects of the nineteenth century. Building by building, Chicago was lifted by an army of men with jackscrews. As the jackscrews raised the buildings inch by inch, workmen would dig holes under the building foundations and install thick timbers to support them, while masons scrambled to build a new footing under the structure. Sewer lines were inserted beneath buildings with main lines running down the center of streets, which were then buried in landfill that had been dredged out of the Chicago River, raising the entire city almost ten feet on average.

Nothing was shut down. As a 750-ton hotel was lifted, people went about their lives inside — perhaps only taking a second to marvel at the surreal experience going on beneath them.

The title of this post is picked up from tip #2. Steve Martin, the brilliant comic, discusses the importance of honing our craft through diligence and hard work in his autobiography:

I learned a lesson: It was easy to be great. Every entertainer has a night when everything is clicking. These nights are accidental and statistical: Like lucky cards in poker, you can count on them occurring over time. What was hard was to be good, consistently good, night after night, no matter what the abominable circumstances.

Here is a summary of the tips for success on a grand scale:

• When the going gets tough, the tough get creative. Don’t do more, do different. Lift a city.
• Don’t be great, be consistently good. Don’t worry about the big break, worry about being good enough.
• Use rejection as motivation. And remember the compliments you receive. You’re charming, right?
• Working hard is the best way to network. Bring coffee and tea.
• Don’t wait for permission. Don’t poison anyone, but test and prove.
• If you can’t be #1, be clever. Energizing others with style can beat “the best way.” (Mimes are nodding right now.)

Don't underestimate the power

Original post:  Aug 17, 2015

Perhaps you may have admired the creative genius of others from afar. You may have harbored secret wishes to dream up the next iPhone or write that novel or solve that nagging problem. Perhaps you thought that creativity is something that you are born with; that you either have it or you don't. This article argues that isn't true.

In "People Underestimate Their Creative Potential", Melissa Dahl lays out a case for the rest of us. She writes:

But people tend to doubt their own ability to stick to the tedious trial-and-error part of creative work, suggests a large new study from Northwestern University,published recently in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Across seven experiments involving more than 1,200 participants, psychologists Brian J. Lucas and Loran F. Nordgren found that people underestimated how many creative solutions they could come up with in a given amount of time, suggesting, the researchers argue, that in a real-life situation, they might give up too easily. And that’s a problem, they say, because their results also showed that the participants’ ideas became more creative as they persisted.

The experiments presented a challenge and asked participants for creative ideas. They then stopped the group and asked how many ideas they might come up with in a second brainstorming session. They found:

And not only did they come up with more ideas than they expected, those ideas got better as they kept working, as judged by an independent team of raters. This is consistent with the findings of previous studies on creativity — for example, one 1970s study of classical composers found a link between higher-quality pieces and the total number of compositions that an individual composer had produced. A huge part of creative work, after all, is failure: the terrible, weird ideas that lead the way to the truly great and original ones. The famed psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyitheorized that this helps explain why "flow" leads to those bursts of insight: When people are absorbed by a task, they "persist ... single-mindedly, disregarding hunger, fatigue, and discomfort." Concentrating deeply in one area for an extended period of time allows you to examine the thing from different angles, understanding the nuances of the problem.

By forcing participants to keep trying, the researchers may have helped them unlock more of their potential!

Here is the link to the full article:  People Underestimate Their Creative Potential -- Science of Us

Teaching in the age of Minecraft

Original post:  May 22, 2015

As a parent, it's a constant struggle. Every choice has benefits and drawbacks. On the one hand, you can't be too lenient because kids need rules and structure. On the other hand, you also don't want to make too many rules because it will stifle creativity.

Modern parenting also offers a major dilemma in screen time. It's hard to deny my kids the iPad when I'm constantly on my phone or laptop. While they are normal in most respects and like to play outside, they also love their games and videos. One of their all-time favorites is Minecraft.

This humble game was one of the first to really catch fire. Think of it as electronic Lego. While there is a survivalist game that was part of the original release, more often than not the kids like to play the "creative" version. In this setting, there are unlimited amounts of building materials available. You can literally spend days building entire worlds. Here is one example for the more literal minded. It's an electronic re-creation of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris:

You can find many spectacular examples with easy Google searches of elaborate presentations that go on and on.

I ran across an article recently that discussed ways teachers are now incorporating Minecraft into lesson plans. It helps capture the imagination of students in a non-traditional way. Here is one quote from the article:

Diane Main teaches a high-school computer-science class at the Harker School in San Jose, California. She has been using MinecraftEdu with her students for the past two years and has been consistently impressed by what her students have created in the game, especially when they are given the flexibility to follow their own interests, figuring out how to do the desired actions in their own way. "When you have opportunities for creativity and more open-ended situations, it allows kids to figure out that they can try things, they can do things differently—there’s not one formulaic way to do well in this class," Main said. "A student told me after the class that he learned that first option [to solving a problem] isn’t always the best option. And that’s something you can’t teach kids—they need to have the opportunity to experience it themselves."

What surprises me even more than the creative potential is the way that Minecraft is opening new doors for entertainment. My boys will literally watch others build and navigate these virtual worlds. There are YouTube videos with famous players like Stampy Longnose that serve as virtual guides for ten to twenty minutes at a time. I literally have to set time limits to get the boys to stop watching. Their endless fascination reminds me of the time I spent in arcades once I had run out of quarters watching other expert players on the games. I suppose this is something similar--where you can watch and learn new moves and tactics you might never otherwise had considered.

Here are the links to the articles I referenced:

Teaching in the Age of Minecraft - The Atlantic

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/21/technology/personaltech/minecraft-stars-on-youtube-share-secrets-to-their-celebrity.ht…

Marketing yourself

Original post:  Feb 27, 2014

Tomorrow, I am scheduled to volunteer at an event in Lowell. I will be joining a number of other company veterans at the event. We will address a group of other veterans who are just beginning their transition to civilian work life.

One of the hardest things to learn coming out of the military was the concept of self-promotion. Much of military life involves team activities. The team matters far more than the individual. Each person is expected to do their job so that the entire group can advance. In civilian life, there are many times when you will also have to work on a team. In order to get to that point, though, you first have to be hired! Job interviews are really about trying to position yourself as a key contributor (as opposed to just another team member).

This article from Inc. gives one person's opinion. It says that you should never describe yourself using the ten terms provided in the article. To be honest, I don't agree fully with each of them. That said, there are legitimate points raised about trying to stay away from the obvious and succinctly making your case for why you should be hired. There is a fine line between effective self-promotion and just being a bit full of yourself.

Here are some of my favorites from the article:

"Motivated."

Check out Chris Rock's response (not safe for work or the politically correct) to people who say they take care of their kids. Then substitute the word "motivated." Never take credit for things you are supposed to do--or be.

"Authority."

If you have to say you're an authority, you aren't. Show your expertise instead. "Presenter at SXSW" or "Delivered TED Talk at Long Beach 2010" indicates a level of authority. Unless you can prove it, "social media marketing authority" just means you spend a ton of time on Twitter.

"Innovative."

Most companies claim to be innovative. Most people claim to be innovative. Most are not. (I'm not.) That's okay, because innovation isn't a requirement for success.

If you are innovative, don't say it. Prove it. Describe the products you've developed. Describe the processes you've modified. Give us something real so your innovation is unspoken but evident... which is always the best kind of evident to be.

"Creative."

See particular words often enough and they no longer make an impact. "Creative" is one of them. (Go to LinkedIn and check out some profiles; "creative" will appear in the majority.)

"Creative" is just one example. Others include extensive, effective, proven, dynamic, influential, team player, collaborative... some of those terms truly may describe you, but since they're also being used to describe everyone else they've lost their impact.

Here is the link to the full article:  10 Ways You Should Never Describe Yourself | Inc.com

Learn to paint

Original post:  Jan 3, 2014

There is growing recognition of the vital importance of technology to our future. We constantly search for the innovative application of automation. There is wide dispute about how we can find the next great invention.

We've had several posts discussing the need to understand coding. Computer coding teaches many important logical principles. But creativity and innovation come from many different sources.

This article in Forbes gives another point of view. "To Foster Your Creativity, Don't Learn to Code; Learn to Paint" by Alex Knapp stresses the importance of the arts to original ideas. He builds on the ideas of Samuel Arbesman in Wired.

My own view is somewhere in between. I think it is important to learn to code in order to help you understand how a computer thinks. I also think that the author is right about the need to learn about new ideas constantly and consistently in order to find unexpected areas of intersection. This excerpt is quite incisive:

The key to being creative, in any field, be it scientific, technical, or business, in the 21st century requires a certain comfort level in technology. But the best way to harness the power of computers doesn't reside in coding--it resides in letting computers do the grunt computational work that humans are bad at, so that humans can focus on the creative, problem solving work that computers are bad at.

He further argues that while the link between arts and creativity is not well understood, it could be because of similarities between artists and scientists:

An artist might sketch and tweak before finalizing the drawing that will become the basis of a painting. A novelist produces a number of rough drafts before finding the one that works. Similarly, the essence of the scientific method is hypothesizing, testing, tweaking the hypothesis, forming new hypotheses, testing again, etc. Engineers design, test, toss out drafts, test, toss out more drafts, etc. So even in the practice of one’s chosen art, a scientist or engineer is still practicing the essential skills she needs to be successful in her primary profession.

When was the last time you sketched something out? Maybe it's time to work on it....

Chopped

Original post:  Aug 16, 2012

My wife and I enjoy watching a show on the Food Network called "Chopped." The show features four chefs who compete to cook an appetizer, entrée, and dessert featuring four mystery ingredients within a time limit of 20-30 minutes.

It is fascinating to watch the creative process in action. We both love to eat a wide variety of exotic foods and the show certainly doesn't fail to disappoint. It takes incredible skill to transform some really crazy ingredients like beef hearts or bubble gum into sumptuous dishes.

A recent episode featuring celebrity chefs was actually quite instructive. It featured 16 Food Network celebrity chefs competing for a $50,000 prize for their favorite charity. In addition to the enormous time pressure the judges face in taking these wild basket items and transforming them into a delicious plate, there was the added pressure of trying to win the competition for their charitable organization. You could literally see the chefs trying to focus their efforts in a desperate attempt to provide that extra added touch that could help elevate their dish above their competitors.

I was most fascinated by watching how the relentless ticking of the clock affected even the most talented chefs. They could have kept things quite simple and easily presented a passable dish in the time given. However, since they knew they were competing against other talented foes, they had to design complex and complicated dishes to bring depth to their flavors and to balance a number of competing tastes and textures to make their efforts stand out. One of the favorites who seemed destined to win the overall title made a simple error by forgetting one of the main mystery ingredients. He had cooked them and they were sitting inches away from the plate. In the rush to complete his dish, he forgot to garnish the plate with the required element. His dish was outstanding in every other aspect, but he was "chopped" because no one else made any error quite as bad (even if their dishes didn't taste quite as good).

It is also instructive to note that the judges grade on three key elements:  taste, appearance, and creativity. The runner-up lost primarily because he did not "dress" his plate as well as his opponent. His dishes, while delicious, did not look as great. Other chefs were cut because they simply cut up the ingredients and hid them on the plate instead of transforming them into something better.

If we can translate this competition to our own work life, I think we can see the impact that deadlines have on even the most talented personnel. It's amazing to think of what might have been had that favorite taken the time to remember to garnish his plate or that runner-up had cleaned up his presentations. There is a lesson there for all of us.