Designer and writer Nancy Duarte looks at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech to determine what makes the speech iconic.
Ms Duarte visuallizes the speech – mapping phrases, phrasing, patterns and content to illustrate why the speech has remained so iconic and powerful – and ultimately influential for change.
Which part(s) do you remember most or find most effective?
Humanistic, meaningful, distinctive – different: Harvard Business School professor Youngme Moon recently released her new book, DIFFERENT: Escaping the Competitive Herd.
I’m her target audience. As someone who trudges through as few business books as possible (most seem choppy and predictably written, and with lots of reconstituted ideas ~ all code for boring), DIFFERENT was, different.
The title is the book’s theme. Ms Moon builds her case for DIFFERENT, around a few basic ideas:
Moon encourages us to set aside weaknesses – instead, turn strengths into differentiation. She talks about differentiation, not as a marketing tool, but as a mindset. Similar to a design thinking state of mind.
I found DIFFERENT refreshing, humorous, surprisingly open-ended and most of all unique. And that’s not easy these days. Ms Moon achieves this feat not only by what she is saying, but through a combination of her distinct “voice, storytelling ability, wit, and insight.” That’s how the PR tells it, and it’s actually spot on.
Perhaps the future of successful marketing is not about competition, but differentiation and coexistence.
The book has been criticized as the same-same wrapped up in beautiful package. Agree or not with Moon’s message and approach, the book is a good read. Pick up a copy. Let me know what you decide.
In the past decade, design thinking, as a concept, had been evolving slowly. The easiest definition: design thinking means thinking as a designer would – but it’s more inclusive than that. IDEO’s Tim Brown has described it succinctly “….design thinking converts need into demand.”
In an earlier post, By Rethinking Design as “Design Thinking,” Organizations Become More Innovative, I looked at design thinking as it influenced organizational culture, products and services. But first, design thinking had to influence me.
Design thinking hit mainstream lips in 2009. As with any trending topic, there are many books available on the subject and even more in the pipeline. Here are seven noteworthy books that helped change my patterns of thinking – some new to the shelves and some classics.
Brown’s book introduces design thinking – the process of converting need into demand. It’s a human-centered approach to problem solving that helps people and organizations become more innovative and creative. This book targets creative business leaders looking to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization, product, or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.
Mr. Martin sees innovation and efficiency as creating a powerful competitive edge. The most successful businesses in the future will balance analytical mastery and intuitive originality in a dynamic interplay called design thinking.
Written nearly 50 years ago, Gardner’s book remains visionary. He presents this challenge to individuals: innovate for the greater good of society, or stagnate. Gardner’s focus on “innovativeness” – be it an attitude, a set of skills, or a condition – must be the norm for both the individual and the society in order to provide continuous renewal, and personal and institutional innovation.
Csikszentmihalyi’s book teaches that by ordering the information which enters our consciousness, we can discover true happiness and improve the quality of our lives. In a balanced experience – a state where attention, motivation and the situation converge, the result is productive harmony. What makes an experience genuinely satisfying? Being in the state of “flow.” During flow, enjoyment, creativity and a total immersion the task at hand, to the exclusion of all else – allow skills to function at optimum performance. Like being the zone.
What if you could stop squashing your ideas and start growing them instead? What if you could help everyone in your organization think creatively? The impetus: change your behavior. No theories here, ?What If! presents actual case studies and simple behaviors to facilitate change. The authors pinpoint six behaviors critical to innovation. Who doesn’t want to be a “momentum god?”
?What If!’s call to arms: Let go of the familiar and strive for an alternative view. It’s the only way forward for sustainable business and competitive advantage.
How does environment stimulate creativity? Creative potential in addition to working environments determine an individual’s creative outcome. Analysis of Creative Knowledge Environments (CKE) – the environment in which new knowledge is produced – examines individuals versus groups, a single person office versus a multi-national firm, among other situations, in conjunction with the physical environment. Dense, but insightful.
Calvino’s 1979 innovative, nonlinear novel houses shifting structures, a succession of tales, and different points of view. It probes the nature of change and chance, and the dependence of fiction on reality. I’ve included this fictional title because it forces the reader to let go of sequential and pre-ordered thinking, and encourages one to question everything.
Let me know if you have other titles on your list.
Innovation, motivation, perception, invention. And let’s not forget speculation and buzz. Apple can create free, mega-viral anything – faster than you can say iPod.
With the amount of press the upcoming Apple event invitation and tagline, Come See our Latest Creation, have generated, you might have thought Apple disclosed the mystery of the Crop Circles or the meaning of Stonehenge. Triffles, compared to Apple’s next unveiling – its tablet computer [it is said] next Wednesday/27 january, in San Francisco.
Will it be the tablet? What will it be like? Maybe iPhone 4.0? Who will be Apple’s media partner(s)? The NYTimes posted an amusing piece in its BitsBlog today, carefully analyzing each aspect of the invitation, looking for clues in Apple’s personality and design-thinking processes.
Like all others who worship at the altar of Apple, I can’t wait.
What innovative gizmo would you like to see Apple’s future?
I wrote this post as a guest blogger for Ventureneer.com’s Vistas blog.
The world has finally realized that the way creative people think is a process that can be applied to problems throughout an organization, not just in the design department.
Thanks to the persistence of many creative people and to a changing economy, design thinking is becoming mainstream thinking and is sparking innovation in every area of business, from how services are delivered to how an organization is structured. Design thinkers see possibilities that can radically change the way we do business.
In his book, Change by Design, Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, defines the process: “design thinking converts need into demand. It’s a human-centered approach to problem solving that helps people and organizations become more innovative and creative.”
In other words, encouraging right-brain thinking in every aspect of your organization brings teams together and sets in motion a cascade of creative ideas that not only solve existing problems but also open the door to new products, services and delivery systems.
Not everyone can be Steve Jobs. His fully-integrated concept and message permeates all levels of Apple, from its organizational structure to R&D, from end-product design to marketing and presentation. Apple embodies design thinking and the benefit that thinking brings to all aspects of a business.
But design thinking is not only for design-oriented firms: All organizations can benefit by design thinking. Kaiser Permanente and Grameen Bank have used design thinking successfully to develop innovative products and corporate cultures.
Whole Foods employed design thinking from the start. The chain began with in 1980, based on the mantra of co-founder John Mackey: Find the finest natural and organic foods, and distribute them to customers.
He defines the Whole Foods mission as a sum of its parts, stating that each element of the corporation plays a huge role in this grassroots organization’s success:
Whole Foods’ brand innovation takes place at the structural level, not with media campaigns. Whole Foods succeeds because it delivers unique products and services that are perceived to enrich the lives of its customers. The brand platform is its deliverables.
Mackey created an innovative culture that became a competitive advantage for the company. He designed Whole Foods as a social system, not a hierarchy. The delivery system to the customers is dependent on and integrated with the work culture.
Many organizations talk the talk about teamwork and empowerment, but very few actually walk the walk. Whole Foods is the rare company that not only has clear vision and purpose, but has the commitment to implement it.
Organizations with a defined sense of purpose achieve greater levels of innovation than those that don’t. Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management in Toronto, summed it up nicely. “The real challenge lies in getting better and better at a different thing,” he said, “in devising clever solutions to wickedly difficult problems.”
How do you innovate? Each organization has a different way of encouraging innovation. How do you do it? Are you incorporating design thinking in your organization?
