What was the last experiment you did at work?
Experiments fuel creativity and change. Experimenting means you are intentionally going off the map and pushing beyond the status quo: you are doing something for which the outcome is uncertain, and doing it on purpose. It's that uncertainty that creates the potential for big positive change.
Scott Berkun, "Do You Experiment at Work?," Harvard Business, 24 July 2008, http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/berkun/2008/07/do-you-experiment-at-work.html
Apple: In the competition between PCs and Macs, we outsell Apple 30-to-1. But there is no doubt that Apple is thriving. Why? Because they are good at providing an experience that is narrow but complete, while our commitment to choice often comes with some compromises to the end-to-end experience. Today, we’re changing the way we work with hardware vendors to ensure that we can provide complete experiences with absolutely no compromises. We’ll do the same with phones—providing choice as we work to create great end-to-end experiences.
....Third, we are going to reinvent the search category through user experience and business model innovation. We’ll introduce new approaches that move beyond a white page with 10 blue links to provide customers with a customized view of their world. This is a long-term battle for our company—and it’s one we’ll continue to fight with persistence and tenacity.
Kara Swisher, "Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s Full Memo to the Troops About New Reorg," D: All Things Digital, 23 July 2008, kara.allthingsd.com/20080723/microsoft-ceo-steve-ballmers-full-memo-to-the-troops-about-new-reorg via Rich Goade
One telling anecdote in my research into innovation history is this striking observation: inventors, creators, and leaders, the people who earned fame for the work other people call innovative rarely used that word themselves. Instead their vocabularies leaned heavily on words like problem, experiment, solve, exploration, change, risk and prototype. Powerful words. Words that are either verbs, or imply a set of actions. And more to the point, they care less about being innovative than they do about making things. Making good things. Forget creating a breakthrough: it's hard enough to make a really good thing that people will love to use. Most markets are in desperate need of affordable, high quality goods that live up to half the promises their advertising make for them.
Scott Berkun, "Why Innovation Is Overrated," Harvard Business Online, 14 July 2008, http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/berkun/2008/07/why-innovation-is-overrated.html.
“The source of Google’s competitive advantage is learning by doing,” said Hal R. Varian, Google’s chief economist.
In the Internet marketplace, Mr. Varian notes, users can easily switch to another search engine by typing in another Web address, so there is no tight technology control, as there is with proprietary PC software. Similarly, Mr. Varian says, advertisers and publishers can switch fairly easily to rival ad networks operated by Yahoo, Microsoft and others.
But economists and analysts point out that Google does indeed have network advantages that present formidable obstacles to rivals. The “experience effects,” they say, of users and advertisers familiar with Google’s services make them less likely to switch. There is, for example, a sizable cottage industry of experts who tailor Web sites to get higher rankings on search engines, which drive user traffic and thus ad revenues. These experts understandably focus their efforts on the market leader, Google — another network effect, analysts say.
Steve Lohr, "Google, Zen Master of the Market," New York Times, 7 July 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/technology/07google.html. Via Items shared by Robert Scoble.
The irony of creativity is this: people want to be creative without change. They want innovation with no risk. They want a new result with the same exact behavior. They can talk for hours about how passionate they are about creativity, but when it comes to actually changing anything, they’ll find a way to repeat the same thing again and again. That’s why books, seminars, courses and lectures on creativity rarely translate into much actual creation. No one can make change happen except the person who must accept the fears, and consequences, of change.
Scott Berkun, "The irony of creative change," scottberkun.com, 24 Jun 2008, www.scottberkun.com/blog/2008/the-irony-of-creative-change.
The value lies in the network of people and how they illuminate the things I don’t know.
....
I want to know more people, and sure, it’s interesting to see what they’re up to, but what I really want to know is what is going on inside their heads with a minimum of fuss. I want to see how they see the world. This is why I follow people on Twitter. This is why they follow me.
Michael Lopp, "We Travel in Tribes," Rands in Repose, 15 May 2008, www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2008/05/15/we_travel_in_tribes.html via NorthTemple.
JV: Have you seen challenges in being a designer at Google, a very sort of technology-focused and -centered company?
IA: It is challenging. I think in a lot of conventional companies, design is kind of a top-down process. Where you think about who are your target users, what’s the market you’re going after, what are their needs. You do requirements-gathering, and then you design the experience around that, and then you tell the engineers to go build. Here, the way products are conceived a lot of times, it’s an engineer has some kind of idea and then starts building it and then — as it gains momentum — a product manager and a designer might become attached to it. So it’s a very bottoms-up kind of process, which is very different to how designers are trained to think about product development. Yet I still think that there are ways that designers can work within that environment and still have products be use-driven and design-driven, but the ways in which you go about getting yourself inserted might be quite different than [at] other cultures, [which] are maybe more top-down, or product- or marketing- or design-driven.
Jeffrey Veen, "Chatting with Irene Au," veen.com, 7 Feb 2007, www.veen.com/jeff/archives/000961.html.
Also listen to a podcast at itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail1758.html
Q: How do you find the paradigm shifts, the really big changes that even the customer doesn’t know they want yet?
A: Or they may know they want, but they can’t verbalize it yet.
Two things. And we teach our people how to do this. One is to spend time observing customers. I love market research. It’s nice. But even better is to go out and watch with your own eyes customers or prospects in their native environment; in their home or in their office. Watch what they do and ask them about what they do and don’t do.
As you do this, second point, savor surprises. Be open for the unexpected. Look for the unexpected. What didn’t make sense? What didn’t agree with the paradigm that we all have in our mind? Because it is those surprises that typically are the market speaking to you about a problem they have that we haven’t discovered yet.
Transcribed from Nir Eyal, "Scott Cook, Founder of Intuit," iinnovate podcast, 28 Apr 2008, (quote starts at 15:30), iinnovate.blogspot.com/2008/04/cook.html
1. satisfying work to do 2. the experience of being good at something 3. time spent with people we like 4. the chance to be a part of something bigger
Jane McGonigal, "Alternate Realities," SXSW 2008 Keynote, March 2008, podcast - 2008.sxsw.com/blogs/podcasts.php/2008/04/02/keynote_mcgonigal slides - www.slideshare.net/avantgame/alternate-realities-jane-mcgonigal-keynote-sxsw-2008/ blog post - avantgame.blogspot.com/2008/03/keynote-speaker-jane-mcgonigal-doing.html
If you haven't yet seen Randy Pausch's Last Lecture take 76 minutes and watch it. You will be moved - it is very good.
Randy Pausch's Site: www.randypausch.com
Randy Pausch's Lecture: www.cmu.edu/randyslecture