I’ve been pushing Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds and Slide-ology by Nancy Duarte to anyone that will listen for about a year now. The two books both advocate making presentations that are more than simply slide after slide of bullet points. This year, I’ve given my MBA classes the task of doing presentations more in […]
Here is a bit from a superb interview with linguist Dennis Baron about the impact of new technologies on communication: Historically, when the new communication device comes out, the reaction tends to be divided. Some people think it’s the best thing since sliced bread; other people fear it as the end of civilization as we […]
One topic that is guaranteed to get my classes fired up is Apple. They’re great to use as an example because they elicit a strong reaction. Consequently, I’ve been giving some thought to some of the issues surrounding iPhones, particularly as they relate to other 3g phones, like Google’s Android-based phones. Whatever you might think […]
Jeff Veen paraphrases Picasso with ‘Good designers copy, great designers steal’. Since innovation is in large part finding new combinations, I think that Veen’s point applies to innovation as well as design. He expands the Picasso quote to include a similar statement from TS Eliot, saying a great poet that steals ‘welds his theft into […]
Recently I’ve been running into a bunch of things that say what I want to say so clearly themselves that I don’t really need to add much. The most recent is this essay by Don Norman on systems thinking in product/service design, which includes: No product is an island. A product is more than the […]
The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. -Jacob Bronowski via the outstanding book The Social Atom by Mark Buchanan My secret to success in innovation – try something (anything!). See if it works. If it does, do more of it. If it doesn’t work, figure out why and learn from it. […]
Do things always get better as they evolve? I touched on this idea recently, and I think the answer is definitely ‘No’. Now Wired has made the point for me again with an interesting article on innovations that are not big jumps forward technologically, but rather simply good enough. The idea is that some products […]
Here’s a video from the people that made the iPhone app Convert, showing all of the different versions that they tried: Convert Design Evolution from tap tap tap on Vimeo. There are a couple of things worth noting in this. First, they experimented a lot. They generated a ton of variety, all of which would […]
Atul Gawande from his most recent book, Better: The third requirement for success is ingenuity – thinking anew. Ingenuity is often misunderstood. It is not a matter of superior intelligence but of character. It demands more than anything a willingness to recognize failure, to not paper over the cracks, and to change. It arises from […]
That’s me wearing my new iPod headphones. Strangely, I caught a fair bit of stick for wearing them today – including a relatively sarcastic ‘nice retro look’. I thought this was particularly interesting in light of a nice post I read this morning called The Myth of Evolutionary Ascent (found via John Wilkins’ blog). The […]
Jeffrey Pfeffer has written an interesting post summarising research by Boris Groysberg of Harvard (found via Felix Salmon). The research looks at the impact of banks hiring away star performers from competitors. Here is the description of the research: Grosyberg studied 1,052 stock analysts who worked for 28 U.S. investment banks over the period 1988 […]
