EMBA的小眼睛

A one day design sprint (and a developer directory)

In about a week, I'm hosting a design sprint, and I thought it would be worth sharing the details widely because perhaps you should have one too.

I'm poking around in the early stages of developing some new projects, and one of them tries to solve a widespread problem with a new approach on mobile devices.

To take it to the next level, I'm hosting a 6-hour design sprint in my office (outside of New York City) for a few people. The notion (which I have found useful for many projects) is to get some motivated, talented people together to whiteboard possibilities and challenges and to open doors to new ways of thinking. The participants get paid of course, but even better, they get the energy that comes from a collision with other creative people.

For this sprint, I'm really focused on finding people with significant experience and a point of view about some combination of: mobile app development, back end data manipulation and user interaction and design. Background in one of these areas is enough... if you're at the top of your field, I'd love to hear from you.

A Peter Corollary

The original Peter Principle made perfect sense for the industrial age: "In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence." In other words, organizations keep promoting people up the organization until the people they promote reach a job where they are now incompetent. Competence compounded until it turns into widespread incompentence.

Industrial organizations are built on competence, and the Peter Principle describes their undoing.

Consider a corollary, one for our times:

"To be promoted beyond your level of confidence."

Taking the plunge

Maybe that's the problem.

Perhaps it's better to commit to wading instead.

Ship, sure. Not the giant life-changing, risk-it-all-venture, but the small.

When you do a small thing, when you finish it, polish it, put it into the world, you've made something. You've committed and you've finished.

Staffed by mimes

If someone asked you how to do something, would you act it out, using no words at all?

Of course not. Yet, in our increasingly post-literate world, it seems like organizations are afraid to use prose. It doesn't cost anything, and when you post a link, you have all the room in the world to clearly write out a narrative of how something works. You can even do it in 200 languages without too much trouble.

Here's the fundamental mistake that marketers make: Great design often needs little explanation. And so, natural, organic, effective design often comes without written instructions. But, and it's a huge but, the converse is not true. Shipping something without instructions doesn't mean it's a great design.

What are the chances that a guest is going to use this hotel shower properly the first time?

"I need you"

Three magic words. They light up our brain, they grab our attention, they initiate action.

But they're being corrupted by the ease of reach and the desire by some organizations to grow at all costs.

I doesn't always mean a human. More and more, "I" means us, the corporation, the shareholders, the faceless. I is actually, "we," and you're not a part of that we.

NEED more and more means "want." We want you to do this, to buy this, to forward this, to write about this. We want it because it will give us more.

An end of radio

Eight years ago, I described how city-wide wifi would destroy the business of local radio. Once you have access to a million radio stations online, why would you listen to endless commercials and the top 40?

I realized last week that this has just happened. Not via wifi, but via Bluetooth and the smart phone.

The car-sharing driver (Bluetooth equipped car, with a smart phone, of course) who picked me up the other day was listening to a local radio station. It was almost as if he was smoking a pipe or driving a buggy. With so many podcasts, free downloads and Spotify stations to listen to, why? With traffic, weather and talking maps in your pocket, why wait for the announcer to get around to telling you what you need to know?

The first people to leave the radio audience will be the ones that the advertisers want most. And it will spiral down from there.