The Overlap Blog

Mimicking Whole Foods Market looks at competitors that try to replicate another, but the people part of that equation.

Publix, Giant Eagle, Safeway, and Wal-Mart are all trying to replicate the products and experiences Whole Foods delivers, but they can’t replicate the people Whole Foods has delivering the products and experiences to customers. Products and programs do not create brands, people create brands. It’s the people that matter more in creating a brand than do products or programs.

In our Dreamworks/Pixar conversation, we were focusing on the people part of this (perhaps obvious) equation, but still weren’t able to unpack what it was that made the people behavior in a materially different fashion.

Check out Core77’s summary of the Aspen Design Summit (there are four pages but this links to the most relevant page). I’m reminded of the exercise after Kristian’s presentation. We tried to do in an hour what they struggled to do in a couple of days. Just gives some sense of scope and focus needed to even attempt some of this bigger stuff.

Update: I see our own Manuel was there - maybe he’ll have a report for us?

Bruce Nussbaum should have come to Overlap
(he was invited!)

Applying design thinking outside the corporate sphere in civil society is one of our great challenges–and opportunities. Chicago’s mayor Daley is into using design to solve education, transportation and other problems and I believe the mayors of San Francisco and New York (and of course Portland, OR) are open to it as well.But Europe is way ahead. The Brits, Danes, Dutch and Scandanavians are using design to solve major socio-economic problems and we need to follow what they are doing and apply it here in the US. A recent conference in Northumbria University, put on by the Centre for Design Research, at the School of Design, brought a host of speakers to talk about delivering better services through design.

I talked with Tamara Giltsoff of live/work, a British service design/innovation firm, recently. The firms moto is “you are what you use, not what you own.” Love it. live/work was at the conference. Tamara showed me how the local government in that rural area of Britain hired live/work to help solve a major transporation problem. An increasingly elderly population needed to get around and many couldn’t drive and/or afford taxis to go everywhere. Instead of looking at the number of physical buses/cabs/cars available, live/work asked about availability of movement at any given time. How many seats were open in the various means of transportation in the morning, afternoon and evening? Then it suggested putting each into a computer so that a person needing a ride to a doctor at say 11AM, could check in and order up whatever is available. Prices could be negotiated, subsidized, paid in full, whatever.

I don’t know how feasible the concept really is but it is beautiful design thinking that we should apply to our own transportation and education issues. It is not the things–the cars or school buildings that are a problem but the flow, the movement, the content of the issue that should be addressed. And not the ownership, but the use.

Live/work also worked with Streetcar to launch the flexible car rental company that rents cars by the hour in London. It’s a growing trend in the US as well.

Why can’t government use design thinking to solve problems?

As I was stumbling around the internet today, I came across an article I’d missed, written by our fellow Overlapper, Chris Conley. Had I read it before coming, I’d have skipped my talk and just pointed you all to his article, since he puts so much of what I’ve been thinking into clearer, smarter terms. This really should be considered a classic piece of thinking in the Overlap.

Quite relevant to Richard Farson and to Luke’s closing question relating to designers moving in the organization is Chris’s last paragraph:

The core competencies of design facilitate
specific and tangible ways of engaging with
problems. These competencies bring new value
to the way in which business teams work. To
foster the broad application of design competence,
designers will need to feel confident in
leaving the designer label behind and accepting
the label of “business manager, strategist, or vice
president.” Of course, this is no big leap for the
best in any discipline; one will find engineers,
accountants, and human resource professionals
at the helms of organizations around the world.
However, at that point they are simply
called leaders.

Below are Richard Farson’s notes expanding upon comments he offered towards the end of Overlap.

—–

Give up being professionals……become metaprofessionals

Define Meta: A higher science of the same nature but dealing with more fundamental problems. (OED)

Becoming metaprofessionals is the only way to address the great design challenges of this century.

Read the rest of this entry »

Review from the New York Times

With his machine world, however, Mr. Lasseter appears to have tried to do an end run around the vexing problem of the human body with cars that might as well have come out of a Chevron advertisement. Even stranger, the film turns Detroit’s paving over of America into an occasion for some nostalgic historical revisionism. Surreal isn’t the word.

Over the last two decades Pixar has invigorated American mainstream animation with charming stories and sterling technique, reaching a company best with the consecutively released “Monsters, Inc.,” “Finding Nemo” and “The Incredibles.” The age of Pixar may not be as golden as that of 1930’s and 40’s Disney, but it’s an estimable run, especially since each new Pixar feature has reached deeper and higher in thematic and aesthetic preoccupations.

Like classic Disney, Pixar films are invariably traditionalist, with stories of familial and social retrenchment, but they’re also witty and playful, fresh in both graphic and written line. One clunker won’t shut down or even threaten the factory line, but here’s hoping that as this onetime scrapper becomes increasingly entrenched and establishment, it keeps its geeks-and-freaks flag flying.

Given Conley’s presentation about Pixar’s process and Richard Farson’s musing aloud (aftewards, I believe) about where Pixar would be in 10 years, this is an interesting review. The movie will make money, I bet, but it seems like it stinks (not to mention may be slightly on the evil side), and this reviewer is looking at the studio for the reasons.

Mollyguard iis a web-based service that handles event registration, with a simple free version and a slightly more expensive paid version. Might be something to utilize for future unconference-y events.

Podcasting channel for “social innovation”

The non-profit Conversations Network has just launched a new channel about businesses that want to make the world a better place.

A bit of a hodge-podge list, but here we go (and I’m sorry about the way some of the lists run together but this f’ng WordPress editor keeps taking out my BR tags and doesn’t recognize carriage returns in the semi-WYSIWYG (well not all of them) and really I can’t spend any more time on perfecting the visual appearance of a list)
Orbiting the Giant Hairball but more important is Shaping Things

politics lost: how american democracy was trvialized by people who think you are stupid by joe klein (About the rise of pollsters and political consultants since the late 60’s

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer

This Book Will Save Your Life - A.M. Homes

Artful Making
Hard Industries
The Argumentative Indian
Territorial Imperative
Cliche to Archetype
Innovator’s Solution
Blue Ocean Strategy
Strategic Innovation and Management of Technology
Less Than Zero
Descartes’ Error
Actor Network Theory (wikipedia - Bruno Latour)
Don’t Think of an Elephant
Intro to NLP, by O’Connor (NeuroLinguistic Programming)
Difficult Conversations
Words That Change Minds
Bowling Alone
Smart Mobs
Diffusion of Innovations

Christo and Jeanne-Claude : An Authorized Biography by Bert Chernow & Wolfgang Volz

Team of Rivals - the Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

Mr. China: A Memoir
Tom Clissold
One Billion Customers : Lessons from the Front Lines of Doing Business in China
James McGregor
Chinese Negotiating Style
Lucian W. Pye
Tribes : How Race, Religion and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy
Joel Kotkin

can’t wait to read:
American Pharaoh : Mayor Richard J. Daley - His Battle for Chicago and the Nation
Adam Cohen, Elizabeth Taylor

magazines:

The New Republic

Make

The New Yorker

TV (all on Comedy Central, go figure):

The Mind of Mencia

South Park

The Colbert Report

The Brand Gap

Marty Neumeier

Manging the Professional Service Firm

David Maister

Strategy Safari

Henry Mintzberg, Joseph Lampel, Bruce Ahlstrand

Shooting Water: A Memoir of Second Chances, Family, and Filmmaking by Devyani Saltzman

99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style by Matt Madden (also see exercisesinstyle.com)

Jan Chipchase posts an interesting example of trust in a designed experience. Bank customers rank the level of service they received and the accumulated result is shared back to the customers.

In Brad Nemer’s exercise we evaluated the eBay “stars” rating as an artifact of trust/media. Thought this extension of that interface into another space might be interesting.

Jan’s blog is fantastic, by the way. He’s one of the best observers and interpreters of culture-through-artifacts I’ve ever encountered.