metacool

metacool is now at metacool.com

All good things must come to an end, what goes up must come down, all public companies eventually go out of business, and every blog ends up on a new server.

Per my post from a few weeks back, I'm happy to say that metacool can now be found at www.metacool.com

metacool here at TypePad will remain in place, but all of my latest writing and thinking will be showing up in the new place.

Special thanks to my friends and colleagues Piper Loyd and Katie Clark for helping me make this transition.  As Piper says, you two really have wings.  Thank you.

So see you over at www.metacool.com!

The heart of leadership

Like many people, I was deeply moved by the brave individuals who ignored their own safety to help victims just seconds after the recent Boston Marathon bomb blasts. How and why did they do such courageous things that day? The actions of Matt Patterson, Carlos Arredondo, Michael Chase and others in Boston speak to something deep at the heart of leadership.

What is leadership? Here’s my definition: it's about making positive change happen which otherwise would not have happened. Action is key: when you make a difference by acting, you are leading. Knowing the right thing to do, or the right framework to use, gets you part of the way there—but that’s not leading, yet. To lead you must act on what you know and feel is right.

Now consider this brief video from 2003—each time I see it, I know I am witnessing true leadership at work:

The situation: young Natalie Gilbert is performing the Star-Spangled Banner before the start of a professional basketball game, and she stumbles. Just imagine the heartbreak of flubbing your lines in front of 20,000 strangers—at age 13. Thank goodness for the proactive kindness of Maurice “Mo” Cheeks, then the coach of the Portland Trail Blazers.

As I watch Mo Cheeks here, his actions conjure questions similar to those inspired by the Boston Marathon first responders: Of all the adults on the floor of the arena, why was he the only one to act? Why did he help without hesitation? And the big one: why did he risk his professional reputation on national television to aid a girl he didn’t know? Clearly carrying a tune is not his professional calling...

But leading is. Mo Cheeks helped Natalie because, much like those leaders in Boston, he prioritized the change needed in the world over how he might fare in the process of making it happen. He shows us that leadership demands that we act even if in doing so we jeopardize our own well-being. Because life is rarely perfect, to lead we must balance the imperfections of our present situation, abilities, and ideas against the premise of a future where we did not act. What if Cheeks hadn’t rushed to help? He certainly would have avoided embarrassment, but a young girl would have been left standing, alone. Through his leadership, Mo Cheeks not only helped another person, but lifted the spirits of everyone present—as well as all of us watching a decade later. The emotional swell of everyone singing along with Natalie is truly inspiring.

At the heart of leadership is a deceptively simple question: "Am I willing to risk my personal reputation, status, and safety for the good of others?” Sometimes in life it can feel foolhardy to rush in to try and make a difference, but doing so is rarely a foolish act. It's an act of leadership.

 

(a version of this post appeared on my LinkedIn Influencers page)

John McWhorter: Txtng is killing language. JK!!!

This talk by John McWhorter is another of my favorites from TED 2013.  It's elegant, witty, informative, intelligent, entertaining, persuasive.  This is so because McWhorter only gives one talk here.  Allow me to say more about what I mean by that.

Something which I've noticed lately is the communicative power of extremely simple (almost "non-designed") text slides like those used by McWhorter in this talk.  As a speaker, when you employ projected imagery to help communicate the points of your lecture, you increase the risk of distracting your audience from the content delivered by your own voice.  What I mean is that if the image you project doesn't exactly follow the words you speak, or easily relate to them, all of a sudden you're asking your audience to process two streams of loosely connected information.  That's a difficult task and a big ask, because you're essentially asking your audience to process and understand two talks in parallel.

1DR -— how does this happen?

I am guilty of this transgression.  I find that the probability of inflicting this harm on your audience increases when you choose imagery not of your own creation, be it a stock photo or an image that's almost to your point, but not quite.  Unsolicited advice: if the image you project isn't the thing you're talking about, choose a different image.  Or forgo the image altogether.  Better to take McWhorter's path and employ very simple slides with very carefully selected letters and words... just a few.  And those words should match those coming out of your mouth, so that the visuals reinforce what you're saying, instead of competing with it.

This doesn't apply to talks whose entire point is to show visual content, of course.  With those, let it all run free in maximum technicolor glory.

Hope this isn't 2M2H.  10X.  86!

metacool Thought of the Day

"Everything can look like a failure in the middle. Persist, persevere, refocus, and things can turn around."

- Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Seinfeld + Porsche: a shared creative process

To paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, comedy writing and car design are two things you don’t see people doing in public. So here’s a video peek at Seinfeld’s private creative process—and that of Michael Mauer and Mitja Borkert, both design leaders at Porsche. When it comes to revving up your own creative process, they’re inspiring studies.

How do these three creative masters do what they do? Let’s watch and see what we can learn:

Seinfeld, Mauer, and Borkert are all extremely thoughtful about their craft and dedicated to constantly raising the bar for what “good” looks like. These videos are master classes in creativity, with five important takeaways:

Insist on Great Fundamentals. All three know the power of getting the creative rocket pointed in the right direction. For car designs, Borkert declares “...the proportions are the crucial beginning of any project.” The same holds true for jokes, where Seinfeld says “I like the first line to be funny right away.” They don’t spend energy making a lousy shape attractive, or a bad joke funny. It’s about having the right architecture from the start. Seinfeld even talks about his comedy writing in structural terms, saying “...I’m looking for the connective tissue that gives me that really tight, smooth link, like a jigsaw puzzle.” The creative process for both great cars and great jokes starts with great fundamentals.

Obsess Over Details. All three focus on the kinds of details—from minute surface transitions on a windshield to nuances of syllables in a string of words—that none of us civilians ever notice. Except that we do, because when it comes to great things, it’s the overall experience we remember, and that experience is shaped by myriad details whose sum is greater than the parts. Details such as the fun index of a string of words like “chimps in the dirt playing with sticks”. Details such as the depth of an air outlet. At the seven minute mark you can hear Mauer questioning a surface transition on the back bumper of the Panamera. As a layperson, I couldn’t see anything amiss, but you know it was a big deal for them. Details matter.

Pack the Right Tools. For creativity to effect change in the world, it requires expression. Seinfeld’s tools are yellow legal pads and blue Bic pens. The Porsche equipment used by Mauer and Borkert costs quite a bit more, but they have it all at hand, too. Having the right tools nearby deftly eliminates the procrastinator’s excuse of “I could be creative if only I had the right pen.” Pack your tools, get going, and create!

Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Creativity is hard work. Edison’s observations about 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration are true. It can be tempting to take the path of least resistance. But when faced with thorny challenges, gritty optimism is the wellspring for creativity and magic solutions. Interestingly, both Seinfeld and Mauer found it a challenge to resolve their respective tale and tail. For Seinfeld, it required hard work to uncover the breakthrough Pop Tarts line, “...they can’t go stale because they were never fresh”. For Mauer, the right shape for the Porsche station wagon was terra incognita: “...the rear of it is certainly the greatest challenge—we never had that kind of car at Porsche before.” Designers made piles of sketches, stared at clay models, and iterated often to come up with that beautiful 3D Porsche signature effect. Whether it’s a car or a joke, lathering, rinsing, and repeating—over and over—is what transforms good into great.

Master Your Creative Domain (But Then Forget About It). Notice how fluid the creative process feels for Seinfeld and the Porsche designers. A creative process isn’t something you learn in a day and use forever, and it isn’t a set of simple steps you read out of a manual. It takes years to develop, and the more you use it, the more your confidence grows. Drawing, surfing, playing the piano—it’s true for all creative endeavors. At some point you move beyond rote process so that it all becomes your natural way of being, what you were put on earth to do. Then you can create like the masters Seinfeld and Mauer and Borkert, with great confidence, joy, energy, and total engagement in the task at hand. First you master the art, then your own process, then you forget all that and just do it.

There’s a universal creative process we all share—but as many permutations of it exist as there are people on the planet. The point is to be conscious of your own process, and to always be evolving it. Now, I’ll never write a joke like Seinfeld or profile a headlamp like Mauer, but I can learn from the specifics of their creative approach in order to improve my own. In the details of another person’s creative process are the universals we can all learn from.

 

(a version of this post also appeared on my LinkedIn Influencers page)

Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness: General Motors

There's some amazing design work happening at GM these days.  Though I have not driven either model (they're not on the market yet), I'm really impressed by the design work done on two new GM models, the 2014 Chevrolet Corvette and the 2014 Cadillac CTS. 

Here's a view of the new Corvette Stingray:

And here's a shot of the new Cadillac CTS:

Each car manages to capture the essence of its respective marque while also breaking new ground aeshtetically.  These designs feel very confident and bold, and everything from the overall proportions to very small details in the interiors really work and cohere nicely.  I can't wait to see future variants of these two hit the market over the next few years—here's hoping they'll ship a CTS-V Wagon!

Great designs like these don't happen by accident.  And it's not just about having great designers at work, either.  For things like this to happen, the entire business system needs to be well, firing on all cylinders.  Culture and organizational dynamics are key to making great stuff happen.  You can tell a lot about the fitness of a system based on what it produces, and these two cars provide some substantial evidence that GM knows how to generate, develop, and execute good ideas once again.  And that's pretty gnarly in my world.

Nine years of metacool-ing

This week marks nine years of my exploring the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life. 

I started metacool because I was bored one Saturday afternoon.  My wife was out of town for the weekend, I was bored, and as usual I was thinking about cars, meaning, business, aesthetics, technology, life and everything.  As a name in action, metacool already existed as a Yahoo Group I used to blast out interesting (at least I thought) articles to a group of unsuspecting and uncomplaining friends.  Since I had time on my hands, and because I thought it would be cool to write about my favorite beautiful-ugly car, I decided to ape my internet heroes Seth Godin and Joi Ito by cranking out my own blog. 

Thank goodness.  I really didn't care then if anyone read my stuff, and I don't care too much today, either -- at least not in terms of having a big audience or lots of eyeballs or unique visitors or any of those stats that'll drive you crazy if you let them.  Writing down my evolving thoughts here has helped me learn new things and to refine what I know.  And if one person reads them and enjoys them or fires off a dubious email to me, that's gravy.  It's connected me to people who I otherwise would never have met in Real Life, and many of those folks have become good friends.  For that -- and the ability to pollute the interwebs with my various obsessions du jour -- I am supremely thankful.  Yet another example of how much you can learn by doing.

Not everything has been rosy here.  To paraphrase a shopping cart expert friend of mine, "theTwitter is tyrrany," at least when it comes to blogs like this one.  It's so tempting to read something interesting, think a few incoherent thoughts for a few milliseconds, and then tweet it out to the world.  "Hey, check this out, you'll love it!"  But why?  But how?  And so what?  Such tyrrany is why I only wrote a handful of things over the past few years (thank goodness for the Nissan DeltaWing!) and almost let this blog trickle away to nothing. 

But in times such as these, when everyone else is busy tweeting out cryptic sub-140 musings and posting photos of cute little witty kittens, I believe it's a good strategic move to position oneself on a different sort of mountain top.  At least that's what I learned from Porter!  So, as you may have noticed, I've renewed my vows to metacool and blogging, and am trying to tweet less and write more.

To punctuate all of that, I'm about to ship a new version of metacool.  Coming soon you'll be able to log on to a new and improved site.  Nothing revolutionary, but with refined aesthetics and navigation, amongst other things.  Still the same, but better, leveraging a much more modern technology platform.  Hopefully I'll be able to innovate the way Porsche does with its 911: in automotive terms the new metacool will be modern like the 991, but still highly evocative of the 901.

Thanks for reading, and as always, please let me know what you think.  Your questions, comments, and thoughts are always most welcome. 

Thank you.

metacool Thought of the Day

"I give myself 24 hours to mourn a failure. When something fails, I wallow in it for a day. And then I move on. I never let it stay with me for more than a day. But I give it its one day."

- Brad Feld

Failing. And dealing with it.

A few of my Principles for Innovating are more popular than others.

When I give a talk on those principles, the first six are received with a lot of enthusiasm, which is to be expected, because they're all about design thinking, always an empowering subject.  People who get excited about principles seven through twelve tend to be in management positions, because that collection deals with innovating from a manager's point of view.  Principles fifteen through eighteen make organizational design aficionados salivate, and nineteen and twenty always make me want to cheer when I talk through them.  I love nineteen and twenty.

Principles thirteen and fourteen are really bummers.  I hate talking about them.  They suck the energy out of the room.  In fact, when it comes to that contagious buzz and energy you get when things are going well in a talk (for both presenter and audience), Principle 13 is nothing if not a black hole.  "You will fail," it says. 

There's a reason it's sitting at that number.

You will fail.  That's the reality of trying to bring new things to life.  You will fail, and may fail over and over and over.  You may never suceed, actually.  But, some folks are able to take that failure and get to the mantra of Principle 14, which is Failure Sucks, But Instructs.  Today's New York Times has a wonderful article titled "Following Your Bliss, Right Off the Cliff", which examines the failures and recoveries of several entrepreneurs, including my friend and d.school colleague Michael Dearing.

Here's an excerpt from the article.  It talks about Michael's experience with a shoe retailing startup which ended up going out of business:

He struggled to keep the business afloat because, he said, it felt dishonorable to let it go. “I personalized the outcome to a degree that it was unhealthy,” he said. “I thought failure was total and permanent — and success stamped me as a worthwhile business person.”

...Mr. Dearing liquidated his business in what he called an “excruciating” time. He turned to eBay to sell shoes, cash registers, delivery trucks and warehouse equipment to repay creditors and pay his employees’ severance. “I was dead broke,” he said. “This was probably one of the hardest times, deciding whether I was going to buy food for my animals or dinner for me.”

...“I thought I had one shot to be successful,” he said. “I had no idea that my career — or anybody’s career — is actually a multiround process and that you had many, many at-bats.”

...Mr. Dearing would approve. He tells his students that the “suffering comes from being attached to the outcomes.”

As paradoxical as it sounds, he said, “If you stop worrying about the outcomes, you will achieve a better outcome.”

Let's read that last one again: "If you stop worrying about the outcomes, you will achieve a better outcome." 

What a profound statement from Michael, and it works on so many levels.  When you stop worrying about the outcome, you let go of the fear of ultimate, soul-crushing failure, which in turn allows you to focus on the here and now.  Being in the moment is what allows you to see and hear clearly to what life is telling you.  That feedback helps you understand the true nature of what is going on with your new venture, and leads to better decision making.  Being freed from fear not only adds a few points of IQ to your total, but it gives you the courage to run that test, to build that prototype -- today.  Taking action now and failing on a smaller level each day, while listening to the resulting feedback coming your way, ends up giving you a much better chance of succeeding in the end than if you ignore those small doses of daily feeback. 

Michael's advice is a very Obi-Wan Kenobi feel-the-force-flow-through-you-Luke kind of thing, but it really does work.  It's also the hardest thing for would-be innovators to do.  In my experience, you learn how to stop worrying about the outcomes by building up the mileage that only comes by shipping stuff.  The more you ship, the better you get, and the better the odds become of the outcome being great.

John Maeda on creative leadership

Here's a really interesting diagram created by my friend John Maeda, who is the President of RISD.  It's a portrait of leading, surviving being the leader of something, and then thriving and growing:

This diagram really speaks to me.  It resonates with every experience I've had leading the process of bringing something new to the world.  Related to this diagram, about eleven months ago I was in the "do it" phase of a big effort, and I wrote a post here about that experience titled "Climbing Mountains and Wells".  Here's an excerpt:

When I look back upon the things I've embarked upon to create change in the world, one thing stands out: the journey always took much longer than projected.  If that journey was something akin to climbing a big mountain, I spent more time navigating the approach to the base of the mountain than summiting the peak, if you will.  I rarely if ever planned for this "flat" part of the trip.  The mountain peak is so seductive, so sexy -- it's where you want to end up, so you focus on what it will take to scale the verticals.  But as it turns out, it's the long walk to the base of the mountain that's the hardest part.  It's about perseverance more than strength.

Innovating something, be it a stand alone product or a massively interconnected system, involves many more days of getting to the peak than it does scaling the peak.  This is because there are so many pitfalls along the way -- so it always feels like you're climbing something.  Climbing a mountain face or a well, it feels the same: steep, slippery, and difficult. As it turns out, a lot of that climbing happens because you've stumbled into a crevasse or a well, and you have to find your way out before you can get back to your mission of walking to the mountain.  It can't be helped; if you're innovating, by definition you're venturing out through the dark unknown, so of course you'll stumble and fall and have to pick yourself up.

What I like so much about John's diagram is how it gives you a visceral feeling for what it feels like to "do it", to create something new.  You really do find yourself wondering "will I survive?"  Per my thoughts from last year, being able to pick yourself up after a fall (being reborn) sure feels a lot easier when you know that everyone else goes through the same process, too.

Critically, it also shows the need to allow yourself time to reflect upon the change that's been unleashed, and to learn from it.  In the heat of the moment, it's really tempting to "do it" and "survive" and then quickly loop back to "advance".  But that's when big mistakes start getting made, where you harm your relationships with others, and where you burn yourself out.  It's critical to give yourself the time to stabilize and emerge refreshed, inspired, and ready to roll again.

Amazing diagram!

 

 

metacool LinkedIn influencing

 

I am pleased to announce that I'm now writing the occasional essay for LinkedIn as part of its Influencers group.  Here's my debut effort.

What will I be writing about, you ask?  Since my personality and brain haven't been changed out for something better, I'll be writing there about the things I'm passionate about, which all in some way roll up to pursuing the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life.  Basically metacool stuff.  Sometimes I'll write something specific for LinkedIn, other times I'll post my thoughts both here and there.  Please give me a follow there if you're interested to see what comes up.

I would also appreciate any feedback and guidance you might have on future topics to cover there and here.

Thank you!

Wise words from a five-year-old

This isn't one of those posts where a parent brags about their kid.  I do think she's pretty special, but I'm not going to go there today.  However, my daughter said something this morning which I think really nails an elemental truth about what it means to go through life with an open mind, hungry to grow and learn.

This morning my daughter and I arrived a little early at her nursery school, so we sat down together on the floor of its library and read a book together while we waited for her classroom to be ready for a new day of play and learning.  Being there with her is always a highlight of my day.

We selected a picture book told in the voice of a grandmother telling her grandchild about what the child's father was like as a baby and young child.  Some of the illustrations showed a kid being happy, some frustrated, some sad, some hungry, and one was about being afraid. 

Upon seeing that last one, my daughter said, "It's okay to be a little afraid, it just means you're about to learn something."  I teared up there for a second or two.  And then I thought about Czikszentmihalyi and flow theory and what it means to live a life of meaning: if we're engaging with things a little beyond our current abilities, we're learning and growing.

It's okay to be a little afraid.  I think she's right, no?

 

Why robocars and the Porsche GT3 are kissing cousins

Earlier this week Virginia Postrel published a great Bloomberg article titled Why Silicon Valley is Winning the Robocar Race.  It's a provocative look at what's happening at the intersection of digital technologies and cars, and it also serves up a heap of great insights as to why Silicon Valley works the way it does.  In it Virginia quotes digital big thinker and doer Brad Templeton, Stanford Revs Automotive Research Program Executive Director Reilly Brennan, and yours truly.

 I really like the following passage:

The world of software -- Google’s world -- also produces a different mindset from the world of traditional car manufacturing. “Software companies have an amazing ability to release something un-perfect and slowly work their way up,” says Brennan, the executive director at Revs. Consumers anticipate progress, making early adopters more tolerant of flaws and shortcomings.

Of course, early automobile adopters were also tolerant. Silicon Valley is where Detroit was in the 1920s or ’30s, when cars were the newly indispensable technology. Its critics are culturally marginal, while its products remain touchstones of prosperity and progress. It’s only lightly regulated. Silicon Valley’s ever-optimistic innovators assume that if they’re doing something cool and important, nobody will seriously try to stop them. That cultural confidence -- or outright cockiness -- is as crucial as any particular technology to delivering on the decades-old promise of self-driving cars.

I also love her use of "robocars" instead of the usual "autonomous cars" phrase.  It's sounds so much more sexy and interesting.  It's like saying "sushi" instead of "cold, dead fish", and I heartily encourage all of us to adopt it in lieu of the other one. 

In the article I'm quoted as stating that even in the new Porsche GT3, "the entire experience is mediated by computers", ergo the title of this blog post.  The reason I said this is that with the new GT3, the steering, the suspension, the transmission, even the alignment of the rear wheels are all guided by computers.  The computers aren't driving the car, but they do help you drive the car, to give you the ultimate Porsche driving experience, even if you're no Jeff Zwart when it comes to driving prowess.  If you're interested in learning more about the new GT3 and how its systems work, please check out the following video featuring GT3 product manager Andreas Preuninger:

Note well, product managers: Preuninger gives one helluva great product demo.  If you can't talk with this level of passion and insight about your product's raison d'etre, you have to find a way to make that happen.  Either make your product more exciting, or get more excited about it, or both!  Excited product managers correlate very highly with amazing product experiences, and are likely even causal in achieving that outcome.

As an aside, I borrowed the image at the top of this post is from Virginia's article, and it comes from a 1930 Saturday Evening Post advertisement.  It depicts an engineer of the future controling an automated highway system of some sort.  Doesn't his control dial look a lot like a Nest thermostat?

Allan Savory, innovating from first principles

How do you recover from failure, if at all?  Two of my principles for innovating deal directly with the reality of failing:

• No. 13: Do everything right, and you still can fail
• No. 14: Failure sucks, but instructs

If you're trying to push for a better world, you will fail along the way.  The question is, how do you learn from that failure?  At a personal level?  As an organization?  As a society?

Allan Savory gave a stunning talk earlier this month at TED where he described his personal quest to build success on top of a monumental failure he experienced relatively early in his life.  Here's an explanation of of that failure, in his own words:

When I was a young man, a young biologist in Africa, I was involved in setting aside marvelous areas as future national parks. Now no sooner — this was in the 1950s — and no sooner did we remove the hunting, drum-beating people to protect the animals, then the land began to deteriorate, as you see in this park that we formed. Now, no livestock were involved, but suspecting that we had too many elephants now, I did the research and I proved we had too many, and I recommended that we would have to reduce their numbers and bring them down to a level that the land could sustain.

Now, that was a terrible decision for me to have to make, and it was political dynamite, frankly. So our government formed a team of experts to evaluate my research. They did. They agreed with me, and over the following years, we shot 40,000 elephants to try to stop the damage. And it got worse, not better.

Loving elephants as I do, that was the saddest and greatest blunder of my life, and I will carry that to my grave. One good thing did come out of it. It made me absolutely determined to devote my life to finding solutions.

I'll leave it to you to listen to the way that Allan Savory learned from his failure and created long-term success from what he learned.

I can see several of my principles for innovating at work in Savory's work.  First, he is a keen observer of landscapes through time.  He learns by doing, and finds inspiration in facts experienced in the first person.  That is Principle One at work.

Second, he understands that you can learn your biggest life lessons when things go horribly wrong.  This is Raney's Corollary at work, that you only learn when things start breaking.  Avoiding failure at all costs leads to paralysis and nothing ever ventured, but ignoring failures when they happen leads to self-deception and ventures attenuated.  You'll never really reach remarkable if you ignore negative data flowing your way -- listening to negative feedback is what gives you the basis for a smart pivot.  As you can hear above, Savory has fully embraced the hard lessons of a decisions which resulted in the needless destruction of thousands of elephants.  He now uses the wisdom gained to drive his quest to find out the root causal mechanisms behind desertification.

Third, Savory's story is that of an innovator who understands the power of going back to first principles.  As any physicist or mathematician knows, when you go back and look -- really look -- at the immutable contraints and rivers behind a situation, you are apt to make connections about true causality which are impossible to reach for folks dealing only at a symptomatic layer of information.  Being able to step back and look deeply at a situation in order to perceive its essence is a core talent of great innovators.  And it can be cultivated, I believe.  It's what kids do quite naturally.  A return to beginner's mind is what helped Allan Savory create this remarkable process innovation, which I hope will save not just many elephants through time, but entire ecosystems.

metacool Thought of the Day

Patterned by Nature from Sosolimited on Vimeo.

 

Principle for Innovating 2:  See and hear with the mind of a child

Why this Sprinter van conversion shows us what good prototyping looks like

Have you ever held a wooden surfboard?  What a revelation.  In my humble opinion they are some of the most beautiful objects around

Paul Jensen is a master craftsman who, among other things, creates truly gorgeous surfboards out of wood.  He also does the occasional van conversion, transforming the inside of a Sprinter van from this:

... to this format, fully fettled for far-flung adventuring:

In this photo blog, Paul documents almost every build step and design decision of this conversion.  As a builder, I love to see someone else's creative process tick.  It's pretty amazing to see how Paul takes a bunch of rather humble materials and transforms them into a bespoke interior for this Sprinter, in turn transforming it into an adventuremobile.  I want one!

We can learn a lot about good prototyping process from Paul.  One of my principles for innovating is "anything can be prototyped, and you can prototype with anything".  Speaking of prototyping with anything, Paul used 1/8" thick plywood to create this quick mockup of the interior of the Sprinter van:

Each square represents one square foot in the actual van, making this prototype a very effective way for Paul to check his initial plans, improve his design ideas, and communicate them to his client.  The little plywood dude there helps everyone translate the scale model to reality.  It's also a fast and cheap medium to work in, so even if his initial design direction took them down the wrong road, there's not much ego to be lost in chucking the whole thing and starting over.  Much, much easier than going from drawings directly to the van and only then realizing that your client thought that "left" meant behind the driver and now the sink is on the wrong side. 

Now, for those of you busy pivoting your startup's iPhone app to one that actually might make money, putting cabinets in a Sprinter van may seem simultaneously quaint and trivial and even passé, but path dependence is for real.  Getting on the wrong design trajectory bites even the biggest and most expensive of endeavors.  Earlier in my career I was part of a massive online software project, and via a lack of prototyping we overlooked some key user needs and ended up spending years engineering a platform that was ulitmately a dead end.  Careers weren't ruined, but it would have been a lot more fun and profitable to build the right thing in the first place. 

Whatever you're working on right now, I want you to build a prototype of it tomorrow.  No matter what it is, you can figure out how to make a quick prototype.  I know you can.  Give yourself and hour to create the prototype, and then spend an hour showing to people.  Just build it like you mean it, and listen like you're wrong.  It'll be awesome.

Being honest the Harry Weathersby Stamps way

Never underestimate the value of being honest -- deeply honest -- when you're working as part of a team. 

Learning to express what you're thinking in a truthful but respectful way is a foundational skill for people who work with others to bring cool stuff to life.  Which I believe means pretty much all of us.  Too little honesty and you'll have a pleasant working atmosphere but end up shipping something mediocre or just plain wrong; too much honesty and you won't ship anything at all, because the team will dissolve before your very eyes.  Being honest without coming across as a blunt jerk will win you friends, help you ship amazing things, and probably get you promoted, too.  We can all get better at this -- it's a life journey kind of thing.

How dear to my heart, then, is this amazingly disarming statement coined by the late Harry Weathersby Stamps, who was a professor at Gulf Coast Community College.  It's meant to be lobbed when you need your audience to be absolutely clear that you are about to speak from the heart:

"I am not running for political office or trying to get married"

Is that amazing, or what?  Try it out in your next project status review session, and let me know how it goes.

Harry Weathersby Stamps, pictured above, passed away this past Saturday.  It's well worth your while to read his charming obituary, which is American prose at its best. 

 

Read more here: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/sunherald/obituary.aspx?n=harry-stamps&pid=163538353#storylink=cpy

Innovating. Doing, not talking.

Which of the following two propositions makes you want to put down the TV remote and go do something interesting with your life?:

 

"Let's grab some coffee after lunch and talk about  innovation."

or

"I had a dream about how to make man fly - could you help me hack together a prototype for a couple of hours this afternoon?"

It's the second one, right?  It has to be. 

Yes, it's a good thing to get to know the many flavors of innovation from a theoretical point of view, but we're all here to make a dent in the universe, right?  That means doing stuff, and as with surfing or playing the piano, no amount of reading or talking about it will make you better.  It's all about cycles of doing it.

So where am I going with this?  Well, the finale of Ron Finley's TED talk made realized the folly of my ways on this blog.  Here's the key line:

... if you want to meet, don't call me if you want to sit around in cushy chairs and have meetings where you talk about doing some shit -- where you talk about doing some shit. If you want to meet with me, come to the garden with your shovel so we can plant some shit.

My folly on metacool?  Sadly, implying that nouns are more important than verbs.  Henceforth, I will no longer refer to my Innovation Principles as such.  From here on out, they are Principles for Innovating. 

Doing, not talking.

metacool Thought of the Day

“You know, when you are in your 20s, you always believe that the race, that the championship is the only thing that matters.  But then 20 years later, you say ‘Ooohhh, I remember when I was there with my mechanics, with my engineer, talking about the car, going out for a pizza...

So you realize what really (matters) was the effort that you put in daily in order to build something special. Because when the championship arrives, you cannot expect to meet happiness that day, otherwise you don’t get there. It’s the process.

You cannot talk about dedication, sacrifice or stuff like that.  You just do what you have to do because you love to do it.”

- Alex Zanardi

Ron Finley. Guerrilla gardener. Leader

This elegant talk by artist and designer Ron Finley was by far the highlight of my experience at TED last week.  I find it inspiring on so many levels -- here are a few:

I am inspired by the way Ron Finley went back to first principles to find a solution to the challenges he witnessed in his neighborhood, South Central.  In his hometown, the obesity rate is ten times that of more affluent areas located only miles away.  Goods and services are popping up to deal with the problems brought on by obesity, but they only really deal with the symptoms, and not the root cause.  As Finley says in this talk, "Food is the problem and the solution".  Yes, indeed.  Having now listened to this talk three times, I can't help but admire the way he looked deeply at the challenge, and with a designer's mind started to build solutions to enable people to change fundamental aspects of their behaviors which lead to illness and further poverty.  Dreaming of and planting a Food Forest is nothing if not an act of inspiration.

I am inspired by the design of his talk itself.  These days it's relatively easy to mimic the "standard" format of a TED talk: lots of compelling images and words projected up behind the speaker, all there to push the narrative forward.  But nailing a talk the way Finley does here is actually very difficult.  Notice the way his photos and screen texts correspond exactly to whatever he's trying to communicate at that moment.  He avoids the use of inauthentic stock imagery, and the few words projected up on the screen correspond to only those select ideas he wants to have stick with you: PLANT SOME SHIT!

I am inspired by the way he is helping his neighbors to design their own lives.  Especially the children.  He talks about the importance of manufacturing your own reality, versus robotically accepting the path designed for you by others.  As I listened to Finley speak in Long Beach, my mind immediately connected to this amazing statement written by my colleague Tim Brown a few years ago.  Beyond immediate impact of helping people marooned in a food desert eat in ways that are building healthier bodies and minds, Finley is enabling those people to create intent in their lives, and act upon it.  The act of designing and bringing something wonderful to life, be it a garden, a house, or one's own self, is nothing but the continuous expression of mindful intent.

Above all, I am inspired by Ron Finley himself and his passion for action.  As I've written before, my definition of leadership is very simple: it's the act of making something happen which otherwise would not have happened.  In my book, Ron Finley's guerrilla, renegade, let's-not-just-talk-let's-do-something-now approach to gardening is the triple distilled essence of leadership, and that's pretty damn inspiring.

More thoughts on designing from Chris Bangle

A few days ago I came across this wonderful interview of Chris Bangle done by Hugo Becker in June 2012.  I did a lot of research prepping for my Revs Program event with Chris, but I unfortunately never saw this one -- I would have done a much better job had I been able to read it.  It's really good.

Here's a wonderful passage where Chris talks about his current approach to designing things, and the thinking here has a direct connection to his amazing "the fox is pretty because the fox has a pretty tail" thoughts expressed at Stanford:

The other thing I have am trying to do –– and this I would ask your readers to consider –– is to look at the world of design-creativity as an endless stream with many contributors instead of a one-time phenomenon coming from the pen of some famous-star-designer. The problem with “the star designer” is that everybody else who is in the execution process either does their job 100% right or 100% wrong ––like a machine.

I’m trying to empower the people in my projects; to help them understand they are all active participants in a seamless creative change process. To make everyone be engaged and to somehow actually experience a contributive participation…instead of me the designer saying: “Okay, here’s the design, I’ve drawn it, now you take it and if you screw it up God help you”.

I think this is a really powerful set of ideas.  It's vitally important that people engaged in the process of designing stuff make some decisions about whether they want to empower or dis-empower the people around them as they make their way through that process. 

Would love to hear what you think.

 

image: Chris Bangle Associates

Sugata Mitra: experience the world

Last week I was fortunate to participate in the TED conference in Long Beach.  I learned a ton and it sparked a lot of new thoughts for me, which I will be writing about here on the pages of metacool for the next few weeks. 

One of my favorite moments was this talk by education innovator Dr. Sugata Mitra.  It's his acceptance speech for this year's TED Prize.  From the standpoint of technique, I admire it for his masterful interweaving of humor, information, and narrative; for those interested in the art of public speaking, it's a master class. 

Of course, he didn't win the prize for being able to give a good speech, he won it for what he's accomplished and for his vision going forward, and I'll allow you to learn about those via his own words here:

Here's a particularly thought-provoking section of Mitra's talk:

Well, I bumped into this whole thing completely by accident. I used to teach people how to write computer programs in New Delhi, 14 years ago. And right next to where I used to work, there was a slum. And I used to think, how on Earth are those kids ever going to learn to write computer programs? Or should they not? At the same time, we also had lots of parents, rich people, who had computers, and who used to tell me, "You know, my son, I think he's gifted, because he does wonderful things with computers. And my daughter -- oh, surely she is extra-intelligent." And so on.

So I suddenly figured that, how come all the rich people are having these extraordinarily gifted children? What did the poor do wrong? I made a hole in the boundary wall of the slum next to my office, and stuck a computer inside it just to see what would happen if I gave a computer to children who never would have one, didn't know any English, didn't know what the Internet was.

The children came running in. It was three feet off the ground, and they said, "What is this?"

And I said, "Yeah, it's... I don't know."

They said, "Why have you put it there?"

I said, "Just like that."

And they said, "Can we touch it?"

I said, "If you wish to."

And I went away.

About eight hours later, we found them browsing and teaching each other how to browse. So I said, "Well that's impossible, because -- How is it possible? They don't know anything."

Of course, those kids knew "something" because they were willing to mess around with a computer and fail until they knew how to make it work.  Kids are ever open and curious.  They learned by doing.

What's striking about Dr. Mitra's life journey and his ensuring discoveries is that he's so deeply rooted in experiencing the world instead of talking about experiencing the world.  He is an expert on education, but is no mere theorizer.  He is a doer.  He had a hunch, and acted upon it by putting a computer in a hole in the wall.  He learned something from that experiment, and kept on trying new stuff.  Never just theorizing, always learning by doing.

Chris Bangle and the tail of the fox

If my time at IDEO has taught me anything, it's that a creative environment need not be toxic, caustic, or unnecessarily stressful.  In fact, the reality is quite the opposite: if you want people to do great work together, just treat them like competent, intelligent, well-intentioned human beings, and then diligently cultivate the elements of dignity, joy, and achievement which generate a satisfying inner worklife.  People who are feeling beautiful on the inside do beautiful things out in the world.

My fear for all those people reading Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs is that they assume that being an asshole and exociating people within an inch of their life is the key to achieving greatness as a leader of creative endeavors.  To be sure, there's nothing wrong with being demanding and maintaining the highest standards, but when one considers the totality of what one is trying to create in the world, and not just that thing you're working so hard to ship, there's so much more to reckon with:  What's the culture you're creating?  How will people relate to their families when they go home in the evening?  Will people regret any of the things they had to do to meet the standards you established as being non-negotiable?  Ultimately, what's the price to be paid for being inhumane along the way?  Does the end ever justify the means?

This past November I very fortunate to spend time with Chris Bangle during his visit to Stanford.  I deeply admire the work Chris led at BMW and FIAT; I'm fortunate to drive one of his cars and I spend a lot of spare cycles oggling other ones I see on the street.  They're gorgeous, passionate sculptures, and you can't help but feel the strong point of view driving their designs.

He gave a helluva great talk about designing for difference, which you can see in the video below.  We talked through myriad topics in our Q&A session after this presentation, but related to the themes I mention above, I'd like to point you to the response Chris gave to my final question, "Speaking about design, where do you want to go?".  Chris stood up and said something very profound, starting with an Italian saying he's heard from the farmers in his village:

The fox is pretty because the fox has a pretty tail.

You can hear all of our exchange starting at around the one hour two minute mark.  Please listen to all of his statement from that point on -- it's an elegant riposte to the idea that one must be brutal to create things which are beautiful:

 

We create things which are beautiful by making the process of creation beautiful for everyone involved.  The fox is pretty because the fox has a pretty tail.

Girl Scout Cookies and learning to live an entrepreneurial life

Today is National Girl Scout Cookie Day.  I used to not know much about the Girl Scouts, but my wife recently started a troop, and this has given me the opportunity to learn a bunch about this remarkable organization.  In particular, I've become really interested in the role of the fabled Girl Scout Cookie in the flow of the Girl Scouts organization, whose misson is to build "...girls of courage, confidence, and character, who make the world a better place."

From a purely financial point of view, sales of cookies help fund troop activities.  A percentage of sales go back to each troop, so the more boxes are sold, the more money a group of girls has to engage in activities in pursuit of the Girl Scout mission.  Selling cookies is a fundraising activity.

Of course, it's about much more than money.  There's a lot of potential learning to be had.  The Huff Post recently published an awesome essay written by Girl Scout Olivia Ottenfeld on that point, and here's an excerpt:

...the Girl Scout Cookie Program is not really about the cookies, but about all of the life skills girls learn as part of the program. Many people don't really understand that. That's why we're launching National Girl Scout Cookie Day on February 8...

...There are so many positive values I'm learning from selling cookies. There is no limit to what a girl can do: undertaking a service project to help make a difference in her community, exploring new challenges by kayaking in a nearby lake, or broadening her horizons by traveling to another state, or even another country. When I hit the business world after college, I will fear nothing.

So, people of the universe engaged in the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life, I have a simple ask of you.  And I'm not asking you to buy cookies (only do that if you really want to eat them).  Instead, I'd like to ask you to pause and engage in mindful conversation with the next Girl Scout who approaches you to buy cookies.  When you're asked to purchase cookies over the next few weeks, consider treating that query as a valuable learning opportunity for those cookie sellers. 

Whether or not you buy cookies, you can choose to have a quality interaction with that girl by asking her about the project and what she's hoping to get out of it.  For younger girls, ask how many she's hoping to sell, what her troop hopes to do with the money, etc... for an older girl, ask her about her marketing plan, how sales are going relative to that plan, how things compare to previous years, how is the Fiscal Cliff impacting cookie sales this year, if at all, up to and including what she's dreaming of for her future.  By doing so, you'll help her learn some of the key lessions (including how to deal with rejection) articulated so well above by Olivia Ottenfeld. 

Here's a great video which builds on these ideas:

Opportunities to frame one's character and worldview as that of a creator, builder, and entrepreneur need not happen solely in a classroom, not can they.  They happen just as well on a playing field, at the keyboard of a piano, or out selling cookies to benefit your fellow scouts.  Please consider being part of that learning journey, and positively influencing a girl's life forever.

I'll take a few boxes of Tagalongs, please!

A Tribute to Bill Moggridge

Bill Moggridge, 1943-2012

metacool Thought of the Day

MOVE from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

Eating bacon chocolate, living at the intersection

Last week I attended the Fancy Food Show in San Francisco.  It's like the CES of food, with over 1,300 exhibitors from 35 countries showing 80,000 products to over 17,000 attendees.  If that sounds like a recipe for something big and overwhelming, well, you'd be right -- after seven hours walking the floor (even with two espressos and a bunch of bacon chocolate in me), I was ready to cry uncle.  But don't get me wrong -- it was really a cool experience!

Thing is, I am not a fancy food aficionado, nor am I an expert on anything concerning the food industry.  To be sure, my employer IDEO does significant work across the domains of food, nutrition, beverages, water, and wellness, but I'm not directly involved with much of that work.  So why did I take a valuable weekend day to attend this show?  Well, the answer is twofold.  First, I wanted to gain more empathy for my colleagues who care very deeply about this stuff; I want to really understand their passion for food. 

Second, immersing yourself in new places, situations and experiences is how you become and stay an innovative soul.  I'm a strong believer in taking a stroll through pastures far flung from those one naturally gravitates to.  It's not hard to convince me to attend gatherings focused on networks of things, robotics, software, or Porsches.  But, if I only ever pay attention to those types of events, my ability to see patterns or make breakthrough associations across unconnected worlds will diminish over time.  If creativity is about making connections between seemingly unrelated things, then living in a bubble (or even a handful of bubbles) becomes a limiting factor on the heights your imagination can reach.  If you're engaged in the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life, you owe it to yourself to expose your brain to an ever more diverse set of inputs and experiences.

How?  I always think of a point made by -- I think by Buckminster Fuller, I'm not really sure? -- which in essence said that, to enlarge one's scope of awareness, one should always buy the magazine located in the upper right corner of a newstand.  Doing so ensures that you are always exploring an area you don't know anything about.  In 2013 terms, I think this means following random (but interesting) folks on Twitter, letting your eyes run wild on Instagram, and going to things like the Fancy Food Show.  If you only follow people you know and like on Twitter, how will you ever hear about anything that doesn't make sense to your current worldview?

What did I learn at the Fancy Food Show?  I'm not sure yet, to be honest.  I did experience some, ahem, interesting branding choices, such as a breakfast cereal called Holy Crap.  Aside from those unexpected jolts to my sense of right and wrong and good taste in the universe ("...I wonder how they came up with that?" was a common refrain in my brain), I didn't have an earth-shattering moment.  Yet.  And that's the point.  It may be a year, five years down the road where some synapses fire and what I saw last week makes a difference.  That's what living at the intersection is all about.

So, what next for this year?  I'm planning to have several wilder kinesthetic experiences this year, such as a rally driving school, because I think they're even stickier than a purely intellectual experience, and so have a greater chance of really knocking your hat in the creek, innovation-wise.  In that same vein, I'd really like to run a Zero One Odysseys adventure sometime soon.  And I'll also be trying to attend some technology conferences I've never been to, and I'm going to visit a couple of places I've never been before.  Who knows what I'll learn! 

How will you try living at the intersection this year?

 

 

Michael Brecker, Mike Stern, Steve Christopher, and the Art of Infusing Creativity

At one point in David Kelley's interview with Charlie Rose, Rose states that the process of going through life has a way of squeezing the creativity out of people.  A depressing thought.  But if we take it as true, how then do we make sure that the opposite happens?  How might we ensure that everyone -- especially kids and teens -- has creativity infused into their existence?  I've been pondering that question the past few days since that interview aired.

On a whim this morning I searched YouTube for the following video, which dates back to 1987:

As a saxophone-obsessed teenager, I must have watched my VHS tape of this Michael Brecker performance over 1,000 times.  In 1987 I had the good fortune to be part of the 8 O'Clock Jazz Band at Farview High School in Boulder, led by Steve Christopher, or "Mr. C" as we all called him.  We met at 8am each and every morning, which was just awesome -- what I would give now to be able to start each day with a creative hour of music making with group of folks who could swing some Basie or rock out on a Maynard Ferguson tune, too!  Between jazz band practice and time at home, I was probably playing 2-3 hours a day.  Much of my time at home was spent playing with and learning from Michael Brecker's solo album, which was a wicked mix of digital and analog technology, all brought together with his special blend of superior jazz chops and funky see, funky do.  The tune Original Rays was my favorite, and my bandmate Rudresh Mahanthappa and I gave Mr. C more than a few grey hairs as we endeavored to emulate the feel, the emotion, and the total commitment to craft captured by the performance above.

If you've not been able to watch the entire video, please at least forward to the 5:45 mark and listen to Mike Stern's brilliant guitar solo.  ROCK & ROLL.  He totally wigs out, man!  Incredible. 

Infusing creativity: I learned so much from being in 8 O'Clock with Mr. C.  Practical things, like how to work with a creative team of people toward a shared goal and how to stand up in front of hundreds of people and do your unique, personal thing.  It also gave me the creative confidence to formulate a strong personal point of view and to create on top of that; I can think of of few better ways to prepare for life as a designer than to learn how to do jazz improvisation under pressure in front of a live audience.  On a more intangible level, my hours blowing a horn gave me a deep appreciation for the more ethereal aspects of a life well-lied, such as beauty, elegance, and joy. 

Most important of all, I was able to six years of daily reaching a state of flow.  When everything is going right in the creative act, you feel a sense of transcendent joy and power and mastery.  It's simply so awesome to experience as an individual, and in my opinion, it's even better when done as a team.  Just look at the body language of Brecker and Stern in that video above -- there's extremely deep communication going on between then without a spoken word shared, and they take deep delight in helping each other get up to the top of that peak, and beyond.

From the standpoint of pure talent, I was never going to be a Michael Brecker-caliber saxophone player, no more than I will ever be as good a driver as Juan Manuel Fangio.  But the beautify of pursuing flow is that it gives you a chance to experience exactly what the greats like Brecker and Fangio experienced, even if the outside world doesn't quite rate your output at the same level. 

No matter: to be a person confident in one's creativity, what matters is what's going on between your ears.  Do you know how great it feels to be in flow, and do you want to keep getting back there?  Because that's all there is.  If we want to help kids and teenagers feel like all that creative juice in them is brimming with excitement, energy, and a passion to create, we need to help them find ways to wallow around in the marvellous experience of reaching flow via creative expression.  And let them go as deep as they want for as long as they want, whatever it may be.  If they can remember how that feels, wherever they go in life, they'll be able to live a creative one.

 

 

 

metacool Thought of the Day

Designing for Difference with Chris Bangle

I'm very happy to be interviewing Chris Bangle onstage next week as part of an Open Garage series event at the Stanford Revs Program.  Our discussion will focus on the topic of "Designing for Difference in a World of Sameness".  I have nothing but respect for what Chris did at Fiat, BMW, Mini and beyond.  He knows what it means to believe passionately in a set of ideas, and to bring forth change to create something new in the world as an embodiment of those ideas.

The car I drive is a sculpture created by Chris and team, so you can imagine how stoked (and honored) I am to be having this discussion with him. 

I'd love to hear what kinds of questions you'd like me to ask Chris -- please leave a comment below with your ideas, and I'll use them as input and inspiration for our talk.  Thank you!

Innovating means shipping and executing

As a non-trivial coda to my series of posts on the Nissan DeltaWing and the process of innovating, here's a brief account of how the DeltaWing team fared over the weekend.

When we last checked in on this intrepid crew, they had just finished an epic all-night push to repair their mangled car.  They then took their place on the starting grid at the 1000 miles of the Petit Le Mans, and had a flawless race, finishing an incredible fifth place (as the head of Nissan remarked, likely the most celebrated fifth place in the history of racing).  The drivers drove with speedy care and finess, the work of the engineers endured through the long hours, and the mechanics and support team all did their part along the way.  Though racing always centers on the drivers, it's a team sport of team sports, and when it comes to actually running the race - executing the vision, in other words - the team cook and physical trainer are as important as the head engineer and lead mechanic. 

Here's a nice recap of the team's race experience:

Innovating isn't just about killer ideas or designs.  To say that you've truly innovated, you first need to ship something, which means embodying your ideas in a form which can influence the lives of others.  And then you to achieve impact at scale, which requires meticulous execution of the total business system surrounding your innovation.  Innovation is nothing without experiencing the crucible of having to ship, and the discipline of executing at a level commensurate with the potential you envisioned in the first place.

They payoff to doing what other people said say you cannot do?  Just listen to Ben Bowlby's voice in the video clip above, and then remember his joyous expression.  Priceless.

 

 

A new verb for innovators: deltawing

As a boy growing up in Boulder, I attended a wonderful school named Burke Elementary.  An amazing place, staffed with passionate, dedicated teachers, and named for a great American, Admiral Arleigh Burke.  Admiral Burke used to visit our school once a year, and he made a big impression on me.  Why?  Because he was kind and attentive to us kids, but also because his nickname was "31-knot Burke".  That caught my attention!  Here's where Burke's moniker came from, per Wikipedia:

He usually pushed his destroyers to just under boiler-bursting speed, but while en route to a rendezvous prior to the Battle of Cape St. George a boiler casualty to USS Spence (a jammed boiler tube brush used for cleaning) limited his squadron to 31 knots, rather than the 34+ they were otherwise capable of. Thereafter, his nickname was "31-knot Burke," originally a taunt, later a popular symbol of his hard-charging nature.

That idea of charging ahead, going that extra distance in order to make things happen, really struck a chord with me.  You can call it "hurdling", as my colleague Tom Kelly does in The Ten Faces of Innovation, or you might call it being entrepreneurial -- doing the most with whatever resources you have at hand -- or you can say it's about having true grit: to me these all describe the same worldview, one where effort does indeed equal results, where you can make your own luck, where putting forth that extra bit of energy is what elevates the winners.  For folks engaged in the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life, it's an essential attitude and skillset to carry in your quiver.

Back to the Nissan DeltaWing, which will go down as my big point of obsession and inspiration for the year 2012.  Here's what happened to the DeltaWing on Wednesday while practicing for this weekend's 1000 mile endurance race:

In case you're wondering, getting clobbered with a 7G hit by an errant green Porsche 911 (not a good example of how to drive a 911, by the way) officially qualifies as an unexpected speedbump in the best-laid plans.  Fortunately only the car was hurt.  But, the car was a wreck, and qualifying was only a day away.  What do you do?  The DeltaWing crew decided to 31-knot it with a truly epic repair session.  They worked through the entire night and the next day brought forth a rejuvenated DeltaWing car:

Wow.

In the spirit of Arleigh Burke, I hereby propose the addition of a new verb to the English language: deltawing.

Deltawing.  As in, "Things went totally wrong, but we pulled the team together and decided to deltawing it". Or, "I didn't think I had anything left, but I deltawinged, and that saw me through."  To deltawing means to stick with your goals and beliefs even in the face of great adversity and calamity.  It's a verb which all innovators need to know how to put into action. 

If you're trying to be innovative, you will fail.  You will fail many times.  How will you respond?  Your only choice has got to be to deltawing.

 

Learning from Professor Poubelle

Here's a charming video created a few years ago by my friends Bill Moggridge and Bernie Roth.  It tells the story of Professor Doug Wilde.  Here's the movie caption from YouTube:

Doug Wilde is an Emeritus Stanford Professor who suffers from a diabetic condition, but instead of resorting to insulin injections, he keeps his blood sugar balanced by bicycling up a steep mountain road. When this became a regular habit, he soon found himself picking up the trash by the side of the road as he went along, so he has become the single handed Adopter of Highway 84, earning a reputation with the locals for his sterling work.

I just learned of its existence today.  And I simply love it. 

While I was an undergraduate engineering student I took a class on machine design.  The final project was a team-based thing, and Professor Wilde placed us into teams based on data he collected about us using his principles of "Teamology", which is described as "An original transformation generates a numerical version of C. G. Jung's personality theory as measured by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). The cognitive mode scores obtained are used to form teams with desirable high scores for as many modes as possible. The scores also guide organization of the resulting teams."  It must have worked, because I got the highest grade of my undergraduate career in that class!  I'd like to think it was because of my hard work, but I think it was becaues of Professor Wilde's insights.  I was on a great team that made me a better engineer than I could have been on my own.

If you hang around the Stanford campus at all, you'll see Doug Wilde getting around on his bike, just as he did when I was a student there.  What an interesting human being.  I really dig this video because he not only has a strong point of view, but he puts it into action in a remarkable way.  Doing is the resolution of knowing, and see the nice places it all takes him. 

Thank you, Professor Poubelle!

 

Bill Moggridge, 1943-2012

Bill Moggridge

Alex Zanardi: Olympic gold medalist, hero

At the height of his powers as a race car driver, Alex Zanardi used to put on breathtaking displays of sheer genius and artistry, such as this notable victory:

He would then celebrate the sweetness of victory with a healthy serving of doughnuts, to wit:

So if you're Alex Zanardi and you win a gold medal at the London Paralympics, what do you do to celebrate now that everyone and his brother does doughnuts these days?

Why, that's easy: you raise your latest racing machine over your head and pump the sky with utter joy!

I wrote about this inspirational man called Alex Zanardi and what he means to me just the other week.  Well, today he won a gold medal at the London Paralympics.  An incredible feat for any 45 year old in an endurance event, let alone someone who has been through what's he's been though.  I honestly can't say that I admire him more today than ever, because he's my hero, plain and simple.  I'm just happy to see that good guys do win, and that hard work, perseverance, and tenacity do in fact pay off.

And I'm not the only one -- here's what Mario Andretti had to say today on Twitter:

"Alex Zanardi Olympic Gold & I can't stop laughing, crying, cheering.

Purely extraordinary what he's capable of. I love you man!"

Yeah, me too.

metacool Thought of the Day

“I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer, born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace and propelled by compressible flow.”

- Neil Armstrong

Learning from Zanardi

This Great Recession of ours has forced me to learn a lot about myself, and to improve my approach to just about everything in my professional life.  As an engineering student in college I learned what it meant to truly work hard, and since then I've considered myself a persistent, tenacious, and industrious person with an entrepreneurial approach to problem solving.  I like to hurdle obstacles, and I like it when the constraints are tough.  But over the past few years of global economic woe, figuring out how to still have a growth mindset -- as well as how to bring people along with me in the groups I work with -- has been a tough challenge.  As a result, I had to try and radically improve myself and my approach to life in order to get to where I needed to be.  I'm still trying, but I've gotten better.

Thankfully, I could rely on many people along the way to provide inspiration and guidance.  I had someone giving me straight, unvarnished feedback.  Another person acted as a role model and coach (a great combination if you can find it).  And there was another person -- who happens to be a race car driver -- who gave me the best advice of all: keep your head down, focus, and keep cranking away.  Just keep at it.  All of them helped me realize that what I was doing wasn't enough, that I could do better, and that there was indeed a path to get there.

I've written about Alex Zanardi many times before here on the pages of metacool.  He's truly one of my heroes.  What Zanardi says to me is that no matter where you think you might be on the path to mastery and enlightenment, there's always more worth striving for.  It's not about feeling that you're never good enough, for that's an energy-sapping state of being eternally bummed.  Rather, it's about having the confidence to know that life doesn't reward finished products -- it's staying on the path to mastery that counts, even when you're already pretty good.  Zanardi, of course, has a way of becoming pretty good at everything he puts his mind to, and then going far, far beyond that point.  As Dario Franchitti states in the video above, Zanardi doesn't know what the word "no" means.  Plus, I'd wager he also probably doesn't know what "done" means, either.  In Zanardi's mind, he can always be what he wants to be.  And -- most important of all -- he knows that in his heart, too.

What have I learned from Zanardi?  That tomorow we have the potential to be better than we are today, and that the decision to keep striving is all our own.  We won't always succeed, and we'll all have setbacks, but man, the reward is in the pushing.  It's not about being remarkble, it's about striving to be so.

When I wake up tomorrow morning, I'll be thinking of Zanardi, and I'll try my best to raise my game.  I hope you will, too.

 

 

Bob Sutton: creating infectious action

During the formative years of the Stanford d.school, I taught a class with Bob Sutton and some other colleagues called Creating Infectious Action.  The class revolved around a basic question: could ideas be designed to spread?

The answer, delivered by successive student design teams working to spread ideas as diverse as downloading Firefox to creating a pedestrian-only zone in Palo Alto, was an unqualified yes.  Yes, you can design ideas to spread, so long as you pay attention to something roughly approxmating these three key principles:

1. create something remarkable - an idea, product, or service
2. weave sticky stories around the offering
3. identify communities receptive to points 1 & 2, then light some small fires, and then spend time pouring gas on those fires

This week, Bob has created some hugely infectious action around the pathetic treatment by United Airlines of the daughter of our mutual friend and colleague Perry Klebahn.  You can read about it here.

I just did a Google News search on the topic, and over 160 news items have been written about this sad episode.  All of this from a blog post.  And there's more to come, for sure.

United's woeful performance is remarkable in a negative way that hits principle one above: a girl, stranded by an airline, kept from getting in touch with her parents, meanwhile surrounded by supposedly responsible adults who can only take action when they go off duty from their job at United.  And Bob has written some very sticky stories around this, all backed up by the authority which comes from an extremely well-regarded, tenured Stanford professor.  And to the third principle above, it's easy to dismiss this as some thing which just happens naturally on the web, but Bob has put a lot of hard work over the years into building an online audience for his blog.  It's an audience highly engaged with the hard issues of organizations and culture, primed and ready to spread an idea like this -- which reflects the very worst aspects of bureaucratic, disconnected, corporate cultures.

As a formerly loyal United customer who now goes out of my way to fly on JetBlue and Virgin America, I really hope that this sad story is a tipping point for United's management and culture, and gets converted into concrete, positive action.  It's rippling across the web, and it's going to be around for a long time, because it's designed to be infectious.

 

metacool Thought of the Day

“For every negative, there’s a positive.  It’s in everything.  How you deal with life, outlook, how much energy you put into achieving something.  That’s why I detest entitlement.  Anything that’s worthwhile is going to call for some sacrifice.  Nothing worthwhile will come to you without a price.  People think in sports, you have different rules.  You really don’t.  It’s whatever motivates you.”

- Mario Andretti

Innovation Principles at Work: the Cannondale Hooligan

 

Behold the Cannondale Hooligan bicycle.

I hesitate to write this blog post, because I'm the prowl for a lightly used Cannondale Hooligan 3 -- in matte black, natch!  (don't buy my bike, dude!)  The Hooligan is still in production, but the 2012 version only comes in a shade of green which, while really wild, doesn't quite have the aesthetic brilliance of the bike above, in my humble opinion.

The Hooligan is all about Principle 19, Have a point of view.  The Hooligan is a BMX bike fore adults, a ride for clowning around while you're commuting across town.  It's not trying to win the Tour de France, it's not something you'd wear spandex on, and there's nary a spring nor an ounce of carbon fiber to be found. 

What it is about is nimbleness and an extrovert aesthetic.  It's polarizing to be sure, but I have a soft spot for eccentric aesthetics, and so the Hooligan's point of view is aimed exactly at people like me. 

I love it.