metacool

Why management matters

When it comes to being innovative and the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life, does the kind and quality of management matter?

Yes.

I've written before about the importance of having management who knows what good looks like.  I think we'd all agree that a computer company should have people who know the best computer when they see it, and that a restaurant's menu should be the result of a passionate chef.   

Part of the reason behind the emergence of cars like the amazing new CTS-V out of General Motors is the presence of product development executives like John Heinricy, who is the one who pedaled the CTS-V to a record time around the famed Nurburgring.  It may be the most obvious statement of the year, but a simple strategy for creating winning offerings is to put power in the hands of people who know what good is, and know how to bring good to market.  That's what GM is doing these days.  As you watch Heinricy at work in this video of the record lap (via a camera strapped to his head), ask yourself if your management team could take their own products to the limit in their own way.

Glass Houses

A pretty good Billy Joel album, and a simply great day of design thinking I experienced just the other week at the Philip Johnson Glass House.  I was fortunate to take part in a Glass House Conversation hosted by John Maeda on the subject of Simplicity.  Keen readers of metacool will no doubt recall that Professor Maeda's book The Laws of Simplicity is one of my all-time favorites (be sure to watch his brilliant TED talk here).  His thinking has had an enormous influence on my work.

Each of the attendees were asked to be the guru for one of the ten laws of simplicity.  I chose the 5th law, Differences, which states that simplicity and complexity need each other.  I spend a lot of my time designing and implementing organizational systems which enable people to do things they otherwise couldn't.  I find time and time again that solutions that aspire only to simplicity tend toward the simplistic, and those that embrace only complexity veer off toward a morass of complexity.  Balancing the two, and figuring out where to place the complexity so that it creates value, and how to position the simplicity to extract that value, is the art.  Here's the illustrative example I brought with me to the Glass House, a snapshot of the dashboard from a Toyota Prius (you were expecting something other than a car from me?):

The cockpit of the Prius is one of the simplest on the market.  A digital readout replaces traditional gauges, buttons are few in number and highly considered in placement, and even the gearshift is just about going foward or backward or not.  And yet the Prius is arguably the most complex car you can buy.  Its gas-sipping nature stems from having not one but two motors, connected to the driving wheels by a fiendishly clever transmission orchestrated by a suite of chips of immense processing power.  All of that complexity without a mediating layer wouldn't be the car that non-car people love to own and operate.  The Prius is a great example of the 5th law.

I saw the law of Differences in action at the Glass House.  Having only ever seen the Glass House in history books, I didn't have a feel for the complexity of the campus on which it stands.  Over time, Philip Johnson built a family of structures which work together in quite interesting ways.  For example, did you know that the Glass House has a sister structure in the Brick House?  Here's a view of the two of them:

All of the mechanical needs of the Glass House are met by the Brick House.  An underground umbilical shaft connects the Glass House to a feed of heat from the Brick House.  The Brick House also contains a bedroom for those times when one might like to engage in... er, some more complex acts of human nature than would be appropriate in a public setting.  A Glass House without a Brick House to power and feed it would be untenable.  Even from a purely formal aesthetic sense, the two houses work better together than apart.  Simplicity and complexity need each other.

I really enjoyed the afternoon of conversation on design, business, technology and life.  I've had a fortunate life of exposure to some pretty amazing people and experiences, and this was right up there.  I'd like to show you some photos, not to gloat, but to share some fun stuff from the day in the name of creativity and openness. 

An amazing group of chefs prepared a meal for us in the Glass House.  It centered on themes of simplicty.  Wine was served.

We sat at table together and talked and ate and watched the weather go from stormy to sunny and back again.  You can't help but be immersed in the weather in this architecture.

We had assigned seats.  I sat in a white chair and ate more than my fair share of the edible centerpiece, which was quite tasty in its own right.  This is my favorite photo from the day:

What is this all about?

Designing is the process of linking need with desire. 

It's easier (and better) to sell something which is desirable, rather than (un)desirable.

Desirability is value by another name.  A more insiring and emotive name. 

Would you rather be valuable or desirable?

We're in the business of creating desirability via innovation.

Words of wisdom from Jeff Bezos

BusinessWeek recently ran a wonderful interview with Jeff Bezos on the subject of managing and leading innovation.  Thoughtful and illuminating, he had me nodding my head and saying "yes", "yes" and "yes" again.  Some highlights:

On the liberating nature of constraints:

"I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out. When we were [first] trying to acquire customers, we didn't have money to spend on ad budgets. So we created the associates program, [which lets] any Web site link to us, and we give them a revenue share. We invented one-click shopping so we could make check-out faster. Those things didn't require big budgets. They required thoughtfulness and focus on the customer."

On cultivating a purposeful portfolio of innovation:

"With large-scale innovation, you have to set a very high bar. You don't get to do too many of those [initiatives] per unit of time. You have to be really selective."

On the right timing for innovation:

"My view is there's no bad time to innovate. You should be doing it when times are good and when times are tough—and you want to be doing it around things that your customers care about."

metacool Thought of the Day

"I have said that knowledge is the purpose to act, and that practice implies carrying out knowledge.  Knowledge is the beginning of practice; doing is the completion of knowing."

- Wang Yangming

Location Change: d.school Conference Now at Hewlett 201 on the Stanford Campus

ALERT!  ALERT!

We have had a BUNCH of folks sign-up for our conference on Creating Infectious Action so we are moving to a bigger room. It is now in Hewlett 201.

Here is the link to the new location.  The event still goes from 3:30 to 6 with a reception to follow.  See you there!

May 1st Innovation Conference @ Stanford d.school

The Stanford d.school class I'm co-teaching on Creating Infectious Engagement is holding a conference next Thursday May 1st from 3:30 pm to 6:00 pm.  Will you please come if you are in the area? 

We've held a conference the previous two years of teaching the class, and each one has been a highlight of the quarter.  Previous speakers have included luminaries such as Steve Jurvetson, Perry Klebahn, Dennis Whittle, Mari Kuraishi, and Jessica Flannery.  Folks that knock your hat in the creek.

This year is no exception.  I can't wait to hear all of them speak, and Ruggy Rao in particular is one of my favorites. Please RSVP to Joe Mellin at ciersvp@gmail.com if you will be joining us so that we can arrange for the right quantity of tasty vittles and libations.

Where?  Our KILLER new d.school space at Stanford Building 524.  This building is right across from Old Union, near the Design Loft.

Since this is all about creating infectious action, please tell your friends all about it!

 

Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness

It's all about a brand that is based on a truth rooted in getting real stuff done in the world.  It's not about selling the sizzle, it's about selling a steak that sizzlers.  Hot!  And a juicy one at that.

What makes it all authentic is the relatively close tie between the WRX's you see pogoing around in this video and what you or I could buy down at the corner Subaru dealer.  They're a lot closer to the civilian models than anything you'd find in NASCAR, let alone Le Mans racing or even touring cars.  Effective marketing is about brands that are real, not fake.  Truth, not myth.

The ultimate long tail business model?

Here's the most radical version of a long-tail business model yet:

Icon Group International

Here's the video summary:

It's in the mail...

I feel blessed to live with four Eames-authored items in my household.  Especially my book-laden nightstand,  which means a vision of Eames is the last thing I see before shutting my eyes.  That little Eames wire table is the first thing I bought after getting a real job out of college.

Simple pleasures.

Speaking of which, these lovely stamps, to be issued this summer, will be a nice way to send a friend a little kiss of design thinking at its best.

New York Times, meet Alltop. Your disruptor.

Personally, I haven't had much luck with RSS readers.  I suffer from the "weekend barrier" -- I'd rather not spend the time to curate my own collection of RSS feeds, and I often wonder what I'm missing out there that I simply don't know about.

Enter Alltop, a new experiment from Guy Kawasaki and friends.  I like it as brain food: it feels like the New York Times in terms of breadth, but deeper in passion due to the laser focus of each of the "contributors".  It's curated RSS, or perhaps even an edited newspaper, but with a radically streamlined business model, with each of the "contributors" having an individual revenue stream of their own design.  As such, Alltop represents a disruptive business model relative to the New York Times.  Let's see where it goes.

And yes, metacool is part of Alltop!  Definitely take a few minutes to wander through the various sections -- lots of cool stuff!

metacool Thought of the Day

"When I am no longer controversial I will no longer be important.'
- Gustave Courbet

Are people upset with you?  It is because what you've done is so bad it is shameful, or because it is so polarizing, so rooted in a strong point of view that all but the most progressive or forward-thinking people don't understand and "get it"?  Do you want to design for the mass market of today or tomorrow?  Are you designing under the old paradigm or for a new one?

Having a strong point of view, informed by real human needs, is at the core of how design thinkerdoers behave.  They make choices, and thus end up with strategies grounded in the needs of real human beings, real organisms, and the planet, and end up with something whose value proposition is intelligible, which creates real value for a real soul somewhere in the world, and is designed to spread and reach the right people, whether that be a bushel or a billion.

Making choices, taking the route which may be controversial or even painful, is about being willing to live with innovative outcomes. 

Quattro!

I'm happy to say that metacool turns four today.  Huzzah!

Four years ago my wife vacationed attended a yoga camp or something in Hawaii and I stayed behind in California because of work commitments.  Me, at home by my lonesome and wondering how I might learn a bit about how ideas diffuse across the web, decided to indulge my 3rd-grade ambition to be a writer, and cranked up this blog by writing a one-liner about the merits of ugly cars.  Thus was born metacool.*

Some 838 posts later, I'm still at it, and I thank you for your patronage and for the great conversations.  The great thing about taking risks in life and just doing something is that unexpected things emerge, stuff you never anticipated would happen.  I can honestly say that this little blog landed me two great new jobs, a new hobby that routinely transports me to a state of flow, and an incredible group of new friends.  Via metacool I've been able to befriend people everywhere from the Middle East to Japan, and just about everywhere in-between.  I've quite literally met some of my heroes, too.  I am very grateful for all of these human experiences.

My wife has been my biggest supporter.  I can be a bit obsessive about my passion for the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life.  For example, she came with me the day I visited the Ducati factory, the Pagani atelier, Fiorano raceway, and the Ferrari museum, all without even a pitstop for a coffee, let alone lunch.  That's  love.  Please join me in thanking my wife for her patience and support over the past four years as I've dribbled out these posts.  I'd likely be a little fitter, our household a bit more together, and more rested than I am now if it weren't for the time I spend writing stuff here.  But it is so fun, and I've learned so much.  My wife is just great, and words fail me.

Thanks for quattro, let's go for otto.  And flow.

* actually, I already had a mailing list going on Yahoo Groups called metacool.  Blogging on TypePad, as it turned out, is much cooler than spamming your friends.

Introducing a new blog: Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness

Never leave well enough alone.

Spring is in the air, and the team here at metacool world headquarters just returned from a week-long management retreat where, among other things, we decided to revamp the way we go to market.  It's time for some market segmentation.  Instead of delivering metacool goodness through just one tube called metacool, we'll now be delivering metacool goodness through two of these tube structures which we're told make up this internet thing.  More than double the fun, and a new way for me, I mean us, to investigate some passion areas without boring the majority of you all to tears.

If you dig my coverage of the more visceral aspects of our designed environment, please tune your radios to my new blog called Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness.  Where metacool is all about the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life, Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness is focused on the visceral side of things.  If I were to imagine a Venn diagram of sorts, then this new one would overlap 90% of its area with the older one.  One can't understand the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life without understand the visceral sides of things, but many folks interested in the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life bore easily when fed gearhead gnarlyness more than once a month.  Hence the segmentation. 

If it helps, allow me to sketch out a prototypical target audience member for each blog:

• metacool:  early forties, with 2.3 years of graduate school; enjoys a fine red wine and dines on gourmet Vietnamese cuisine at least 2x per week; can name the drummer on every Coltrane album; also reads the NYT, Winding Road, the Economist, and Monocle (but is unsure where the last publication is going); recently augmented the 1964 Aston Martin with a Breezer Uptown 8 bike.
• Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness:  mental age of 14 regardless of true physical age; likes music a whole lot but suffers from hearing loss from standing too near to too many aluminum-block Can-Am V8's;  likes any number of fine cuisines but is equally comfortable with cheese doodles and a fine light beer from Golden, Colorado;  used to read Road & Track, Automobile, Car & Driver, Autoweek, Autosport, Racer, Motor Trend, Car, Air & Space, and Bicycling, but dumped all of those subscriptions for Winding Road alone; recently modified the 1964 Aston Martin with a supercharged Chevy small-block conversion, and added a Boeing Stearman to the internal combustion corral because of the sound it makes.  Secretly prays each night to receive a Ford rocket Galaxie from the Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy.  Or both.

Does that help?  In other words, I am both of these blogs, and they are both me.  I want to have a way to explore visceral stuff more deeply without turning off the rest of you.  I am mildly dismayed when metacool is called a "car blog" (it isn't -- I merely use cars as a lingua franca to talk about innovation), but I would love it if Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness were labled as such.  One of my favorite public intellectuals is Russell Davies, and all I'm really doing here is aping him or Kevin Kelly, each of whom maintain a nice collection of inter-related blogs.  Looking at what Russell does, hopefully Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness is to metacool as eggsbaconchipsandbeans is to we're as disappointed as you are.

This new blog is a working prototype.  The graphic design is rough, and some of you loyal readers will recognize some older content.  Thank you for patience and feedback as it moves forward.

Let me know what you think by dropping me a line or leaving me a comment.

AFAQS*:

• Why are you wasting your life blogging about cars?  Well, I don't really blog about cars that much.  But I believe it is vitally important to understand the visceral side of things if we're going to make much progress on planet Earth.  Why doesn't everyone drive a fuel-efficient car?  Why doesn't everyone ride a bike instead of driving a fuel-efficient car?  Why don't we ride public transportation?  All of these have to do with what I call the challenge of making green red, and unless you dive deep in to our reptilian psyches as I plan to do here, I think you lose the big picture.
• Will there be less Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness on metacool?  No.  But there will be more at Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness.
• Will the character of metacool change?  I think so, but only gradually.  When I started writing metacool, I was but a lad in my early thirties without a care in the world and a hot 240-horsepower car in the garage.  Now I'm an old man with two kids, a mortgage, and a real job, and my hot car now gets out-dragged by a Camry from Hertz.  As I move through the world, I'm actually less interested overall in aesthetics and product-related stuff, and more interested by macro economics, psychology, and organizational dynamics.  I hope metacool continues to be interesting across those domains.

Oh my goodness, this has to be the most boring post I've ever written.  Let's get back to business!

Ship it!  JFCI!

Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness

* Anticipated to be Frequently Asked Questions

 

metacool Thought of the Day

"I've always thought that being early is a bit like being lucky. If you're early good things happen."

- Russell Davies

Presenting the Lutzinator

A while back I wrote about the crazies at Ducati tapping in to the power of co-creation.  By promising to use a  name submitted over the web for its new G8-based car/pickup, Pontiac is pushing that idea harder.  If you go to Tame the Name, you too can submit a name for this new product.  How cool is that?  Go ahead, submit a few. 

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: when it comes to using the web to push the frontiers of marketing, the people at GM know what they are doing.  I love this initiative: good marketing takes guts, and Pontiac is about to enjoy a true brand renaissance.  They finally have fantastic product (but perhaps poorly timed, given $4 gas...) and it appears as though their marketing folks are working hard to shed any remnant of their screaming-chicken past.  Another decade of this kind of execution and Pontiac will be the new BMW.  I kid you not.

Messing around with virality in Facebook

I'm a big believer in knowing by doing.  So in preparation for my upcoming Stanford class on Creating Infectious Engagement, which will involve a viral marketing project for Facebook, I've been messing about a bit over in their part of the world.

This past weekend I set up a "I'm a fan of" page on Facebook for the Stanford d.school.  Using some tools built in to Facebook, I sent notice of this fan page to four key connected mavens, and have been tracking the membership stats over the subsequent days.  Here's what the curve looks like, tracking the total number of fans at the end of each day (or at my 10pm bedtime, to be more precise):

I'm not sure what to think about these results.  Any comments or ideas from Facebook and/or marketing gurus would be great. 

Jill Bolte Taylor at TED2008

This is the first of my three favorite talks from TED2008.  Not only does Jill Bolte Taylor use the best stage prop I've ever witnessed in a live speech, but she manages to talk about left brain and right brain in a way that helps us understand the power of living with a truly whole mind. 

Her presentation blew me away the first time I heard it, and my second and third viewings have been just as powerful.  I've already made some changes in my life as a result of her words.

Want an innovative culture? Status differences blow

When it comes to bringing cool stuff in to the world, I'm a big fan of Honda.  If you've been around metacool for any period of time, then you know that I admire Honda a great deal.  I've written about Honda's ability to innovate on a routine basis, about the fact that it is led by someone who really -- really! -- knows the business, about its ability to advertise truth rather than myth, about the pickup they make which I dearly want and am only waiting for the diesel model to arrive to purchase, and about kick-ass minivan race cars made by Honda's own employees on their own time because, well, kick-ass minivans are a kick in the ass if you're a racer.  Just about everyone at Honda, it would seem, is a racer, as explained in this great article in Fortune:

Unlike Toyota (TM), which is stodgy and bureaucratic, Honda's culture is more entrepreneurial, even quirky. Employees are paid less than at the competition, and advancement is limited, given Honda's flat organization. Their satisfaction and fierce loyalty to the company come from being around people like themselves - tinkerers who are obsessed with making things work.

At the risk of making a broad generalization, I would say that innovative startups and more mature organizations capable of innovating on a routine basis (like Honda) share two key elements in common:  first, a remarkable lack of status differences among employees, and second, a low-friction environment when it comes to the meritocracy of ideas.  I actually believe the latter is a function of the former.  Why? 

We all have 24 hours a day to live our lives.  We have finite time and energy at our disposal.  If we all start with the same account balance, some of us choose to spend it worrying about what our boss's boss thinks about us, or on over-preparing for that internal review meeting, or on wondering what our growth path is.  Others say "this is this" and get on with being generative, pushing ideas as far as they can go, and helping others see what works by gathering real evidence from the world and letting opinions fall by the wayside.  Status differences are energy sinks.  Do you want to spend your life worrying or producing?  Dramatic status differences lead to dramatic wastes of energy. 

Show me a group of people who worry less about where others think they stand, and more about how things are really going and how they might do things better and cooler, and mark my word, that's the group of innovators.

A wonderful example of a disruptive business model

Here's a great example of a low-end disruptive business model: Psychotherapy for All

The more I work on the creation of disruptive business models, the more I'm convinced that there's almost always room for a disruptive model.  One just needs to start with human needs and look hard, work hard for it.  The design process needs constraints.  A lack of viable solution spaces is more a reflection of poor innovation process than a statement of fact; it is a lack of generative contraints which leads to dead ends. 

I can think of no better design constraint for the genesis of disruptive business models than trying to serve the needs of people living on a few dollars a day.  What, for example, might happen to pace of innovation in our US healthcare system if we were to take notes on disruptions such as this one, or from the Aravind Eye Care System? 

Stanford d.school viral marketing course rides again!

If you are a Stanford graduate student and want to get some sticky experience in designing stuff to be viral, please sign up for Creating Infectious Engagement.  This course is the third iteration of a vein of intellectual inquiry which began with Creating Infectious Action (CIA) two years ago, and became Creating Infectious Action, Kindling Gregarious Behavior (CIA-KGB) last year.  Is there a government agency named CIE anywhere on the planet?  Let me know about that one.

As usual, the d.school experience is all about team teaching, because it increases variance.  I have the pleasure of joining an illustrious, experienced, and fun teaching team for the class:  Debra Dunn, Perry Klebahn, Kerry O'Connor, and Bob Sutton.  We'll be doing projects for Facebook and the Climate Savers  Computing Project.

You can find out more about the class at Bob's blog.  The class is for registered Stanford graduate students and will likely be the most work of any class you've ever taken at Stanford.  If you are interested in applying to the class, please send a resume and statement to CIEapplication@lists.stanford.edu (no more than 500 words) about why you are interested in taking the class and will be a constructive part of it.  Additionally, please list your experiences, if any, with d.school classes.  Applications are due March 15 and admissions to the class will be announced on March 19.    Also, if you have any questions, please write Debra, Kerry, or Bob.

Director's Commentary: Amia Chair

Here's a marvellous Director's Commentary about the Amia chair.  Thomas Overthun, a colleague of mine from IDEO, and Bruce Smith of Steelcase take us through its genesis.

Watch the video, and find out why an integral part of innovating is being willing to cut everything in half.  It's all about strategy that makes your hands bleed: I challenge you to find something in your work life that you should cut in half on the bandsaw, if only metaphorically.

Why not?

Adios, WoW!

Like my fellow blogger John, I recently quit World of Warcraft.  It wasn't just about saving the $15/month I was blowing on a game I wasn't playing anymore; many issues played a role in my decision, to wit:

1. WoW just isn't as cool anymore.  Ah, you say, it was never cool!  Oh, but it was.  WoW is the most amazing piece of "flow design" -- the art of matching challenge to skill -- that I've ever had the pleasure to use.  Pair its ability to put one in a state of flow with some beautiful graphics and an easy to use platform for social networking, and you've got one sticky game.  Cool, even.  But what is hip today soon becomes passe, and I fear that WoW has become a victim of its own success, becoming too familiar and too big.  And, to paraphrase a statement I heard over the weekend, advertising is the penalty companies pay for being uninteresting: I knew I had to quit WoW when I saw the commercial featuring Mr. T.  In its heyday, WoW didn't need mass advertising.  (cash cow)*(milking it) = uninteresting
2. Per the wisdom of Bob Sutton, I decided I had enough power, fame, glory, and material wealth.  In WoW, that is.  When you're a level 70 Hunter and your equipment is good enough to not get killed every five minutes, and you've got a pet bear named Yogi who you love like a... dog, and your outfit couldn't be more Darth Vader, and you finally built that gyrocopter to validate all those hours spent getting your engineering up to 350, there just isn't much more left to life.  With all of this achieved, I quickly fell off the challenge/skill matching curve and the flow stopped flowing.
3. Opportunity costs.  I'm all about learning by doing, and I learned a lot from tooting around the world of WoW.  I learned about designing for flow, and got a glimpse of what the future of truly social software may hold.  Enough, even, to get a journal article out of it.  Now that the learning is under my belt, I'm ready for the next thing.  What should I do?  Let me know if you have any ideas.

But I'm more than a little bummed.  I miss Diegoman a bunch already.  Sniff sniff, sniff sniff.

metacool Thought of the Day

"Human progress depends on unreasonable people. Reasonable people accept the world as they meet it; unreasonable people persist in trying to change it."

- Bob Geldof

(via G.B. Shaw)

TEDding...

I'm blogging a bit from TED this week over at the TEDBlog.  I'm not trying to blog about big stuff said on stage, as there's lots of "small" interesting stuff scattered around the conference.  I just wrote one post, more to come if I can tear myself away from the Google coffee bar.

RIP, Paul Frère

Paul Frère, a singular driver, engineer, and journalist.  A big hero of mine.

Brand evolutions

Here's some brain fodder to play with the next time you're stuck in traffic: Evolution of Car Logos

Just look at the evolution of the SAAB badge.  Amazing how much churn there is on the automotive branch of the tree for a brand which only emerged after WWII:

Myself, I like the 1949 badge the best.  Don't like the screaming chicken so much.  How does one say "Burt Reynolds" in Swedish?

As I look through this site, I have to admit that many of the older badge renditions are at least as compelling as their replacements, and often more so.  Having been a brand manager at one point in my peripatetic career, I sense that the rationale for many brand revisions or logo redesigns are rooted more in internal politics and the need to do something tangible for one's yearly performance review than in market needs.  In other words, most customers probably don't care if your new logo is slightly better than your old one, especially if they just finally got used to the old one, because it has only been the old for the three years that have passed since the last redesign.  As with management, sometimes the best marketing may be no marketing at all...

Anyway, it's fun stuff.  Thanks to Tim for pointing me to this link!

Rethinking management education, organizing for routine innovation, Charles Eames, and the importance of holding the air gun trigger down

Just the other week I had the pleasure of dropping in on one of Bob Sutton's graduate courses at Stanford.  I was supposed to be on paternity leave, but if you haven't noticed yet, I have this thing for racing and cars, and well, it's only a ten-minute walk to the Stanford campus from where I live, and my wife is a kind and charitable soul when it comes to indulging my passion for gearhead gnarlyness.  Call it a busman's holiday. This particular class (pictured above) deals with navigating innovations through complex organizations.  Yes, that's a real NASCAR racer.  Yes, those are real live Stanford graduate students.  And yes, that's what February in California looks like.

So what's going on in the photo?  A very interesting exercise in teamwork which exposes and illuminates all sorts of juicy issues in organizing for innovation.  In this class, Sutton, co-teacher Michael Dearing, and guest lecturer Andy Papathanassiou of Hendrick Motorsports get teams of students to go through the process of changing the tires on a NASCAR machine.  It is harder than it looks: the tires and rims are heavy, the car wants to fall of the jack (well, it is on jack stands, but it feels like it wants to fall off), and the lug nuts seem to be cross-bred with jumping beans.  You can read more about the class exercise here and here.

After 60 minutes of watching teams of students go from zero to hero in terms of their tire-changing acumen, my head was buzzing with lessons for those studying the art and science of bringing cool things to life:

1. Mind your modalities:  How do you want to grow?  What are you trying to accomplish?  At first glance, changing a tire is easy, right?  Take it off, grab a new one, bolt it on.  But how might one reduce the cycle time by 10%?  50%?  90%?  How would you organize teams to reach those goals?  And on the other hand, how do you create teams that are able to change tires in a hurry in the heat of the Daytona 500 without missing a beat?  And how do you get one team or organization to be good at both innovating and executing?  I think it is all about minding your modalities, knowing what you are shooting for at any instant.  If we want to commit to taking 20% off of our tire changing times over the course of a racing season, perhaps we need to start an R&D department whose function is to create extreme variance, to find those weird solutions that will lead to paradigm shifts.  And perhaps we need to establish a test team whose job it is to sort through the revolutionary stuff coming out of R&D in the name of focusing and honing a few promising solutions.  And then we need to find a way to train our front-line team so rigorously that they can execute flawlessly on that killer idea birthed in R&D, and matured by the test team.  Minding modalities is about recognizing when it's about business by design versus business as usual, and structuring and leading things accordingly.  It's about embracing variance when it is needed, and driving it out when it is not.   The best racing teams, such as Hendrick, Penske, and Ferrari, know how to do both.  They are masters of innovation modalities.
2. Seek out constraints:  when staring in to the abyss of a blank sheet of paper, constraints provide a vital toehold, a way forward.  Not necessarily the way forward, because rarely is innovating a linear process, but a way forward nonetheless.  NASCAR is an incredibly constrained environment when it comes to the design and operation of race cars.  Everything is templatized and mandated to the nth degree by a central organization.  And yet, creativity flourishes, the leading edge continually moves forward, and the garden blooms.  Sure, there are some a few "cheating" weeds here and there, but that's racers being racers.  Cheating is just a way of signaling that that a constraint is likely invalid.  Constraints = Progress.  Infinite possibilities lead to stasis.
3. Organize for information flow:  How do you design an organization so that it can innovate where it needs to innovate and execute when it needs to execute?  Here's a clue: drawing org charts won't get you there.  Ideally, one thinks first about critical information flows which need to occur in order for certain outcomes to be realized.  Once those information flows are identified, the organizational structure emerges fairly organically, with an org chart as a by-product.  I was thrilled to meet Andy Papa at this class exercise, because Hendrick does a wicked job of organizing for creative information flow.  As a pioneer of the multi-car team in NASCAR, Hendrick has cracked the code on how to structure an organization such that variance-reducing, execution-minded focus (separate teams each competing to win the NASCAR cup) can coexist with a non-zero, variance-embracing, innovation-seeking worldview (everyone in the organization sharing information in order to identify patterns which lead to revolutionary and evolutionary innovations, and hopefully, victory for all).  Racing teams have no choice but to evolve or die, and to make tough choices or cease to be relevant, so I often look to them for inspiration when faced with organization design challenges in my own work.  You read it here first:  Hendrick is the New Apple.  Or the new GE.
4. Learn by Doing: I'm entering broken-record mode here, but the teams that did the best in this class challenge were those that dove in and started changing tires.  Instead of arguing over who would be the CEO of rickybobbytirechangers.com, and who would be leading the war for talent, these teams got down on the ground and got their hands dirty.  By the wail of the air gun, thee too shall witness one's strategy emerge.  And so it happened -- the best way around a NASCAR wheelwell can't be thought through in one's head, but has to be iteratively solved with hand and heart and brain.  In other words, strategy that makes your hands bleed.

Note to self: if ever I find myself swapping out new rubber in a big hurry, keep the trigger down on the air gun.  WFO, baby!

Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness

The Timbuk2 Steve Sleeve for the MacBook Air

It's Eccentric Clamp Day

Did you forget? Join all of us at metacool in celebrating February 8 as Eccentric Clamp Day

Tell your friends!  Gearheads of the world, unite!

metacool Thought of the Day

"I suddenly understood with great clarity that nothing in life—except death itself—was ever going to kill me. No meeting could ever go that badly. No client would ever be that angry. No business error would ever bring me as close to the brink as I had already been."

- David E. Davis, Jr., on the liberating effects of the automobile accident which almost claimed his life

The most interesting blog post I've read in 2008

Mr. Rogers, The US Senate, Mary Baker Eddy, A Sneaker Sanctum: Just Another Day in the Neighborhood

Matte is the New Black, continued

It seems I'm not the only one enamored of satin finishes. 

Rob Poltras of I Love Substance has been tracking this trend for the past year.  Check out his portfolio of mattness: Catching Up on Flat Black Hotness

Matte is the New Black

Last weekend, as I tended to my newest market offering's complex fluidic thermodynamic power systems in the wee hours of the morning, I flipped on the tube and watched more than a few laps of the 24 Hours of Daytona.

A Mazda RX-8 (pictured above) won its class, beating out a gaggle of Porsche 911's for the honor.  In no sense a stock car (see the video at the end of this post for a walkaround this full tube-framed racer), this RX-8 nonetheless points to the future of car design for us civilians: look closely and you'll notice that the paint isn't glossy.  Instead, the luscious carbon fiber panels on this machine are matte black, or satin if you will.  Wax not needed or desired.

We've been raised to believe that gloss is good, that shiny equals quality.  Those days are over.  Hear this now: the cult of the waxed car body is melting, and this RX-8 represents the tipping point.  Sure, beating the 911's at Daytona is a win for the ages, but sporting a matte finish and finishing first -- that's a tipping point.  If manufacturing and repair (how do you buff out a matte finish?) issues can be solved, I think we'll start to see a lot of matte paint jobs rolling around.  And a lot of them will likely be dirt-shedding nano particle finishes.  Even cooler.  We've already see matte paint on show cars from BMW and Lamborghini. 

Matte is the New Black.

Here's a video of the Daytona-winning RX-8 from the driver's seat (oh, the wail of a rotary motor!):

And here's an extra treat in the form of a most gnarly walkaround the car in the presence of race Nick Ham.  Check out the paint (shown to best effect toward the end of the video):