where I write

Office:

Home:

Design Study Tour – Day 2

Today, we visited SAP Design Services Team. We start the day by me giving a talk on my work on organization designing. The talk was a bit rough as I had to deal with audience in Germany and the session started about 30 minutes later than scheduled. At any rate, I hope I conveyed the gist of what I wanted to say. My talk focused on how the radical digitization and emergence of knowledge economy creates the demand for continuing innovations in organizations and how this creates an identity problem in organizations. I further talked about how seeing organization design as a verb, as opposed a noun, helps organizations address this challenge. The presentation slides are here.

After my talk, student made presentations at SAP design center, in front of the Design Services Team. The first team focused on people's lunch behaviors. They studied professionals and students in terms of how they choose they lunch selections everyday.

The second team focused on the students use of money. They interviewed several students, which are available on their blog. They identified sources, modes of payment, control methods, spending, and experiences. Then they grouped people based on the level of involvements in money management and the spending (overspending vs. no-overspending). This led to many interesting questions and discussions about financial matters for the students.

The last team focused on the daily decisions on the mode transportation. They also have their own blog which is used to document the stories from the interviews. The interviews were based on daily everyday life experiences. They also have a Flickr site with the pictures that they took. They actually reconstructed their analysis process live in front of the audience.

The members of SAP Design Service Team reacted to the presentations. They provided extremely valuable comments and feedback.

The last item on our morning agenda was the talk by Matthew Holloway, VP of Design Service Team at SAP. He talked about how Design Service Team was set up and what it is doing within SAP applying design thinking principles. It was such a great presentation. He talked about how their team is trying to treat many of their problems through prototypes and visualization to change the way the company approach to the problems. He calls it "tangible strategy", which he defines as the articulation of strategy with prototypes. One of the idea that he mentioned was the important role that design plays in organization is to bring predictability.

Below is a video clip of his talk at IIT's Design Conference in 2007.

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=3781576816077810671&hl=en
We had a wonderful lunch at their cafeteria. The ice cream was very nice. Before we left the building, we also had a brief tour of their working environments.

In the afternoon, we visited Neutron — a brand design and strategy firm. They are known for their books — Brand Gap and ZaG.

They emphasize the notion that the brand needs to be built from inside-out. So, they argue that brand building is culture change. They emphasize the importance of destabilizing the established business vocabularies. Design thinking is, according to them, a gut level reactions, which triggered a long conversation about the nature of design thinking and the meaning of rigor. Overall, it was a good visit.

Design Study Tour – Day 1

Today was the first day of the study tour. First, I had to solve some logistical problem. The good staff members at Hotel Diva made sure all the needs were taken care of.

We started with students making brief summary statements on the project that they've been working on. They are making their presentation tomorrow at SAP. Each group picked their own design problem based on the broad guideline that was given by the SAP design team. I will write more about their work and presentation tomorrow.

At 11AM, we had a session with Matt Mullenweb, the founding programmer of WordPress and the founder of Automattic. Matt talked about his view on a wide range of topics including innovation, design, competition, and vision. He talked about how WordPress started as a software, slowly moved to become a platform. It was a beautiful example of how radical change does happen over time in a series of small incremental changes. He explained how the conflicting design requirements led to the invention of the idea of "plug-in". There have been over 8.2 million downloads of WordPress, and there are over 20 million downloads of various plug-ins. This magnitude of market response to the plug-ins led Matt and his team to slowly realize that they are in a platform business. Often, innovation in the products changes the character of the company. Yet, unfortunately, often the company themselves are the last one to recognize it and end up being the victim of their innovations — think about what happened to the original AT&T which created much of the underlying technologies that enables today's Internet, yet disappeared behind the curtain as they did not fully recognize what was going within the Net. He is a truly impressive young man. This is the second time I met him and both times, I've been deeply impressed by him. He is only 24 and students were quite inspired to see someone at his age with formal management education speaking so eloquently about complex issues in management ever so clearly and confidently. I wish we had a bit more time with him. But, we had to rush to our next stop at Yahoo! All students had to run to grab their lunch (I got a sushi lunch box) and had to finish their lunch in the bus.

After about an hour drive, we arrived at Yahoo! main campus. We were greeted by Paula Brown and Larry Tesler. I only realized that Larry Tesler that we met was the one who worked at Apple only he left the room. But, it was good to meet a hero of our time.

There were three excellent presentations. The first presentation was by Marc Davis. Marc focused his talk how we can re-conceptualize what computing means in the wake of Web 2.0 and mobile tools. He focused on the importance of 4W (Where, When, Who & What) and how reframing a familiar problem through the digitization of those dimensions can unlock the wealth of new innovation ideas for companies. He demonstrated several Yahoo! products, some of which I was familiar with. As a part of his demo, he took a picture of me, using his mobile phone, which showed up on his Flickr web site (see it here).

Next was a presentation by Klaus Kaasgaard. His talk mostly focused on the role of customer insight research within Yahoo!. Customer insight research is a combination of traditional market research and user experience research. He discussed some of the challenges of running research group to figure out where the market is going and how challenging it is to pick the most appropriate research method. The best part of his lecture was his point that one cannot use focus group with eight strangers frankly talking about sex. To that point, I responded, one cannot easily use observation method to study it either. So, we left with no proper research method for that. At any rate, Klaus is originally from Denmark and it turned out we have several mutual friends.

The last speaker was Luke Wroblewski. Luke gave a very enlightening talking on why design is becoming so important in contemporary organizations. He mentioned product maturity, rapid pace of change and complexity as three forces behind the recent surge in the interests in design. He included globalization as a part of complexity, although I would have made it as a separate force on its own. But, that's just my own opinion. He argued that for product maturity, design as an outcome is the response; for the rapid pace of change, design process; and for the complexity, the design principle. And he summed up design thinking — although there are many different definitions of it — with three key words: empathy, vision, and iterative. That was pretty good keywords.

We finished our day at a local restaurant, called Le Colonial. It was a beautiful and delicious French-Vietnamese place. We all enjoyed good food, wine and conversations. At the end, we were pulling out our credit cards to pay the bill. Here are some photos from the dinner.

good food

Candy’s new look

He got a knot and a ribbon. Taken with Nikon D80.

Design Study Tour

From May 19-22, I am taking 18 Fox MBA students to San Francisco area to visit a number of design studios. It is a part of a new course that called, Design & Innovation.

One week in Gothenburg

I was in Goteborg, Sweden for a week last week. It was a time well spent as I was working with my colleagues at Viktoria Institute. I always enjoy working with them. It was particularly nice to be there with Jeeyoun. I did not charge my camera battery, so the camera died on me only after two days. This is a picture that I took at a local cafe where Jeeyoun and I had cappuccino.

Digital Transformation Workshop Began Tonight

We had a wonderful reception tonight. All the out-of-state participants safely arrived. Many local participants came to the workshop. Tomorrow is the big day. It is funny to stay at a hotel in your own town. I am staying at the Conwell Inn where most participants are staying. There will be a live blogging of the event here.