Raising the Bar, Learning from Failure, and Other Lessons from Steve

After a crazy couple of weeks in the consumer electronics/smartphone/computer/telecom mega-industry (it’s really all one now), another bombshell arrived yesterday with the news that Steve Jobs has resigned as CEO and is taking on role of chairman of the board. In reality, it probably means he will be in an advising capacity not unlike what he’s probably been doing for the last year while on medical leave. But still, a shock to the system.

The fact that he’s been able to carry on having any significant executive role at Apple is testament to how passionate and dedicated he is to the company. For quite a long time now he’s had another full-time job (and I’m not talking Pixar or being on the board of Disney): fighting cancer. Best wishes to you in that challenge, Steve.

There’s a lot of speculation on how Apple will do now that Jobs is no longer at the helm. I for one think it will do just fine for quite a while - it’s got a very solid culture that will endure, huge momentum in the market, no debt, probably the strongest brand in the world, and the upper hand in almost every market it’s in.

Setting the Bar Crazy High

All of us in the design and innovation biz have a lot to thank Steve Jobs for. He opened up the play space for us by setting the bar so ridiculously high. This did several things:

• It set a standard for quality, invention, and consistency that inspired others (including us at frog), and allowed much greater latitude for pushing the boundaries of form, materials and interactions. A staple of client requests in the last decade has been “I want the iPod of [my category]” (which became “I want the iPhone of…” and then “iPad of…”). Meaning of course that they didn’t want a literal iPod, but they wanted the same kind of game-changing product, business opportunity, and user experience which these devices came to represent. Most companies, however, underestimate how difficult that is to do from a cultural, technical, organizational, and business perspective (especially if you want to do this repeatedly, not just a one-off).
• It changed people’s expectations for design, products and experiences even in categories far beyond the ones Apple plays in. A good example is the current trend of consumerization of IT, where expectations about ease of use, flexibility, and joy of use from consumer applications are now being forced onto staid IT systems. Why does the online expense-filing application my company pays a lot of money for have to suck so bad, when the free site I use for sharing photos handles so much more complexity so much more easily?

Failure Can Make You Stronger

In 1965, the Apollo 1 spacecraft caught fire while still on the launchpad, killing all three astronauts. It was a televised, very public failure for NASA as it desperately tried to overtake the Russians for the race to the moon. While it was tragic, it also prompted a critical reassessment of the program that ultimately made it better. Retired astronaut John Young said, “I can assure you if we had not had that fire and rebuilt the command module … we could not have done the Apollo program successfully. So we owe a lot to Gus, and Rog and Ed. They made it possible for the rest of us to do the almost-impossible.”

Jobs has been quite open about the fact that after he was fired from Apple, he went through a difficult period. But ultimately this made him a better leader, and he returned to the company after eleven years quite a different person than he had left it. I think it’s fair to say that Apple is a better and more successful company now than if he’d been at the helm for the entire time.

In his humble, inspiring speech to the graduating class at Stanford, he put it this way:

So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. […]

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. […]

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

Spend a lunch break watching the whole thing if you haven’t, it’s worth your while:

If You Want to Outsmart Competitors, Make it Policy for Employees to Use Their Products

In a talk earlier this year to employees, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop asked a question that many were probably afraid to answer truthfully, given how Nokia is struggling to combat the iPhone. As BusinessWeek described it:

When he asks how many people in the crowd use an iPhone or Android device, few hands go up. “That upsets me, not because some of you are using iPhones, but because only a small number of people are using iPhones. I’d rather people have the intellectual curiosity to understand what we’re up against.”

This is refreshing statement; many executives would have berated their employees for not keeping the faith while a company faced its biggest crisis.

Don’t Enforce a Monoculture

One of the surest ways of losing touch with real customers’ needs and getting outsmarted by competitors is to enforce a monoculture in your organization, where competitive products are banned and employees only come into contact with your own offerings.

My first job out of college was at Sun Microsystems, and in those days (early 90’s) it was forbidden to have any competitive products, whether they were from Microsoft, Silicon Graphics, Apple, or Dell. Since Sun made hardware and software, only Sun machines running the Sun operating system were allowed. (In the design group we did have a couple of Macs as the software we needed wasn’t available for Sun’s OS, but they had to be kept hidden away and bought and maintained clandestinely.)

As a result, every Sun employee lived in a Sun monoculture. This was unlike the environment most Sun customers inhabited, where there was a mix of hardware, software, and platforms from a variety of different vendors. Customers had to deal with integration issues that were never felt by Sun staff. Furthermore, Sun employees were “shielded” from understanding what competitive products could really do, or from gaining insights into how they might be falling short, or actually meeting customer needs better in some ways than Sun’s products.

I remember when we were starting a new project that we had to visit the nearby Oracle headquarters (ironically, now Sun’s owner) to get our hands on a wide variety of competitive hardware, as Oracle had to test its software on all platforms and manufacturers. We learned more in those few hours of hands-on tire-kicking than we would have been able to in weeks of desk research.

Encourage Competitive Use, Don’t Punish It

Too often, buying and trying competitive products is frowned upon and even seen as a moral weakness. As I wrote about in Innovation X, when the team developing the second-generation Ford Taurus bought a Toyota Camry (with great difficulty) to try it out, it brought to light critical quality factors that significantly changed how the team approached its work. In her exhaustive book about this project, Mary Walton describes how buying competitive cars, especially Japanese ones, was seen as practically treasonous at Ford in the 1980’s.

This attitude is not healthy. You should encourage people at all levels — starting at the top — to be immersed in your competitors’ offerings, just as they should be immersed in understanding your customers’ lives. Without a clear-eyed, honest perspective about how you are superior and where you are falling short, you will fall into a falsely narrow view of the world.

Walton also noted how Ford executives (as is the case at most car companies) were regularly given new cars, and all servicing was handled by in-house technicians. They never had to deal with oil changes, indifferent dealerships, older cars starting to wear out (since they got replaced so frequently), or any of the other annoyances that can come from car ownership. They lived in a perfect bubble that hid the quality advances their Japanese competitors were making in strides.

Go Further

Don’t just encourage competitive usage, but make it policy. It’s not always easy to do in some B2B cases, but for almost any consumer product or service there’s really no reason why this can’t become a regular practice.

Pay for products and services out of the company purse. Don’t rely on people to pay it for themselves (because many won’t, or will resent having to). Invest in paying for dummy or shadow service accounts, such as wireless or entertainment subscriptions, even insurance policies. Just because you may offer employees a discount on your own products or services doesn’t mean that they can’t also be encouraged to try out the competition.

Think like a library and make sure competitive offerings get passed around to different employees, and aren’t just used by one person. Maximize the exposure and therefore the learning.

Hire curious people who seek out competitors and venture to the edges of your business to find the potential disruptors, trying out products and services that you may not see as current competitors but who may become ones in the future.

Have people formally or informally report on what they find so that others can gain the insights even if they didn’t use the competitors firsthand (this becomes a type of pre-emptive knowledge management).

Backed up by concrete actions such as these, you can establish a culture where trying competitive products is not seen as the height of treason, but as loyalty.

(This article originally appeared at Harvard Business Review Online, and was re-posted at Business Insider.)

Microsoft Finds its Innovation Mojo

Microsoft is a bit like Tiger Woods at the moment - industry darling that became too dominant, then had a fall accompanied by a thick layer of schadenfreude, and now is trying a come-back. Microsoft is being replaced in the big-bad-wolf department by Google and Apple and finds itself in the odd position of being an underdog, and people love to root for underdogs. In fact I’d say that Microsoft is further ahead on the come-back trail than Tiger is if you look at some of its recent announcements: Bing,Windows Phone 7, the Courier journal concept, and the just-announced IE9. Something interesting is brewing in Redmond.

(And for context, I’ll say that I’m a Mac user for 20 years and in the past have been quite critical of Microsoft’s approach to innovation. But I also like to recognize credit where credit is due, and that’s the case here.)

There are two things going on with their recent announcements that are really interesting, and which hint at better things to come still.

Finding its Innovation Voice
There is a clear editorial voice to what they are doing. In the past Microsoft was often criticized for producing warmed-over versions of other people’s products (the perrennial Windows vs. OS X war), or for taking a “kitchen sink” approach that just stuck every feature imaginable into a product without thinking about how they gelled as a whole. Now they are creating products with distinct points of view that do not try to simply ape other successful ones, or out-do them on feature lists. You may or may not like exactly what each product does, but at least there is differentiation and an emerging personality to what they are doing, something Microsoft has long been lacking.

Systematizing Innovation
They have been able, to an extent, to systemetize an approach to innovation that began (it seems) with the Xbox team. The Xbox, especially the 360, established a fresh, distinctive approach to development that had been lacking at Microsoft. Innovating on behalf of customers rather than by linearly extrapolating what they say, consideration of a whole ecosystem, and then taking responsibility for the whole user experience in that ecosystem.

We see threads of this Xbox approach showing up in most of the new generation of products - Bing, Windows Phone 7, IE9, and Courier. (These are all products more or less at the edges of Microsoft’s business, Office and Windows have not yet been affected so heavily. In fact the Windows advertising campaign flaunts the notion of just doing what customers asked, which these other products are definitely not doing.)

It was looking for a while that the Xbox might just be a one-off innovation high-point for Microsoft. Motorola experienced this with the Razr - a game-changing product that they weren’t then able to convert into a broader portfolio and leadership of the industry. They could not systemetize the innovation process. After a couple of years, other phone manufacturers caught up to Motorola and today they are way back down in the rankings again.

Succeeding once at innovation is one thing, and can just be a matter of luck sometimes. Succeeding at it over and over again the way that Apple and Google do is a whole other ballgame. If current trends continue, this is what we are seeing going on at Microsoft. Given their size, resources, reach and clout, this could lead to some impressive stuff.

The Proof is in the Pudding
Windows Phone 7, Courier and IE9 all have one other thing in common - none of them have been released yet. They look at the end of the day there can be a lot of slip-ups between nice demo and game-changing shipping product. Microsoft has stumbled here before - look at what happened to Vista and Zune. But they’ve taken their lumps and perhaps now are ready. If so, we could be seeing a huge resurgence from the company which, after all, still has huge resources, dollars and reach. If they really can get their innovation groove back, from conception to implementation, then they will be a massive force to be reckoned with once again.

The Books I'm Reading to Research My Book

I’ve added a new page that lists out some of the books that I’m using as background for the book that I’m working on myself. It’s pretty business-heavy and design-light, but that’s the way my book is too :)

If you’re curious or want to stock up on some heady reading material, check it out.

If you have other suggestions for things I should be reading, please let me know in a comment, I’m always looking out for good material.

Marty Neumeier on Wicked Problems

Marty Neumeier, author most recently ofThe Designful Company, gave a talk atAdaptive Path’s MX Conferenceon Tuesday. Nate Bolt posted some notes about it that included Neumeier talking about wicked problems, one of the areas I’ve been thinking about for a while also.

Bolt writes up the following from Neumeier’s talk, in response to a question about how to avoid bold dumb vision (as opposed to bold smart vision):

Ford had the bold vision of a ford pinto. They made the mistake of deciding their design vision instead of designing it.

That’s what happened with the Aeron chair. They wanted to make the best chair ever, and they threw out the style guide of all previous office chairs to do that. They made a prototype and tried it with potential customers, and they said “it’s sort of comfortable but it’s kind of weird. I don’t know if I would buy it.” Then they worked really hard on the comfort part of it, and then eventually people said “it’s really very weird but it’s super comfortable.” Then it takes off because it is different.

I worry about innovations that aren’t different enough, and the Pinto was maybe too different. Clairol “touch of yogurt” shampoo was going too far. You learn to spot a real innovation by it’s combination of being weird and good.That’s where the real art comes in, doesn’t it? Knowing the difference.

You protect against horrible innovation by prototyping.Test this out little by little. Either in the market or wherever. Stage-gate innovation is what we call it. Ventures do that by giving a little money, then a little more money. Businesses want to get into the market immediately, and they are impatient. So they take very small risks. That’s just me-too-ism. Anyone who can help prototype. Herman miller said “we’ve gone this far, let’s go one step further and keep trying it in the market place.

(Not to knock on Nate in any way as I know what it’s like to try and take notes while somebody’s presenting, but I just want to caveat what I’m about to write by saying that I don’t know for sure how accurately Nate’s notes capture what Neumeier said or intended, so I could be boxing ghosts here.)

I’m not quite sure what the first paragraph means without more context, but I take it to mean he’s drawing a distinction between a vision that is set from top-down and not tested out, versus one that is tested through a design process.

Undoubtedly Herman Miller did a lot of testing with the Aeron chair, and if Gladwell is to be believed (and I’m assuming Neumeier is familiar with Gladwell’s account - he gives a good talk here) it did indeed test poorly for aesthetics.

I have a hard time going along with the idea that the Pinto was more different from what was out there than the Aeron however. The Pinto looked like a small American car and was designed to compete with small Japanese cars during the fuel crisis. The AMC Pacer was way more different, and look how well that did, though it is something of a cult classic today. But that didn’t do AMC much good.

I agree with his statement about spotting innovation by its combination of weird and good, but then calling it an art rather defeats the next statement of testing out with prototypes — that isn’t really how art works.

Then things get a bit troubling. Yes, we want to reduce our risk by prototyping, and that does help. However, to hold up the Pinto and the Aeron as opposing examples seems a stretch. I’m sure the Pinto was focused-grouped too (though focus groups were very different back in those days).

Neumeier seems to be switching between saying you need to set an audacious vision and then stick with it, and that you need to prototype iteratively and get feedback incrementally that you then use to refine the design.

The Aeron was tested, but what did Herman Miller do? They didn’t change direction. They stuck with the plan and ploughed ahead. Perhaps partly becaused they’d invested several years of work into the chair (HM is famous for spending four or five years to design a task chair) and the architecture of the design was basically baked in. They could not take the weirdness out of the chair without drastically changing it.

So Herman Miller took a bet the farm risk, tested with prototypes, but they ignored the input, for whatever reason. Herman Miller had a “smart” hunch about how the chair would ultimately be received. They took a big risk that they knew what the fine line was between stupid and clever. They could easily have been wrong, and then case studies would be written about how they ignored focus group input and were too stubborn to change direction, so the chair was the biggest flop in their history.

The fact is, sometimes innovations succeed or fail through pure dumb luck. And we laud the ones that succeed in hindsight, but how many of us could have truly predicted them ahead of time, even if we prototyped the hell out of them?