Workshop on Creativity in Mongolia

I recently had an opportunity to do a workshop for the American University of Mongolia in Mongolia’s captial, Ulaanbaatar. The workshop was about creative thinking, innovation, and customer research, and it went very well. The participants did a great job with the activities, and the final one - which involved them acting out a customer experience that they had invented over the course of the 2-day workshop - they attacked with gusto (and hilarity).

Many thanks to Muggie, Bujin and the rest of the team at AUM for their hospitality, and to the workshop for participants for making it a great experience!

Here are some photos from the session:

Craft, Creativity and Constraints

A few favorite films on the topics of craft, creativity, and constraints. All should be available at your favorite online video purveyor (well, iTunes, Google Play or Amazon, Netflix streaming is unlikely for the second two films).

Note by Note 

A documentary about the making of a single Steinway piano, a process that takes a year. A Steinway is probably the most complicated “mass”-produced product still made entirely by hand, and largely by people in Brooklyn. Beautifully told story of how great things can come from humble efforts. What I also find fascinating is that they don’t want to automate the process partly because they don’t really know why it works, or how it would create a different sound, since the people who originated the design and manufacturing process for Steinways are long dead/retired.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi

A terrific documentary about the only 3 Michelin star sushi chef, and his restaurant with 10 seats in a subway station in Tokyo. He’s been making sushi since he was 9 years old, and is now 85 and still working. Lessons: Keep the highest standards, never be satisfied, always stay learning, pay attention to the details even if the customers don’t notice them.

It Might Get Loud

This movie features Jack White (of the White Stripes), U2’s Edge, and Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Paige. This clip pulls together the various points in the movie Jack talks about how he purposefully makes his life hard as a way of pushing himself to new ideas. “Ease of use [for the creator] is the disease to fight in any creative field”. The White Stripes were purposely a high constrained band: 2 people, 2 instruments, 2 colors (red and white).

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.