Thinking (a bit more) about Design | Designing better Thinking

When I first start this blog, I was surprised at how often the concept of design came up as it was not my usual way of thinking. Although it has been in the background in the musings of this blog and Milestones for a New Millennium, I have not focused on it directly for sometime. Lately though I have been thinking about it from an educational perspective. If we were to integrate design thinking, in its broadest terms, into our economy and culture and wanted to prepare students to contribute to that culture, what would we teach them? This post does not answer that question, it begins to frame it.

Dev Patnaik discusses Mixing Design Thinking With Business with Roger Martin of the Rotman School of Management, who argues for a radical idea: to develop business leaders who are well-grounded in multiple disciplines.

The Rotman faculty aim to mold managers who are equally comfortable and adept at using tools and frameworks from business, popular culture, and design to solve the most urgent challenges of the day--what Rotman calls integrative thinkers and what I call hybrid thinkers.

They discuss The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage, Rotman's approach of integrating design thinking into traditional analytical MBA programs. Rotman believes new ideas must come from a new kind of thinking. At least new for today's analytical mindset. The logical leap of the mind, the apple falling on the head, that you can't prove from past data the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce called abductive logic.

• Strategy is an act of design.
• Highly skilled designers focus on new possibilities rather than the application of existing ideas. Create from data, guts, empathy, creativity, and a little thin air.
• Balancing the analytical and the intuitive is key to great leadership.
• Analytical thinking prevents them seeing promising new opportunities and driver of growth, but ideas still have to make sense from an analytical standpoint. Great leadership involves bringing both lenses to bear to find better possibilities.
• Roger's take on design thinking isn't rooted in design.
• Surprisingly designers aren't necessarily good at design thinking. A tremendous sense of aesthetics, prototyping, form, and ergonomics doesn't inherently reflect the ability to imagine previously unseen possibilities.
• Templates, not management theory, are the enemies of innovation.
• Neither businesspeople nor designers have a monopoly on good ideas because most people, regardless of background, are more comfortable reapplying a formula or using a template from an existing success than generating new possibilities.

Raising Dev Patnaik's question:

If design thinking isn't based in design and the abilities of designers, then the term may need to change. Without any question, increasing any organization's design capability will increase its ability to differentiate from its competitors, to build a more consistent brand, and to create more appealing products. But it's something else entirely to create a culture of innovation. We would do well to make this clear in the terminology we use.

He addressed this question in a previous article, Forget Design Thinking and Try Hybrid Thinking in which he asserts that, The secret isn't design thinking, it's "hybrid thinking": the conscious blending of different fields of thought to discover and develop opportunities that were previously unseen by the status quo.

Hybridity matters now because the problems companies need to solve are simply too complex for any one skillset to tackle. We're in an era when car companies are trying to grapple with massive changes in technological capability and market need, when cell phone companies are trying to own global entertainment, and when snack food companies face extinction unless they figure out how to promote health and wellness. As Lou Lenzi, a design executive at Audiovox, once told me, if you want to innovate, "You need to be one part humanist, one part technologist, and one part capitalist."

According to Patnaik, hybrid thinking is much more than gathering together a multidisciplinary team, it about multidisciplinary people. He uses John Lasseter, the co-founder of Pixar, as an example because he can effortlessly fuse technology, art, and storytelling together to create Toy Story, which is why he is beloved and admired, not because he's good at technology. In the video below from Edutopia Randy Nelson, Dean of Pixar University makes a similar distinction between cooperation and collaboration.

Innovation versus Idiots How to stay on the right road

Still catching up with some of the older pending posts in my draft bin. Found some from Harvard Business Publishing, especially this one by Bill Taylor.

The article of particular interest was Wisdom of Warren Buffett: On Innovators, Imitators, and Idiots in which he provides a hour-long television interview with Buffett in which he talks about the "natural progression" of how good new ideas go wrong. The "three I's":

1. Innovators, who see opportunities that others don't.
2. Imitators, who copy what the innovators have done.
3. Idiots, whose avarice undoes the very innovations they are trying to use to get rich.

Taylor tells us that, the problem, in other words, isn't with innovation -- it's with the idiocy that follows.

So how do we as individuals (not to mention as companies and societies) continue to embrace the value-creating upside of creativity while guarding against the value-destroying downsides of imitation? The answer, it seems to me, is about values--about always being able to distinguish between that which is smart and that which is expedient. And that takes discipline. Can you distinguish between a genuine innovation and a mindless imitation? Are you prepared to walk away from ideas that promise to make money, even if they make no sense?

So if Buffet warns us of the path to economic destruction, but what do we need to do to keep on the right road? Scott Anthony provides another insightful post, again from Harvard Business Publishing in which he discuses the Three Steps to Innovating in Struggling Industries.

1. Lower the cost of testing.
2. Creatively tap into outside resources.
3. Ruthlessly prune the portfolio.

The Musician As Businessperson The Entrepreneur as Artisan

The New York Times brought up an ongoing debate with its Free Music? Only With a Fight article back on March 15, 2008 under its BUSINESS| What's Online section. The fight is over the economics.

Hugh MacLeod asked the same basic question, in his case regarding software, how does a software company make money, if all software is free? via gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards" by hugh macleod back on 4/8/08.

On Page 122 of this month's Wired Magazine, I'm given a brief mention in the first paragraph of an article, "Open Source Software Made Developers Cool; Now It Can Make Them Rich", all to do with monetization of Open Source software. Here's the online version.

Last spring, marketer and blogger Hugh MacLeod posted a question on his site: If open source is such a phenomenon, where are all the open source billionaires? His audience wasn't amused. Open source software relies on a community of volunteer developers who tinker on, write for, or amend a program, then give it away free. MacLeod's site filled up with complaints that even to look for billionaires violated the spirit of the open source movement. "There have to be rewards," one commenter wrote, "but they don't have to be financial."

What gets me working for Microsoft is that I've always been very interested in something else, namely, how people make a living. This is true for large companies, small companies, billionaires and "humble tradesmen" alike. This is why I can work with a large software company like Microsoft, or a small tailoring firm like English Cut, and find them both utterly fascinating. Everybody needs to get paid; that is the great constant in business.

Much of today's economy seems to be based on the intangibles of creativity rather than the production of product. This weblog initially looked at fair use and copyright issues and its impact on the economic viability at the individual level. Special interest has also been paid to the economics of this new paradigm at a more broad based level. Hugh MacLeod provides some insight from the world of Web 2.0.

Last summer, at a dinner party in London, I had the great pleasure of meeting Simon Phipps, the Head of Open Source at Sun Microsystems. .. A lot of the conversation was off the record, but one of my main take-outs was that Simon passionately believes that "The Future Is Open Source".

A few weeks ago, I met a young developer who worked in an IT department of a large insurance company. I asked him what kind of software did he use. Answer: About 75% Microsoft, 25% Open Source. I asked him why did he not use more Open Source? I thought IT people loved Open Source?

"If something goes wrong with Microsoft, I can phone Microsoft up and have it fixed. With Open Source, I have to rely on the community."

And the community, as much as we may love it, is unpredictable. It might care about your problem and want to fix it, then again, it may not. Anyone who has ever witnessed something online go "viral", good or bad, will know what I'm talking about.

When you buy a Microsoft product, you're not just getting ones and zeros. There's also a form of "social contract" implicit in the commercial transaction. You gave them money, this entitles you to certain expectations.

The last time this was considered, under Troubadour Troubles - Economic, Legal, Moral? You Pick, links were provided to David Byrne and his advice on Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists — and Megastars. This time the advice comes from Entrepreneurial Mind, who provided back on March 28, 2008 a perspective on the Musician as Artisan.

The music industry is facing an interesting puzzle these days How do you run a business where customers do not want to pay and they do not want advertising?

Efforts to sell music by subscription have mainly failed...traditional radio's offer of free music surrounded by audio advertising also is being rejected by a generation that resents undesirable interruptions.

"They want to be the program director, and they insist that the program be free," says Jerry Del Colliano.

The big boys in the industry do what big boys do in any industry undergoing fundamental change -- they try to get the government to protect their interests.

The predictions from the Institutue for the Future about the future of small business might offer a glimpse into the future of music:

Artisans, historically defined as skilled craftsmen who fashioned goods by hand, will re-emerge as an influential force in the coming decade. These next-gen artisans will craft their goods and shape the economy -- through upswings and downturns -- with an effect reaching far beyond their neighborhoods, or even their nations. They'll work differently than their medieval counterparts, combining brain with brawn as advances in technology and the reaches of globalization give them greater opportunities to succeed.

Summing it all up from Hugh MacLeod:

The reason Microsoft is able to charge the money it does IS NOT JUST BECAUSE OF THE SOFTWARE. Like Open Source, the social contract can often matter far more than the ones and zeros.

Summing it all up from Professor Cornwall:

...I hope that it is an industry sustained by talented artists -- and successful artisans -- who help us understand love, heart ache, happiness, sadness, joy, despair.

I have to admit being pleased with the idea that the rock star provided the more business oriented advice and the business professor talked about issues closer to the artistic soul. Both Hugh MacLeod and Professor Cornwall, I suspect, are approaching the same place from different directions. Whether they or we all will arrive at the same place is another question. The challenge is to actively instill the humanity that Professor Cornwall evokes into the so far unwritten and to a large extent unrealized social contract that Hugh MacLeod suggests.

Chaos And Creativity

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

(Henry Brooks Adams)

Surviving Ideaicide And Other Perils Of The New Economy

Some of the recent posts for this weblog have been dealing with the creative-destructive aspects on the Web 2.0 business environment, Kevin Kelly's insights for the creative side and commodification for the destructive. Another post dealt with the new Artisan Economy.

What this post is taking a look at are some of the aspects of the social/business environment in which all of this is suppose to be happening. This is to serve as a reminder that having a laptop does not instill instant creativity or guarantee a smooth road to success.

As this New York Times BUSINESS article on February 3, 2008 By JANET RAE-DUPREE tells us in Unboxed: Eureka! It Really Takes Years of Hard Work

As humans, we want to believe that creativity and innovation come in flashes of pure brilliance, with great thunderclaps and echoing ahas. Balderdash.

Not only do we have to work hard on our own ideas, we have to maintain an openness to conflicting ideas, going back to what F. Scott Fitzgerald advised. This Los Angeles Times article provides a more indepth perspective.

The modern world is an ever-changing mass of contradictions. Reconciling them is fundamental to success, whether in business or in life.

The need to keeping conflicting ideas in balance is hard enough, but one also has to do so in an environment of increasing complexity. As small business expert by Ivana Taylor review of The Complexity Crisis — Why Keeping it Simple is Not Stupid at Small Business Trends' tells us.

Looking at the current business obsession regarding product proliferation, the long tail, and flat worlds complexity the argument goes has run amok among businesses, both big and small. John Mariotti, former president of Rubbermaid Office Products and Huffy Bicycles, lends perspective and clarity to complexity in his new book The Complexity Crisis. Why too many products, markets and customers are crippling your company and what to do about it.

"Businesses must compete in more complex global markets than ever before. Most companies are seeking double-digit growth in markets growing in single digit rates — or not at all. This quest for growth has led to runaway complexity caused by the proliferation of products, customers, markets, suppliers, services, locations, and more. All of these add costs, which go untracked by even the best accounting systems. Complexity also fragments management focus, wastes time and money, and ultimately reduces shareholder value. The problems grow, but they remain under the radar of management attention. Complexity is arguable, the most insidious, hidden profit drain in today's business world."

What is of greatest interest is how, even succeeding in meeting the above challenges, you keep your ideas alive. One source of inspiration has been referenced before, the Change This Manifesto. This time the pointer comes from Brand Autopsy's johnmoore on 2/1/08 Ideaicide Prevention is Everybody's Business.

"Ideas are usually rejected out of turn for being too 'something' — too fast, too unproven, too far beyond the corporate image. 'Too something' is a reactionary description used to take the edge off ideas that are strong, bold, and a little scary at first sight. Your challenge is to help people discover a means, harmonious with the culture, to accept your concept."

Alan Parr & Karen Ansbaugh Ideaicide: How To Avoid It And Get What You Want * ChangeThis Manifesto *

I am not sure that this has to happen necessarily in a corporate setting. GroupThink, which I suspect is a primary cause only needs two to be contagious. Government is also particularly susceptible to this aliment.

Finally, in this type of environment the chances of unhampered non-stop success are slim and none. As the The Entrepreneurial Mind told us back on 1/30/08 Failure Stinks!. Fortunately, Dr. Cornwall provides a pointer to Bounce.

Barry Moltz's long awaited second book, titled Bounce, has finally arrived. From his (Barry Moltz's) website:

Conventional business wisdom tells us that there is always something to learn from failure. Not true--sometimes it just stinks! Failure that offers no real learning value becomes a big jolt to the basic business belief system.

Barry's gift is that he uses humor to offer lessons that all entrepreneurs can learn from. During his last visit to Belmont, Barry offered some glimpses of what he planned to explore in his new book. Just like with his first book You Need to be a Little Crazy, this book is a must read for entrepreneurs at any stage of their development.

Barry demonstrates that developing the resiliency to 'bounce" through these cycles determines who ultimately will succeed. Using real life business examples, he shows that with true business confidence, we can face our fears, let go of shame and failures, use all our choices, be better risk-takers, and define our own brand of success.

Artisans: The Future of Small Business III

Both the Entrepreneurial Mind and Small Business Trends write about the Future of Small Business--Third Installment and the new Artisan Economy. This means that creativity and innovation are important resources for the future and learning becomes an investment.

Dr. Cornwall of the Entrepreneurial Mind does so on 2/13/08 Future of Small Business -- Third Installment

The good folks at the Institute for the Future in California have issued their third and final installment of the Future of Small Business reports.

Artisans, historically defined as skilled craftsmen who fashioned goods by hand, will re-emerge as an influential force in the coming decade. These next-gen artisans will craft their goods and shape the economy -- through upswings and downturns -- with an effect reaching far beyond their neighborhoods, or even their nations. They'll work differently than their medieval counterparts, combining brain with brawn as advances in technology and the reaches of globalization give them greater opportunities to succeed. This series offers a fascinating look at the future of out entrepreneurial economy.

In the post "Are You Part of the New Artisan Economy? I Bet You Are", Anita Campbell of Small Business Advice|Small Business Trends on the same day also writes about the third installment of the Future of Small Business Report outlining the growth of artisan businesses. She goes further providing more insights regarding the new economy:

Welcome to the artisan economy of the 21st century. Chances are, you're part of it. Don't let the word "artisan" fool you. If you're picturing bakers in white aprons kneading loaves of whole-grain bread, or someone hand-crafting candles — that's not necessarily what I mean.

The 21st century artisan is a Web designer, or an author, or a manufacturer of a small but exclusive line of luxury items, or a consultant in a niche speciality, or an entrepreneurial-minded attorney who starts selling information products, or an online retailer, or a software developer, or … the list goes on.

See her full post as for What it Means to You

My thought is this: if you don't see potential new opportunities from thinking about the trends in this Report, you aren't thinking hard enough.

So let your mind loose. Free yourself of old ideas that may be holding you back. Or what you think may be society's perceptions.

Cities Under The Microscope and From A Balloon

There have been a number of articles on cities passing my screen lately, but from varying perspectives. Another of the approaches of this weblog is to combine those different concepts together. The concepts in this post go from the technical to the artistic and from the abstract to the personal.

Science Magazine takes a special look at cities in February.
Science, Volume 319, Issue 5864, Cities dated February 8 2008, is now available:

Video Special: Cities
See a special video introduction to this week's special issue on the science of cities and

Science Podcast Join host Robert Frederick for interviews and stories on the environmental costs of biofuels development; the 2009 U.S. science budget; reproducing in cities; good monitoring relationships;

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In this week's issue of Science: SPECIAL ISSUE:

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Reimagining Cities by Caroline Ash, Barbara R. Jasny, Leslie Roberts, Richard Stone, and Andrew M. Sugden

The TEDBlog on the other hand introduces us to Jaime Lerner , who has a maverick flair and a strategist's disdain for accepted wisdom and who re-invented urban space in his native Curitiba, Brazil.

He talks about how to revolutionize bus transit, awaken green consciousness in a populace accustomed to litter and blight, and change the way city planners and bureaucrats worldwide conceive what's possible within the tangled structure of the metropolitan landscape.

It is David Macaulay of The Way Things Work fame, who, in his TED Talk, provides a personal connection with one city in particular:

His love and fascination for Rome dates to his days as an architecture student, but found the path to his book Rome Antics took some unusual (and frustrating) turns. Through failed pop-up designs, scribbled-out title possibilities, surreal sketchbook pages (think "Piranesi meets Escher"), and rambling storylines, Macaulay details each step of his winding journey toward completion of his illustrated homage to the city.

Excepts from -David Macaulay: All roads lead to Rome Antics

I draw to better understand things. Sometimes I make a lot of drawings, and I still don’t understand what it is I’m drawing.

I also make drawings to help people understand things. Things that I want them to believe that I understand. And that’s what I do as an illustrator. That’s my job.

So I’m going to show you some pictures of Rome. I’ve made a lot of drawings of Rome over the years. These are just drawings of Rome. I get back as often as possible. I need to. All different materials, all different styles, all different times, drawings from sketchbooks, looking at the details of Rome. Part of the reason I’m showing you these is that it sort of helps illustrate part of what I go through with trying to figure out what I feel about Rome and why I feel it.

History of Visual Communication | Myth of Dream Communication

This was put aside for a while without fully realizing how cool it actually was. Besides the link below provided by Jason Kottke, there are others links resulting from some more web-mining.

Elif Ayiter is a lecturer at Sabanci University and PhD candidate at Planetary Collegium.

Sabanci University is a private research institution located in Istanbul, Turkey. Founded in 1996, it is the only college in Turkey that offers a liberal arts undergraduate curriculum.

Planetary Collegium is a research center where artists, theoreticians and scholars from many parts of the world meet to develop their research into new media arts. The hub of the Collegium is based in the University of Plymouth, with nodes in Zurich, Milan and Beijing. This network provides support for research at the highest level. The PhD is awarded by the University of Plymouth.

I found what has to be one of her most beautiful works at Architecture + JeanRicard Broek's blog.

Entre Loup Et Chien

This woman's work is to my lay person's mind very extremely impressive, both aesthetically and functionally. The entire Google Reader link is here from kottke.org. I fully expect to see a TED video featuring her at sometime in the future.

Bookmarked for some weekend reading: The History of Visual Communication...from...via kottke.org by jason@kottke.org on 2/1/08

Bookmarked for some weekend reading: The History of Visual Communication...from rocks and caves to the avant-garde to the computer. (via girlhacker) (link)

Subscribe to kottke.org using Google Reader

Designing What We Live In, Where We Live At , How We Live

As the TEDblog reminds us,"The D in TED stands for Design" -- and two recent talks demonstrate why.

Two more world class designers are featured, one for the building - Frank Gehry and one for what we put in it - Paola Antonelli.

Legendary architect Frank Gehry, in conversation with Richard Saul Wurman, looks back over his career and shares the deepest truths of his architectural practice. Watch this talk >> on many topics, including the power of failure, the importance of collaboration, and the need for architects to bring personal expression to the table. And MOMA design curator Paola Antonelli makes the case that this is a very special moment for design, right here, right now. Watch this talk >>; on a whistlestop tour of some design exhibitions she has organized, including "Mutant Materials," "Workspheres" and "Safe."

On 1/17/08, the TED | TEDBlog let us know that Antonelli had been promoted to senior curator of the New York Museum of Modern Art's department of architecture and design. The promotion was announced by MoMA 's director Glenn Lowry. Paola is currently preparing "Design and the Elastic Mind; an exhibition on science, design and innovation that will open at MoMA on February 24.

TED is following a similar path with my Designing New Paradigms online folder, which will now include these two TEDTalks, by making a dedicated page to design in new Theme: Architectural Inspiration .

Asking The Big Questions

Beside Edge with "What have you changed your mind about? Why?" and YouTube with the Davos Question, TED and the TEDBlog are also asking "The Big Questions"

Many people come to TED -- and visit TED.com -- seeking something out of the ordinary. A chance to mentally recharge. A chance to step back and consider the really big stuff that's happening. A chance to understand life in a richer way.

• Who are we?
  
  • What is our place in the universe?
    
    • What is life?
      
      • Is beauty truth?
        
        • Will evil prevail?
          
          • How can we change the world?
            
            • How do we create?
              
              • What's out there?
                
                • What will tomorrow bring?
                  
                  • What stirs us?
                    
                    • How dare we be optimistic?
                      
                      • And the point?

The TED | TEDBlog provides a number of Web-based ways to make a difference

+ Share Ron Eglash's cool math tools, for studying math via breakdancing, Latin beats and cornrow braids
+ Dive into Richard Baraniuk's Connexions, a massive repository of open-source class materials
+ Visit Phil Borges' Bridges to Understanding site, which rounds up student films from all over the world
+ Browse Erin McKean's booklist "So You Want to Be a Lexicographer?"
+ Check out the beta of Gapminder World, powered by Hans Rosling's Trendalyzer software
+ Watch video and take action at The Hub, a platform for human rights media and action -- presented by Peter Gabriel's WITNESS
+ Discuss sustainable design and materials on the Cradle to Cradle forums, inspired by the work of William McDonough
+ Learn more about Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop per Child
+ Catch up with Majora Carter's Sustainable South Bronx -- or make a specific gift to SSBx via Changing the Present
+ Calculate your personal CO2 production -- and start helping the planet -- at the website for Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, produced by Jeff Skoll

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Consumerville USA Versus Creatorville USA

I have been attempting to formulate a position in regards to Fair Use and Copy Rights over the last couple of weeks. What I have really been trying to do is understand the issues from a perspective that incorporates my beliefs without compromising logic. However, as stated earlier, the difference in the perspectives of the opposing sides is so drastically different that what seems obviously logical to one side is illogical and more likely immoral to another side

From a Civic Media perspective I support Fair Use. From the perspective of entrepreneurs and artists protecting proprietary content I support Copy Rights. The problem is to understand the abuse that comes from both sides. Large media corporations abuse Copy Right by denigrating Fair Use, while many, the young being the most suspect, abuse Copy Rights by illegal downloads for free use.

I couldn't help but wonder if there isn't a common factor in all of this and I believe I found it from another source. Karrie Higgins reviewed two new books in the Los Angeles Times. The title of the article provides both a synopsis of the books and the perspective the reviewer takes.

Escape from Consumerville - Los Angeles Times.

"ONE of the great ironies of living in a consumerist culture is that, in pursuit of success, so many of us unwittingly surrender our freedom. We confuse career and consumer choices with personal liberty, when in fact they all represent the same underlying decision: to buy into the system that produced them. Two new books -- "Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity" by Anne Elizabeth Moore and "The Freedom Manifesto" by Tom Hodgkinson -- remind us that we have other options. We can resist rampant consumerism despite its infiltration into every corner of our culture. The key is to reject the competitive ethos at the core of capitalism and embrace failure."

I have, previously, taken a position against this line of reasoning. The motives are honorable and I readily agree with turning against over-consumption,in fact almost every phrase in the article, we do confuse career and consumer choices with personal liberty, yet I still have to take a stand in opposition to this philosophy. My first fundamental objection, saying that "we buy into the system that produced them", is only half the story. We also collectively produce that system. The people shopping in Wal-Mart worked someplace else creating goods or services to make their purchase possible. Yes, we can argue that manufacturing jobs went over seas but people there are also both producing and buying into the system. I may agree that nobody should buy a Hummer, but I also recognize that somebody will be out of a means of support. Yes, there are substitute industries which are less harmful to the environment and more beneficial to humanity. That is not, however, the key that is being sought, rather the, "key is to reject the competitive ethos at the core of capitalism and embrace failure." Perhaps this word is being used in a special manner, but it still strikes me as a dismal philosophy.

This is, to my mind, the common factor in the Fair Use/Copy Rights debate. We have come to think of ourselves as a country of consumers, not producers or creators. The majority of the young see themselves as only as consumers with no stake in producing anything of value and little reason to compensate multi-million dollar media corporations who are seen as amoral if not immoral. The multi-million dollar media companies have no moral foundation as they have purposely worked to turn us into a nation of consumers and now seek to solidify their advantage into perpetuity. This is where I can completely agree with the philosophy Ms. Higgins expounds.

We part company in that I still believe in a Democratic/Free Enterprise system. I see too much in the world today that gives me faith that working for creative excellence is the best means of helping the world and even with all of its faults the Free Enterprise system guided with democratic principles is still the best means to achieve that. This though is not though the end of my philosophical conundrums. I am still opposed to completely unfettered markets in the Milton Friedman ideal.

This strikes me as being especially true regarding the concept of Creative-Destruction. In the "New" Economy, the destruction portion begins immediately upon bestowing your creation on the world. We seem to be entering a world of just-in-time obsolescence. The question is how do we formulate a basis of interacting with each other that works. What I have written here does not really resolve anything. It merely puts down some more evolving thoughts on a complex subject.

In a past post I wrote that, "I do not believe is the Generation X and Y are immoral as a whole. They are defining themselves differently but doing so those not make them immoral even if they don't follow old rules." The trouble with this line of reasoning is that the fact that they don't agree with our morality does not mean they by default automatically have one of their own. What I quoted in the same post from Professor Cornwall seems all the more important.

Whether it's in everyday life or in the business world, we have to be careful not to boil morality down to a simple list of don''s that serves as a checklist of how to be ethical. Business ethics should so much more than a list of rules to follow. It should be a much broader set of standards of how we treat one another.

Principles of Uncertainty Laws of Serendipity

This post was moved to here from back in November unintentionally. I was intentionally moving the post above this. However, embedding the video for the later post wasn't working and I used this video to edit so that it would. Regardless of that accident, these two posts do tie together under a tag that also has a wide and varied application - design. Originally I did not tag this post under design but I am rethinking that now. The concept of design has changed for me as a result of this weblog more than any other concept that has been dealt with, both in terms of its importance and its intricacy. I am no longer applying the concept of design only to things, particularly to only inanimate things.

The Principles of Uncertainty starts one off on a strange journey starting in the past, both in terms of the work and of Maira Kalman's life, and moving with uncertainty but also serendipity with no particular place to go. Maira Kalman doesn't bring functionality to design, she brings style.

Like Trying to Milk a Fish

The Entrepreneurial Mind wrote Like Trying to Milk a Fish on 11/30/07

The concept of social entrepreneurship has also been explored a number of times by this weblog. Jeff Cornwall introduces us to social entrepreneur Sam Davidson has a thoughtful reflection who at his blog tells us about what it is like being an early-stage entrepreneur.

Those who know me know that I never planned on being an entrepreneur, but that I enjoy every single minute of it. There's risk, there's reward, there's freedom, there's excitement, there's disappointment, there's opportunity - and that's just Monday before lunch. And so when people ask me what it's like to start my own company and be a social entrepreneur, I tell them:

"It's like trying to milk a fish."

Sam is a co-founder and President of CoolPeopleCare

Below is a short video from their website on who they are.

Little Ideas Are The Pathway To Big Sucess

Big Ideas (Meatball Mondae 11) via Seth's Blog 12/3/07 gives me an excuse to bring up another article that I posted but never dealt with to the extent that I wanted.

Seth points out that in a factory-based organization, "little ideas are the key to success".

"Small improvements in efficiency or design can improve productivity and make a product just a bit more appealing. New Marketing, which exists in the noisy marketplace, demands something bigger. It demands ideas that force people to sit up and take notice."

"Today, the advertiser's big idea doesn't travel very well. Instead, the idea must be embedded into the experience of the product itself. Once again, what we used to think of as advertising or marketing is pushed deeper into the organization. Let the brilliant ad guys hang out with your R&D team and watch what happens. Yes, there are big ideas. They're just not advertising-based."

This is a pretty profound statement from a marketer. He does not say it explicitly, but the noisy marketplace of New Marketing seems to break out of the Henry Ford industrial assembly model. Regardless, it involves innovation and Seth is asserting that innovation belongs in all components of the organization at a fundamentally deep level. The whole Seth Godin meatball series is here.

This supporting article from the Christian Science Monitor is on, "How companies can encourage innovation."

"We're moving from an industrial economy to a creative economy," says Richard Florida, author of "The Rise of the Creative Class,"

In a new survey, the Innovation Institute, "finds a "creativity gap" in the workplace – a disparity between the creative resources available and those being used. While a vast majority of American workers (88 percent) consider themselves creative, fewer than 2 in 3 think they are tapping their creative capacities on the job. Nearly 30 percent say they would take a lower salary to work for a company that valued their creative input. And 1 in 5 say they would move to a different city to work for such a company."

Two other factors – a rise in entrepreneurship and more women in business – also promote innovation, says Vicki Donlan, author of "Her Turn: Why It's Time for Women to Lead in America." Many women tell her they left a corporate job because they lacked opportunities to use their creativity.

Why design? Philippe Starck on TED.com

Why design? Philippe Starck on TED.com via TED | TEDBlog by on 12/4/07

The importance of design is made ever more apparent through the explorations done through this weblog, not only in terms of marketing, technology and architecture but biology and physics. Philippe Strarck provides inspiration beyond his physical designs.

Legendary designer Philippe Starck -- with no pretty slides behind him -- spends 17 minutes reaching for the very roots of the question "Why design?" Along the way he drops brilliant insights into the human condition; listen carefully for one perfectly crystallized motto for all of us, genius or not. Yet all this deep thought, he cheerfully admits, is to aid in the design of a better toothbrush. (Recorded March 2007 in Monterey, California. Duration: 17:07.)

Excepts

You will understand nothing with my type of English. Is good for you because you can have a break, after all these fantastic people. I must tell you I am like that [shakes hands], not very comfortable, because usually, in life, I think my job is absolutely useless. I mean, I feel useless. Now, after Carolyn [Porco], and all the other guys, I feel like shit. And definitively, I don't know why I am here, but -- you know the nightmare, like you are an impostor, you arrive at the opera, and they push you, "You must sing!" [gasp!] I don't know.

So! So! Because I have nothing to show, nothing to say, we shall try to speak about something else.

Because there is different types of design. The one, we can call it the cynical design, that means the design invented by Raymond Loewy in the '50s, who said, what is ugly is a bad sale, La Laideur se vend mal, which is terrible. It means the design must be just a weapon for marketing, for producer to make product more sexy, like that, they sell more, it's shit, it's obsolete, it's ridiculous. I call that the cynical design. After, there is the narcissistic design; it's a fantastic designer who designs only for other fantastic designers. [laughs] After there is people like me, who try to deserve to exist, and who are ashamed to make this useless job, who try to do it in another way, and they try, I try, to not make the object for the object but for the result, for the profit for the human being, the person who will use it.

That is our poetry. That is our beautiful story. It's our romanticism: Mutation. We are mutants. And if we don't deeply understand, if we don't integrate that we are mutants, we completely miss the story.

And here is something: Nobody is obliged to be a genius, but everybody is obliged to participate. And to participate, for a mutant, there is a minimum of exercise, a minimum of sport ... The first, if you want, there is so many, but one which is very easy to do, is the duty of vision. I can explain you. I shall try.

Creativity Original and So-So

This post has been re-visited and linked back to from posts in the future. One habit, which is apparent here, was addressing issues of content and medium in the same post.

One of the problems with sharing through a Google Reader is that it has to be a rss or atom feed. I found what I thought was a great post from an interesting blog GapingVoid by Hugh MacLeod on how to be creative. It's from way back in 2004, which goes to my thought about the often impermanent nature of the web. The usual tendency is to seek only the latest data currently provided on the web thereby missing on a possible wealth of wisdom and knowledge. Of course, the more one goes into the dusty archives the more one has to work to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Innovation, Insights , Integrity has a later post on how to be so-so creative which leads to the one above. The author's attitude towards creativity has changed though. Don't know why the change but things change for all of us. To help avoid being overly dourly philosophical about such things, the GapingVoid blog offers the following created by some fans.

Breaking Further into Blogging

Lately, I have been delving more into the blogging scene and learning about some of the other programs and tricks of the trade out there. There is still the question as to what precisely this particular webblog is supposed to be. It is not a blog in the usual sense. Its true intention is for a limited audience who won't be around for another year or so. First by someone, who by the beneficence of serendipity, finds here a gateway to something they judge as being useful in their lives. Second, myself who will have hopefully created a base of knowledge that can be used to insure that some sense of meaning and ability to create some benefit in the world remains in his life. So learning is the main focus. Still current life craves some creative output and this endeavor can serve a double purpose.

A post in Small Business Trends made me feel better about my own efforts. Anita Campbell started her blog in 2003 and didn't make her first 100 RSS subscribers until about a year later in 2004. Now she is at 86,000 plus. The point is that she was trying hard to get readers. More important she had created something that was of value to other people. She also tells how she moved from being a novice to a professional blogger. See Question: How long have you been writing this site. There is value here, but I am merely repackaging source value and perhaps making some interesting combinations like a fusion restaurant. I am still learning how to cook.

Encouraging Innovation

From the Christian Science Monitor

How companies can encourage innovation
Many workers admit they are not living up to their creative potential. Workplace experts say there are ways to narrow this 'creativity gap.'

Helping My Understanding

All of this work with the weblog, helps to inform my understanding and evolving relationship with the world, even those parts with which I disagree. The truth is that there is a great deal to learn from sources with which we might disagree or see as being outside of our realm. There is also greater opportunity for serendipity. My readings on Kuhn's original conceptualization of the term paradigm shift and those of his critics took me to new philosophical vistas of which further exploration is warranted. These are in Paradigm Shifts from Other Perspectives. The links here provide additional information on some of the authors of the articles.

The Gregory W. Quine article was by Paul A. Gregory, Ph.D.
The synopsis of the Thomas Kuhn ideas was by Frank Pajares
Frank Pajares site has a number of interesting links.

One of the Web 2.0 concepts I am wrestling with is creating a tagging system so that different parts can lead to other parts so those pathways are not determined, but they can also find there way back to the source. If one was to create an overall concept of a Paradigm Shift mind-map, it would include multiple tags dealing with many concepts such as innovation, creativity and leadership. It would differentiate between the terms. Each would be able to lead to the other without being overwhelmed with a the noise of too many irrelevant choices while also allowing the expansion of the exploration when desired. Explorers could then define their own pathways and create their own repositories of information to use in their own self-created personal paradigm shifts.

Contrasting Left, Right and All in Between

My online persona goes 'bravely" where my day job/real world self would not venture. The Online world seems to have no issue with pointing out the error of ones ways which provides a fairly quick and efficient way to learn or at the very least allows one to externally formulate one's thoughts. Marginal Revolution had a post titled Why the Left should learn to love liberalism. Liberalism similar to paradigm is a word whose definition seems dependent upon who is using it. My philosophical horizons continue to expand with new views. In addition to the ones put forth in the article, a recent Freakonomics post lead me to Liz Seymour - It Started with A Question. I may not agree with her answer but the sentiment of inquiry is a motivating factor behind this endeavor.

My comments on the Marginal Revolution article are below. Again it is an exercise in trying to better understand economics and incorporate that understanding into my belief system.

The discussion seems painted with very broad brush strokes from any particular side each with claimed benefits that I strongly suspect would last about a week and we would be right back at the debate. The range of thought within the discussion though is rather impressive. The concept of Free Market Anti-Capitalism is a new one to my fledgling economic education. Though I have to agree with the observation about Professor Cowen's overstatement. Obviously there are more than just two sides to this debate.

The most recent post packages the issues neatly for consideration. It is easy to agree that "actions have consequences and that only fools and crazy people build economic systems that ignore them.", but that advice applies to both sides of the ideological fence. It is also easy to agree that wealth redistribution is always more creative and prosperous than wealth concentration, because concentration promotes complacency and laziness, while distribution creates opportunity. Historical, from my perspective and here all sides can argue, an extremism of either right or left has resulted in a concentration of wealth or at the very least done a lousy job of redistribution in a sustainable fashion. Most appealing is arguing from empirical experience, because reality isn't interested in who's a liberal and who isn't, but only in consequences and experiences. This still leaves plenty of opportunity for philosophical pondering about moral sentiments and wealth creation. I still lean towards what has been described as classical liberalism but my recent self-questioning raises self-doubts about my premises.

One question that has been on my mind. China is often brought up in these discussions and there are many issues that justify concern and opposition to China's current polices - Darfur and Burma readily come to mind in addition to those cited. Despite that the question still arises as to the best means of having China take a primary role in the world economy. In particular comparing it to the path that Russia has taken and the effects its policies have had on its people and where its stands today in the world. Would anybody want a Chinese "Putin"?