innovation playground Idris Mootee

Most Companies’ Crisis Are Worse When Compounded by Industry Disruptive Forces with a Leadership Crisis

Companies that are facing industry disruptions are bad enough; during these times leadership faces the most important test – the ability to lead during a crisis. The need of foresight, change and organization design are what true leadership looks like. Some sees this an opportunity to gain power and fulfill their thirst for greed and this needs to be stopped. Because strategic leadership matters… whether through malice or naïveté, those who abuse or tolerate the abuse of leadership place companies at risk.

Poor leadership cripples businesses abilities to accept new realities, correct mistakes and make strategic bets. At lower levels in the hierarchy, the problem was even more severe because in decisions and lack of strategy. Seeing things for what they are. Strong crisis leaders live on the front end of reality and speak in future tense. They recognize systemic drivers and their significance and do not shy away from the consequences of what they see. Foresight and strategic intellectual integrity is a key component of crisis leadership; they think of what is best for the organization, not their own personal or political gain. Poor strategic leadership is often the results of the following:

THE FALLACY OF FORESIGHT

Poor leadership assumes that the climate will gradually improve and things will not get worse. They think the future is predictable and they have a good pulse of the market better than others. Often what they have is groupthink. The reality is things do get worse and they are still reacting to the shift rather than getting ahead of the shift. They could not connect all the variables that are shaping the future of the business and fail to calculate the unforeseen market, industry, technological, social, and behavioral shifts. The fallacy of prediction inevitably led to the downfall of many businesses.

Strategic foresight is often lacking to allow the companies think ahead of the curve. Strategy and detail with speed and clarity. They are able to see the big picture. They can see all of the moving parts and understand what is cause and what is effect. They get below the 30,000ft level and can dig deep into detail without being mired in it. They quickly develop a very detailed knowledge of the issues. This ability further enhances their capacity to view the problem realistically.

THE FALLACY OF SECRECY

Poor leadership believes it is better to shield middle and junior employees from the seriousness of the crisis and radiate a false sense of comfort hoping people won’t read what’s out there. The most common defensive speech usually include 1/ We still a very loyal customer base and they are very loyal to us 2/ We still have a lot of cash 3/ Our product is good and we need better marketing 4/ We are not aggressive enough in pricing. All wrong. Many of these can go away very quickly. Companies should connect their passion points to a foresight-based business strategy that are executable to secure their support and commitment.

THE FALLACY OF ORGANIZATION

Poor leadership usually based them on the notion that a new organization structure is important to formally show the transformation. Any formal organization redesign takes too much time to execute and slow down the transformation. This is the time where they should get rid of people’s title and organize as hubs and networks to executive their strategies. It needs to act as an attacker not a defender. Defender usually won’t survive.  Leaders must be strong enough to hold themselves (and the board) accountable for the past transgressions of turning a blind eye from right and poor decisions or indecisions that led to the current state. Current problems are most likely the results of decisions that were made 24-36 months ago. Strong leaders take ownership of the problem and acknowledge that no magic can undo these poor decisions.

They understand, however, that a long-term solution requires the input and involvement of many stakeholders. They identify those individuals and work together towards a solution that everyone can support and can live with. They also need to differentiate from those who take advantage of the crisis by advancing their own agendas even at the expense of the organization. The successful crisis leader seeks out individuals who have a different and strategic perspective on an issue even whose advice may be contrary to that of their board.

Crisis is the time for real strategic leadership. It is the time to deliver bad news when they need to and do it in a way that avoids panic and provides a realistic level of hope for the future. Above all, they are courageous enough to make sharp decisions, act with speed and take carefully calculated risks.

The Come Back Of Hardware. Is Software Becoming A Commodity?

The world is suddenly obsessed with smart technologies and this time around it seems unstoppable. Our everyday electrical and mechanical industrial object will now be occupied and ran by software and connected to the cloud. It also means each object (as small as some smoke detectors and as large as automobiles) will now be equipped with tons of sensors and can be able to adapt to different environment and individual needs.

It is essential that the next wave of industrial revolution will make us more efficient and empowered (and more human I hope), and data will be at the heart of this revolution. That's another big conversation. All the Nest, GoPro and Beats received multi-billion-dollar valuations through private investments or acquisitions and everyone is wondering why these hardware companies suddenly in such high demand. Because hardware and software are going through different commodity lifecycles and now software is becoming a commodity. They used to be difficult and expensive to develop and even to deploy, that that is changing. It is hard for software company to get into hardware much as hardware companies struggle to get into software. Hardware cannot be done by a few geeks in the basement, and involves massive R&D and specialists including megatronics engineers, electrical engineers, industrial designers, wireless engineers and usually takes a longer time to develop.

Software you can fix it with a download, and hardware you can’t. They are massive supply chain challenges when it comes to logistics and component supplies. The value of firms who can marry software and hardware will have a competitive advantage over their competitors. Essentially everything we use today will be fitted with some sensors, processors perhaps, and may be a screen and will recarnate and become of Internet of Things. For the last three decades, software engineering has advanced to a state that sophisticated codes can be embedded into machines. And the availability of cheap sensors and super powerful processors is powering this cycle of data revolution. All of a sudden, software, hardware and communications infrastructure are advancing us into a new era. Old world manufacturing + low cost computer processing + ubligious computing + cloud = smart new world and many cool products.

It sounds like the Apple story all over again, does it? The hardware and software integration capability of Apple, the ecosystem, the brand and user experience are now not only inspiring consumer gadgets company, not it’s influence is beyond its own industry. I know this is an overused story, but he Apple influence is still here, and perhaps it will be here for a long time even when the company stop creating great stuff one day. Microsoft ex-CEO Ballmer saw that coming in 2012 in a letter to shareholders. "It's important to recognize a fundamental shift under way in our business, we see ourselves as a devices and services company." Microsoft had the strategy right but couldn’t execute it fully with the exception of X-Box. Microsoft’s future revenue will still be coming in from software and it isn't going to change anytime soon. The transformation from software to hardware is harder that you think.

The idea that hardware is now the new software is pretty real. There is a business model implication here. These hardwares are mostly priced between $100 to $250 and they a gateway and great way to sell software. We are seeing a revival of hardware and this time, it is hardware first and software and then date on the cloud, it will bring new technological advances in cloud-powered hardware that boosts productivity, efficiency and manifests as beautifully designed objects that fit into our hands and homes.

What Do We Need More? Managers Or Strategists? Or Design Thinkers?

In business school we are taught the difference between a good decision and a bad one, and how to leverage a good one to get the most out of it. We are also taught that the best decisions are those that minimize risk and produce the highest return. On the ground, management decision-making is never that simple.

We want managers to have a vision for the long term but be flexible enough to respond to competition in the short term. We want them to produce consistent results and yet experiment with innovative ideas for growth. We want both change and stability. If change is the only constant, its constant companion is the avoidance of change.

Because the future is full of unknowns, it’s far more comfortable for managers to pursue stability by optimizing existing core business operations than to prepare for change. There is no theory to teach managers how to achieve a balance between the known and the unknown; the ability to do that comes from experience. But if your experience is defined by an unwillingness to step outside the envelope of stability, you will never know if or how the unknown may help you make a better decision. You will never think beyond the immediate tactic. You may become the world’s best manager of the known, but the least able to think strategically about the future. And the future is where the money is supposed to be. Just ask your shareholders. This unwillingness to strategically embrace the unknown is often why companies fail. When they do, we naturally apply 20/20 hindsight to expose all their wrong moves or analyze how management didn’t act fast enough or how it refused to act at all.

Sometimes management acts too slow to transform the organization when the value is shifting to other activities. Sometimes it bets on new things and fails to protect the core. Sometimes it just can’t keep up with rate of change caused by technological disruption. Is the lack of management development progress for the last 30 years a contributing factor? We produce tons of MBAs every year (it’s estimated to be over 150,000 in the US and 375,000 globally). Should we not expect companies to be smarter as a result?

In the current business climate, management tends to prioritize risk-avoidance and career protection over bold strategic action. Managers operate in fear and tend not to bring their imagination and empathy to work. They succeed by avoiding blame when things go wrong and taking credit when things go right. We forget that the best managers take calculated risks and develop strategies to encourage others to do the same.

For the strategist, the only true way to maintain a useful level of predictability is to actively engage in the shaping of the organization’s future. Through conceptualization and development of forward-looking scenarios, an organization can equip and prepare itself for the inevitable future. Our emphasis on education and management development has been on training managers more than training strategists. Today, we need strategies more than ever and we need to convert our top managers to strategists. We need to encourage and empower mid-to-senior managers to take bolder risks and become the innovative force that out-strategizes the competition.

The practice of management needs to move away from purely avoiding risks to a deeper understanding of risks and how to master them to develop business opportunities and create value. Ultimately we need to train people that are equally versatile as managers and strategists. That's why Design Thinking can play a big role. Whether you're a good manager or strategist, you also need to be a good design thinker.

This article is an except from the coming issue of MISC magazine the Balance issue which will be available in bookstores Dec 2013.

So It Was A Terrible Offsite. But It's Not The End Of The World. Now Here's How to Bounce Back From It.

 
Ask 100 smart senior executives or manages about their last company offsite and most of them will probably tell you that it was anything but productive, or borderline disasterous. Some might say it was painful. A few will admit that they were absolute waste of time and money. Planning an offsite is not easy, managing the aftermath is even worse if it was not a great one.

Over the years, I have organized thousand of these offisites meetings, and I’ve spoken at hundreds of them. Ultimately, any company offsite should be focused on developing a shared vision of the future and how to get there. But so many times they fail to deliver anything more than building team spirit and a big binder of printed PowerPoint slides.

Team building should not be a key component of any offsite. Team building should happen in the office, and it should happen every day. If you need to pay for hotel rooms, conference rooms, catering and back-patting awards to build your team, you have a bigger problem than a lack of team spirit. Little exercsie is fine, but it should never the be the key objective.

If it was a really bad one, here's how you can bounce back it?

1. Be reflexive. Perform an analysis of what went wrong and what objectives were not met. Were you being strategic and realistic in your goals? Or were you so focused on the operational stuff that you took your eyes off the prize? One pitfall of the offsite is that too many objectives are set. If you were not strategic in the first place, build a task team to pursue the strategic agenda in the office. Take into consideration what is strategic and what is operational. And get back to it.
2. Drop the pom poms. Most big decisions need some degree of consensus to successfully start activating. One problem with many offsites is that they end up turning into a forum for breeding consensus. Once everyone is back in the office and the offsite-induced groupthink has worn off, create a safe space for dissent. Organizations that let disagreements get expressed make better decisions. So perform a force-field analysis of the organizational dynamics for those who hold polarized views. Then, build consensus. Don’t force it.
3. Listen. Most executives are correct in assuming that any employee who was monopolizing the airtime at the offsite is probably jockeying for a promotion. Most executives are incorrect in assuming that any employee who did not seem super engaged at the offsite had checked out. Find out why those who fit in the second group were not vocal. Connect with them and solicit their input so they feel they still have a voice. There’s a chance they never even picked up the pom poms.
4. Leverage, leverage, leverage. No matter how small the wins and learnings that emerged during the offsite, leverage them and link them back to the day-to-day office. Many times, learning is left at the offsite and when employees get back to work it’s the same old, same old. During the offsite don’t stop asking your team and yourself: What can we do to bring this learning back to the office? The diffusion of what is learned will help to rebuild confidence so the offsite is not a complete waste. No matter how small those learnings were, celebrate them.
5. Redefine. Give yourself a few weeks and then start thinking about your organization’s definition of success for the next offsite. It’s not about picking a venue, selecting a menu, inviting speakers, schmoozing the boss or engaging in a battle of the PowerPoint. Executives need to spend serious time and effort on framing the critical questions that have to be asked, debated and answered. If that didn’t happen this time, they need to take a serious look at why. Part of that redefinition can come from the dissenters. And part of it can come in the form of external speakers who will challenge, provoke and provide a fresh perspective on how to jump-start a strategic business issue.

This is an excerpt from the June issue of MISC  Magazine "The Bounce Back" Issue.

Some Celebrate Failure. Some Even Romaniticize Failure. The Best Strategy Is To Avoid It!

The new M/I/S/C Bounce Back issue is out in newstand.This issue is packed with great articles about how companies should deal with adversity. It is one of the best issues ever.

For the last few years, magazines have made failure romantic, and start-ups love their failure stories. It’s true, there are some great stories out there: at the top of the list is Steve Jobs who was fired from the very company he founded. J.K. Rowling took Harry Potter to 12 publishers; all of them turned her down. Walt Disney filed for bankruptcy in his early twenties.

And there was Bernie Marcus who was the son of a poor Russian cabinetmaker from New Jersey who got fired from his job working at hardware store. With US $2 million in capital, Marcus and a partner went into business and opened a different format store with hangar-size, no-frills outlets, friendly service and a huge selection of products, they called it Home Depot. For Marcus failing was about character building and part of the journey to excellence.

These stories are both motivational and inspirational. Magazines from Fast Company to Harvard Business Review jumped on the bandwagon, selling the message it’s ok, even cool, to fail. Some people take this as a ticket to push bad ideas forward. Sometimes people carry failure as a badge of honor. There was a guy who wanted to join our company; his resume read ‘six times failure, a proud veteran.’ When I asked him whether he had any confidence that he will succeed the next time, he said no. It sounds like Vegas to me. The organizations we design and operate are not agile enough to support smaller experiments and the bigger the company is, the harder it is to bring innovation to the market.

Companies are using the stage-gate approach, taken from product development, to the innovation process, which is a big mistake. They’re also applying the wrong metrics to measure innovation projects. But the fact is failure is a bad thing – if you can avoid it, avoid it. Instead of putting too much focus on those who ‘made it’, and their struggles and resilience, we should be really be focusing on teaching people how to avoid failure in the first place.

The problem is we should not encourage people to fail, but should not penalize them either. We should be encouraging them to take calculated risks. The danger I am seeing is when young people embrace failure in the wrong way. It almost seems like they’re trying to race through more failures to earn a badge, rather than trying the best they can to give the idea the best chance. This ‘failure movement’ is mostly supported by mediocre people who have few ideas and cannot execute. They continue to romanticize failure, to the extent that they start to expect it. We need to prepare for failure, but never expect it. The failure movement is growing an irresponsible attitude toward risk-taking and Design Thinking.

Just because you fail many times, doesn’t mean that you have a better chance of emerging from challenges unscathed. It gives people an excuse to think harder and learn to apply Design Thinking principles to model scenarios to avoid or minimize failure. Most innovation can’t avoid failure. In fact failure is often by design, it is part of the process of iterative development and market learning. I don’t consider that failure.

Prototyping and learning from mistakes can ultimately lead to a higher chance of success, but it also de-risks project mistakes that usually come from the weaknesses of our human mind, such as hindsight bias. We should be teaching people how to deal with those biases.

The failure movement often falls prey to both of these biases. How many people can you name that went broke while attempting various business ventures, and are still broke? Can you write a list of these people more easily than a list of successful entrepreneurs who overcame immense obstacles to succeed? I think we are giving ‘failure’ too much credit.

I can see why those stories sell, they’re comforting to read and somehow people feels closer to success. This is not the case. If you’ve failed 50 times it doesn’t mean you’re closer to making it. Let’s stop over-glorifying failure and avoid the pain. We know what it means when you have your fingers burnt once. The smartest way is to teach people to learn from Other People’s Failure (OPF). There is so much we can and should learn from it.

When I teach my strategy courses in master level programs, 80% of my teachings are around how companies fail and how to avoid it in the first place. For me, it’s called ‘strategy.’ There are so many free lessons our there, you don’t need to pay the price to feel the pain. Someone did it already. There is no need to romanticize failures, instead, we should learn how to best avoid failure and, in the worst-case scenarios, be prepared to bounce back from it. That’s what Design Thinking can do.

For the full story, pls see the June issue of M/I/S/C which is available in 26 countries and digital subscription is available through Zinio.

Idea Couture Is Ready To Take Innovation And Design Thinking To The Next Level.

This has been a very tough two months for me in terms of time and I have not been spending much time writing my blog as much as I used to. It is getting a bit difficult to find the time as we were going through a reorganization, adding new offices, putting new management system in place and at the same time trying to finish my two books on the weekends which will be published in May and Oct this year.

I am excited about my new Design Thinking and Strategic Innovation book that I hope to fill a gap in the market place. And management of the company is taking more and more of my time. So the time I can afford to touch projects is shrinking, I think I only spend 25-30% on projects these days instead of 40%. And people think I spend a lot of time on my MISC magazine, the reality is it is less than 2% of my time. I have a great team helping me with that. I only pick the theme, cover girl and the designs.

We have always designed Idea Couture to be a company that is agile, high style and deserve great love. But we recognize this is an ambitious goal because we want style, speed and substance. Not everyone can make it. I remember someone said something like "Out of difficulties and impossibilities grow miracles." Perhaps we’re naïve. Idea Couture is not a place for small thinkers or people with big egos. It is place for people who believe in being AWESOME and won’t spend time fighting for excuses.

I take pride of seeing people that I mentor growing everyday. We’ve come a long way since launching what we called an innovation firm – whatever that means. It is not a design firm with MBAs; or management consulting firms with some designers or digital agencies calling themselves innovation agencies. We are built from the ground up to do what we’re supposed to do – we work with organizations to uncover innovative ideas that sustainably grow market share or create new markets through powerful customer experiences innovation. We are close to the completion of our reorganization and I am very excited to wait for more new people joining us every week.

Our technology team is amazing and we’re now adapting new methodologies so we can deliver better and faster cross-platform solutions. Our strategy team is growing and growing and have so much untapped potential (unsolicited resumes are flying in dozens everyday).

Our design team is world class and I personally make sure they will remain the best all the time. They not only produce great work, but also open minded and egoless, and fun. At Idea Couture, design is at our very core, not the surface. Design here is under transformation and it is not done within a studio, it is done in the real world in future tense. Design is where technology and art breakeven and where love and logic intersects.

Our insight team is AWESOME with all capital and it is our intellectual powerhouse. When the company advanced forward to a new stage, our foresight capability was not meeting the standard that I required both in terms of strategic knowledge and professionalism. So we needed a full upgrade. Now we have a new global team and a plan to fully integrate that into our innovation process.

We have no time for amateurism. People are committed to giving their best. We just launched our idea couture culture page, which is my personal most favorite part of our site that best represents us. It shows us who we are as individuals which really what this company is all about. People are here for a reason, not for a job. They find their best and it is our job to bring out their bests. It is not always easy. It is how they find meanings. There is a strong correlation between job satisfaction and meaning.

We refuse to act like a "grown-up" company; however at times the company and will always want to think we’re small even though we have 6 offices around the world.

We refuse to act like a “think tank" as we don’t just think, we do.We don't just produce report, we ation on them. We use visual output for sensemaking and mobilizing change that increases organization adaptability and agility.

We refuse to act like we "know it all" but we believe we are equipped to find the best available solutions.

We refuse to accept any "best practices" as we are the one who invent “next practices”.

We refuse to accept that “amateur foresights” is better than no foresights. Actually it is better to have no foresights than wasting time on amateur futurists.

We refuse to accept that "ideas are everything", in fact ideas don’t worth much. They are cheap. There are no shortage of people with ideas and can never execute anything. The art of jump starting innovation is strategic commitment and it is more valuable because nothing happens until someone do something.

We refuse to accept people with "big egos", it is simply not part of our culture. But there is one nice thing about egotists is that they don’t talk and think about other people at all.

Idea Couture is a working prototype and will remain a working prototype in time to come.

How Imagination Can Create The Future? Start With Those Old Comic Books and Sci-Fi VHS Tapes From The Flea Markets.

For centuries we show our human spirit with stories about our glories,hopes, desires and dreams for a better future, one filled with modern machines that enable us to do things we long to do from being invisible or traveling in flying cars or telepods (may be not telepods as I always worried that something would go missing during the transmission). These stories manifested itself in art, comics, fictions, movies and even science discoveries.

What was known as “futurism” is the artistic movement that began in Italy and Russia that fast-forward us to the future of the machine age into progressive state of mind. Futurism also championed speed, technology, science, youth and also a lot of uncertainties. It's mantra was that the answers to humankind’s problems lay in the future driven by technology – and not the past. The main literary work of the movement was Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, published in 1909, and generally considered the beginning of Futurism. I still enjoy reading that once in a while.

To invent the futures that we desire, business and government leaders need to see things in new ways that trigger their imagination to dream of new possibilities. Many of them are too "stuck" in the present. That’s when Design Thinking comes into play. Design Thinking is not just about understanding  people's needs.  It can also be used to bring people's imagination to propel us into the future. To see the future, Design Thinkers are equipped to creating guidepost for developing strategic foresight. It is called Future Casting.

Future Casting is how people from the past thought of the future. I remember visiting an exhibition in Prague where artists from the former USSR were imagining how the future was like with its futuristic art of space vehicles. Those Russian Futurists were fascinated with the optimism, speed, and restlessness of modern machines and urban life. They were actually performing Future Casting for the public.

I grew up watching Thunderbird and Ultramen and as a boy and they were the only things that were available for me that I could use as a guidepost for imagination. Funny enough, Ironman is like an unfinished prototype based on Ultraman design with the same battery problem. Ultraman highlighted the bottleneck of all technologies decades ago which is the battery. From iPhone to the latest Boeing 787 we still have not solved the battery problem.

We have always tried to look into the future and try to figure out what comes next. Sometimes we create fictions, fantasies of what may come. Will some of these fictions ultimately become real? There is no scientific evidence for this, I suspect the percentage of fiction becomes real is way higher that some thought our research based predictions that never made it close to become real. These materials open a window into the past and in term a perspective of the future… how the future should have been or their fears of how they were afraid it would turn out.

The realities of tomorrow are the fictions of today. If you want to have good strategic foresights, don’t hire designers or futurists. Hire Sci-Fi writers! And pair them up with behavioral economists and anthropologists and you will get good foresights.

The latest issue of MISC The Gadget Issue which has a special design feature Project 2020 about the future of sex, social and beauty. There is also the main feature How New Technologies With The Power To Evolve, Disolve, Disrupt and Democratie Industy which is fun to read. MISC is now in bookstores in 26 countries. And you can get it from Amazon too.

3 Paths Towards A Creative Life. It's Not The "Aha" Moments Or Being Perfect.

You want to be more creative? Sometimes it is not about trying harder to act creative. I see a lot of people trying too hard. Sometimes it’s not just about giving one the space to be creative.  Sometimes it is just being strategic. And sometimes it means apply a healthy dosage of common sense. 

Strategic creativity is more valuable than creativity.  Not everyone needs to be “creative” the same way as other think you should be “creative”. It is not about ideas. It is an attitude. Everyone can live a creative life and be creative how he/she sees live. It seems that when creative people (artist) with certain carft try to solve a problem or achieve a certain end result, particularly when the goal is related to their craft or specialized skills, they have an advantage. But when the problem is too big for them, it takes strategic creativity on a more sophisticated level.

Creativity is in such demand today and it is not the years of schooling or what art schools you attend. The word “Creatives” is used in advertising world to describe those who work on creating advertising campaign or providing craft for production. People in these roles like to believe that they are more creative than others. It is not the case at all.

Creativity is not a job title, crafts, capability or skills. Creativity is state of mind, which you can use in everything you see and do. People should live a creative life rather being creative. By living a creative life and having that state of mind, one naturally becomes creative. Creative is independent of discipline, culture and tools.

So how do you live a creative life? Here are three specific ways that can help you to live a creative life.

1. Be Bipolar. A little madness yield great artists, designers, inventors and scientists. The evidence is growing for a significant link between bipolar disorder and creative temperament and achievements. Seeing the extremes of both sides of anything help you to understand the spectrum of choices and options.  Go to places you don’t normally go and use that space. It is not available for everyone.
2. Be Foolish. Be lazy. Everywhere people are telling you rules and the right ways to do things.  Be acting silly and even lazy can sometimes help you to see easy paths to complex problems. Agatha Christie wrote, “I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention . . . arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.”
3. Be Strategic. Most people see this as the opposite of creative. This is total rubbish. Being strategic can also be creative. And being strategic you need to be very creative. The best strategists are often most creative people who can apply creativity in the context of a specific problem. They don’t’ dress in a funny way or even trying to act like artists. They may wear suits and even a tie, but they could also be the super creative types.

Creativity is not just about “aha” moments or interesting ways to look at things. Creativity is about putting empathy to work. Creativity is not about perfection. Weisberg and Csikszentmihalyi both talked the importance of motivation in creative performance. A notion of Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of creative flow is that reaching peak performance is “autotelic”, meaning it is enjoyable for its own sake. So the ‘creative person’ is simply someone who enjoys creativity and therefore does it all the time, even with no reasons and gains nothing from it. Someone just want to be creative all the time. That's different from peope who are strategic in applying creativity. Nothing good of bad. Just two very diffferent creative types.

Creativity is not about opening new doors because something said creativity people have no doors and doors are for those without imagination.

Can Gadgets Save Healthcare? What's The Next Big Disruptive Technology That Can Reinvent Healthcare? But The Fact Remains That Our Health Care System Sucks, And Will Continue To Suck.

I like the lastest Bond movie and the only thing I missed is smart gadgets. Bond needs to have latest tech toys. I don’t want to see Bond becoming Jet Li. Half the fun of watching a Bond movie is reveling in the odd ingenuity of the clever devices. Bond needs all the tech innovation he could use. Her Majesty's government is not investing enough in innovation for sure. Mi5 has a lot of catch up to do. Perhaps they should retain Idea Couture to develop an innovation roadmap? I might get a call from Sir Jonathan Evan!

In Bond's world, the smart phones have access to intelligent databases; miniaturized radio homing beacons operate on their own encrypted frequencies, the cars come equipped with bullet proof glass—semi-autonomous or remotely controlled—and become invisible to the naked eye. Implantable, traceable RFID chips confirm your identity and carry your medical history. And a smart scan to show when enemies are nearby too. And no, Bond does not need speed dating gadgets at all.

Bond gadgets may have once seemed far-fetched, but in our tech-addled age most are at least possible, if not realized already. In 2009 Harvard Chemists collaborated to successfully develop a low cost micro-fluidic "lab-on-a-chip" (actually it was on paper) solution to identify various biomarkers related to the AIDS virus. This idea of a miniaturized bio-chemical lab is a solution currently being funded and developed by DARPA to get ahead of the bio-weapons curve.

In Casino Royal, a similar device helped save Bond's life after he was poisoned. After plugging into a cell phone, the data from his blood sample was transmitted in real-time back to HQ for analysis. A dedicated team of medical professionals including molecular biologists; immunologists, neurologists and virologists provided advice on how to mitigate the sticky situation of being infected with a designer biological agent from half a world away. The biggest idea here is this can become the premium health service for those who can afford it, specialists are all standing by and all one click away to saving your life. That’s an innovation.

Today, self-diagnostic technologies in tandem with the hundreds of personal health and wellbeing apps have emerged to take advantage of our over-connectivity. We are all a click away from massive global expert networks for information and advice related to described symptoms. Our helathcare economics is not working doesn't matter becasue the cost is too high and doesn't matter who is paying for it. The biggest opportunity for smartphone is not smartphone, it is Personal Health Device. That’s a $20 billion plus industry from the start. We need geniuses and mad scientists and designers to make his real and affordable.

“All the greatest men are maniacs. They are possessed by a mania which drives them forward towards thier goal. The great scientists, the philosophers, the religious leaders - all maniacs. What else but a blind singlenee of purpose could have given focus to thier genius, would have kept them in the groove of purpose. Mania ... is as priceless as genius.”

                                            ― Ian Fleming, Doctor No

This is anexcerpt from an article co-written with M. Lincez to be appeared in the March issue of MISC magazine the Gadget Issue.

Is Design Thinking Built-To-Last Or Just Another Management Fad?

I have been teaching and practicing design thinking for business for the almost ten years and over the years I saw the growing interest of design thinking among both business and design communities. Take away the aspiration side for now including notion such as design thinking to change the world etc., design thinking in business is barely understood let alone bring practiced widely. This is the time when businesses have been desperately looking for the next big thing - think the management “wonder drug”.  Lets put some thought into this, is “design thinking" helpful or is it just a hype that is exporting the dogmas of design to business strategy? Design industry is having their own set of big issues.

What's Design Thinking? Design Thinking bascially refers to the methods, framework, tools and processes for investigating ill-defined problems, acquiring and visualizing insights, synthesizing knowledge, and imagining solutions in the design and planning fields. As a style of thinking or a method of creating solution, it is generally considered the ability to combine empathy for the context of a problem, creativity in the generation of insights and ideas, and rationality to analyze and fit solutions to the context.

While design thinking has become part of the popular lexicon in industrial design and engineering, its broader use in describing a particular style of creative thinking-in-action is having an increasing influence on 21st century education across disciplines. In this respect, it is similar to systems thinking in naming a particular approach to understanding and solving problems.

Buchanan’s (1992) paper “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking” shifted design theory away from its legacy in the world of craft and industrial production towards a more generalized “design thinking” that could be applied to nearly anything. I mean anything, whether a tangible object or a complex system. Drawing on Pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, Buchanan saw design as a liberal art, uniquely well-placed to serve the needs of a technological culture in which many kinds of thing are designed, and human problems are complex. It is basically instilling new perspectives to look at a problem and frame them in different ways to provide more options to tackle whatever the problem is.

And for Design Thinking in Business - The very core of many management theories are being questioned and “management” is close to a point of failure or needed serious reset. Business leaders are looking to find something new to grasp onto in order to make sense of what’s going on and are looking to organize for a future of unprecedented uncertainties. Design Thinking brings a refreshed, revitalized, and rejuvenated approach to management and strategic thinking- but design thinking is far from a cure-all. Innovation, strategy and leadership are closely interconnected and to succeed you must have all three. Innovation is the ability to differentiate options for the future and develop a set of perspectives to guide them there. Strategy is the ability to connect customer needs and wants to the corporation’s core capability, economics and leadership is the ability to instill a sense of purpose for the organization and to mobilize everyone to work towards a common goal.

I don't think Design Thinking will end up like other short-lived management fads and it will eventually deeply embedded in what we called 'management' today and it will help connect the three: Innovation, Strategy and Leadership.

The Harvard Graduate School of Design "Design Thinking for Creativity and Business Innovation" Seminar Is Officially Open For Registration. Spaces Are Limited.

I finally have started on designing for the new executive program for the Harvard Graduate School of Design - Design Thinking for Creativity and Business Innovation. I have been getting a lot of request to speak on this topic and beyond curiosity, many are interested to see how they can apply these concepts not in product development or design but in complex problem solving. After three years of practive devopment and finally put them all together in one seminar. Plan to take this to Europe and Asia later in the year. This is what powers a Senior Designer/Desigh Thinker/Creative Professional to gain a seat in board level stragetic discussions.

The seminar allows participants to learn how to apply the framework and cognitive processes of Design Thinking to connect with your own creativity, frame specific problems, generate innovative ideas, and convert those ideas into tangible business opportunities. In terms of pedagogy, Design Thinking is a lot more than just a human-centered, rapid prototyping design methods, in fact Design Thinking should be less about design, more about thinking.

The program is designed to show how Design Thinking are used by a remarkably diverse range of global organizations across all industry sectors in creating tangibility in insights, foresights, meanings and strategies. Design Thinking is gaining popularity for many reasons. Mainly corporations are facing crises on several fronts and not only from the obvious such as low cost competition, disruptive technologies, economic sustainability, and social development.

Business executives,non-profit and government leaders are also experiencing a profound crisis of trust and legitimacy and all these factors have triggered a loss of confidence in traditional ways of planning and doing things. The very core of many management theories are being questioned and “management” is close to a point of failure. These leaders are looking to find something new to grasp onto in order to make sense of what’s going on and are looking to organize for a future of unprecedented uncertainties. Large established institutions have been battered by system level economic failure, extreme uncertainties, and the failure of traditional forms of leadership and management. These wounds have left businesses gazing hopefully towards design thinking as a new management wonder drug that will help them make sense of what is going on and secure their next big bonus or promotion.

Design Thinking comes just-in-time. Design thinking is bringing a refreshed, revitalized, and rejuvenated approach to management and strategic thinking- however, design thinking is far from a cure-all. You can register here for The Design Thinking for Creativity and Business Innovation Program, please make sure you check if you qualify for affiliate discount. It will held at the Harvard Club in Newe York City third week of May.

This is for executives (both creative and management professionals) who wish to learn how to apply Design Thinking methods beyond the noise and cliché and many of which are myths that are simply not true. It is my pleasure to have Dr. Scott Robiner (Assistant Professor at the School of Design Strategies at Parsons and holds a Doctorate and Master Degree in Design from Harvard Graduate School of Design) as a guest speaker. He brings his perspectives of Design Thinking from a cross-discipline designer perspective and will faciliate an interesting dialogue among participants.

More next few days. Need to board a plane to Frankfurt.