“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”
Steve Jobs

We all know a bad design when we see it. We not only remember them, but also share our experiences with others. But, it is the good designs that we admire and hopefully remember the most. Maybe it is the gorgeous look and simplicity of use of the iPod, or the one-hand-slide action of Motorola’s PEBL, or new and ingenious packaging like HP laptops, or some new online experience. The unforgettable designs are multi-dimensional. The best designs influence and enhance many aspects of our lives through interaction with those products/services — from our buying experience, to the delivery and packaging, to installation and use, to other products/services that complement it, to customer support and maintenance, all the way through end-of-life and disposal.

Design is the trendsetter. It is the translation of an idea to the final product. It has incorporated itself into every aspect of our lives, and became the ubiquitous element in our lives. “You can have any color you want as long as its black.” was Henry Ford’s manufacturing design revolution that triggered mass production. Today, design is yet again at center stage with the green revolution: good design is sustainable design. Good design delivers maximum impact to the customer with minimum impact on the resources of our planet. Good design contributes to the triple bottom line: economic, social and environmental.
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Are you sabotaging your own productivity and leadership efforts? Here is a list of work habits that should be changed, whether they are demonstrated by you or someone on your staff. Let us know what else should be added to this list.

1. Accepting ambiguous meeting invites — Just say “no” to meeting invites that have no clear agenda or purpose, and don’t send out any either. It doesn’t just look clueless and unprofessional, but it also demonstrates a lack of understanding of who the needed decision makers are.
2. Feeding your addiction — Stop accompanying your laptop or crackberry, or worse — both, to every meeting. You can’t be fully present if you allow distractions. Remember, multitasking is the wolf in sheep’s clothing, and definitely hurts your meeting’s productivity.
3. Continuously negating yourself — Stop starting sentences with “But”. It adds no value and negates everything you said up to that point.
4. Living a life of excuses — Excuses are an acknowledgment of failure. Excuses don’t deliver results. So, don’t let excuses and excusers run circles around you, and instead keep the focus on the goal, the desired results and how to get there.

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“Where some see control freakery, others see a desire to craft a seamless, end-to-end user experience. Instead of perfectionism, there is the pursuit of excellence. And, instead of screaming abuse, there is the passion to make a dent in the universe.”
–Leander Kahney

Yes, the book is repetitive. Yes, it is an extrapolation of compiled sources in an attempt to explain what might be going on inside Jobs’ head and how it has shaped Apple. Regardless, it is an interesting read as the author has pulled together various aspects of Jobs’ style, drive, passion and obsession in order to give us a hint of what makes Apple tick.

I don’t believe I would get any arguments by stating that Steve Jobs has molded Apple in his image. Jobs’ core value of developing easy-to-use technology for individuals, coupled with his love of design excellence (where design is the function), has shaped Apple’s innovation strategy: shape the technology to the customer’s needs, instead of forcing the user to adapt to the technology. By owning hardware, software, online services and everything in between, Jobs successfully controls the end-to-end customer experience, and thereby delivers on his core value: products that work seamlessly together and seldom break down.
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Change is hard, managing change is even harder. As I mentioned in my previous post, change, even the idea of change, generates resistance. Therefore, change management is about effectively overcoming resistance to successfully achieve the desired results..

As the above image highlights (note: original source is unknown), many key factors need to be aligned for successful change management. Below are some additional factors that must be managed in addition to vision + skills + incentives + resources + action plan.
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Recently I coached an executive that is struggling to build a culture of accountability and high-performance. In an organization, everyone, from the ground level to the board room, contributes to the organization’s culture. However, as leaders and senior executives, we carry the most influence. Through our actions, conversations, performance and results, we demonstrate what our values are and their importance to the organization.

Yes, cultural change, or any change for that matter, is hard and requires effort. Lets face it, anytime we are asking an organization to improve quality, increase productivity or boost creativity, we are asking people to make a change to what they were doing and how they were doing it. Robert Maurer (One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way) argues that our brains are wired to resist change. Any new change, whether it is a challenge, opportunity or desire, immediately triggers our amygdala response creating the desire to fight-or-flight.
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We live in a world of constant change, where firms need to focus on their operational bottom line more than ever. Yet, at the same time, our customers are not just judging us on our products, price and service, but also on our social and environmental impact. It is now all about our triple bottom line: financial, environmental and social performance.

Lets review innovation and sustainability definitions from previous posts.

• Innovation is about the implementation of a new idea for the purpose of creating value: value for the firm and value for the consumer.
• Sustainability is achieving outcomes that can be maintained indefinitely without depleting the support system or endangering present and future needs.

With that, it only makes sense to incorporate sustainability and sustainable business and management practices to our innovation process, and more importantly ensure it is the foundational principle of our innovation management activities. To refresh, innovation management is focused on managing and directing the firm’s resources and energy utilized for innovation to generate successful economic and competitive rewards.

As always, we have to tailor the concept of sustainability to our situation at hand. So, instead of taking a cookie cutter approach, this article highlights key areas to take into account as you are incorporating sustainability strategy into your innovation management activities. As each industry, technology, culture, target customer, and location have their own unique social and environmental challenge, customizing and developing your sustainability strategy will require planning and time.

In case you are questioning the need to incorporate sustainability strategy into your innovation management activities, let me repeat… Developing sustainable innovation management strategy is all about moving from traditional, resource intensive processes to methods that uses fewer resources while maximizing value. While it may not be obvious, studies have shown that sustainable development ultimately reduces development costs in the long haul, such as in the case of more optimized and environmentally friendly packaging.

Your innovation management activities are mainly founded on four key areas: culture, people/talent, technology/product and process. You can start identifying potential opportunities and sustainability issues in each of these areas by starting conversations and asking questions within your organization. As you are building your bigger picture, also use this opportunity to conduct your sustainability assessment, as it is important to understand where you currently stand in each of these areas.

• Culture — Sustainability is not just about managing the status quo more efficiently; it is also about building a culture that is mindful, compassionate about its impacts to society and the environment, and empowered to take action to improve. Global awareness of diverse cultural and ecological impacts, overall ownership and accountability, organizational learning, how well it can act is all part of building a culture that embraces sustainable choices.
• People/Talent — Globalization, resource shortages and demographic changes require your corporate sustainability agenda to incorporate your people policies. How you attract and retain talent, how your people internalize and act on your sustainability goals, how you enable your workforce to reduce its travel carbon footprint via telecommuting or video-conferencing programs, and how you sustain and nurture their creativity should all be incorporated into your sustainability strategy.
• Process — For a very generic term, process incorporates many different activities that take your innovation from idea to dissemination and beyond. For each of those activities, determine where you can make your process more sustainable and repeatable, without requiring significant resources. Ensure design and process innovation is part of your core competency, so that you are continuously looking for ways to build more sustainable products and technologies.
• Technology/Product — Evaluate every aspect of your technology and product life cycle to determine how you can incorporate sustainability strategies. In your analysis, make sure to include your value chain and your ecosystem evaluation.

In order to prioritize, start with a good understanding of what aspects of your products and services have an environmental or social component. Here are some starting discussion points:

• How/where can I reduce my environmental footprint?
• Product life cycle: Incorporate what-if scenarios to make aspects of your product more green. Redefine end-of-life concepts so there is less landfill impact. Utilize materials and processes that are more eco-friendly. And make sure to incorporate your evaluation of marketing communications.
• Customer support and service: Enable your customers to be greener: recycling programs, reduced packaging, sustainable upgrade programs. Make it easy for your customers to be green.
• Operations management: Analyze your manufacturing and transportation processes to reduce impact to natural resources. Innovate new process where applicable, such as ‘why doesn’t Amazon group my separate orders placed on the same day, and ship them all together?’
• Incorporate 4Rs across your organization, technology and products: refuse, reduce and reuse first, then as a last resort, recycle.
• Your ecosystem: Evaluate your value chain and see how your partners are handling sustainable processes, such as with recycled plastic or biodegradable materials, replacing ingredients or components with more environmentally friendly options.
• Procurement and suppliers: Evaluate your purchasing process for sustainability: recycling-friendly materials, processes and packaging. Ask for participation from employees and suppliers to incorporate sustainable practices.
• Product design: Design your products with sustainable goals in mind: reduce resource requirements, better manage all aspects of product application, dissemination and end-of-life from the time it gets to the hands of the customer to the time it ends up in the landfill. Do ‘what-if’ analysis to understand the environmental impact if demand increases. And, always simplifying your product to make it easy to be green.

As you build your sustainability strategy, you will identify new opportunities, risks and bottom line implications. Ultimately your success depends on your leadership, commitment, planning, creativity and innovations. Recognize this is a journey and track your progress using your benchmark: how well your company is performing against your sustainability requirements, and how your customers are reacting to it. Also create a sustainability knowledge center to track best practices, policies and learnings. Make your goals and progress public, and share it with your organization. This will ensure everyone is living up to the same standards. Employee engagement is crucial for any sustainability strategy.

Technorati Tags: sustainability, innovation management and sustainability, sustainability strategy

It is said that, once upon a time the forests in Central Anatolia were so thick that two passing armies would not hear each other. Today, mostly a desert, the City of Ankara’s main goals is to bring the trees, the greenness back into Ankara. So much so that, in the middle of an afternoon it is very common to see tanker trucks watering trees along the roadway, impacting traffic even though the city is in the middle of a drought…

You might have heard about the cotton farmers in India. The ones that are committing suicide as they can’t pull themselves out of the perpetual debt cycle created by the seed and pesticide industry. Recently, Asia was also in the news as they are experiencing a shortage of talent and lack of skilled staff in environments that expect high growth. As you might have guessed, this growth is coming as more layoffs are occurring in the US.

Our measures for economic prosperity are certainly broken. Today, we mainly measure economic growth in terms of consumers’ buying power. Yet, Adam Smith argued that the benefits of the free market should not be limited to individuals, but inclusive of the society as a whole: The Wealth of Nations (Bantam Classics). Unfortunately today, over-consumption is one of the biggest threats to our environment and society, as The Story of Stuff highlights so well.

In 1987, the World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission) established the following definition for sustainability: “Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” This implicitly captures that our decision making process has to be global, taking into account any present and future implications to our renewable and non-renewable resources, including our ecosystem.

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development points out that “sustainable development is good for business and business is good for sustainable development.” For me, this is common sense. Companies that think about and respect their environment, their society and their employees before they act tend to be well managed firms. Eventually, this also reflects in their financial performance. As popularity, transparency and awareness of green energy, fair trade, organic produce and socially responsible firms grows, your customers will expect sustainable business practices from your firm.

The truth is that concerns over sustainability are sprinkled across all aspects of our lives: our newly established exercise regiment, the weight-loss we recently achieved, striving for a certain living standard or wondering how much longer you can maintain your hectic work schedule, … At the same time, sustainability is about your values and the evaluation of your actions against those values.

For me, the concept of sustainability is very personal. It is as much about achieving well-being for myself and my family as it is about reducing or eliminating the overall stress and impact I have on my ecosystem. It is also about recognizing the cause-effect relationship of my every event and action, and realizing that each outcome has an impact to my sustainability goals which should be incorporated into my planning. With that, here is my definition of sustainability and what it means to live a sustainable life:

Achieving outcomes that can be maintained indefinitely without depleting the support system or endangering present and future needs.

Implicitly stated, ecosystem, society, self/individual and economy are intermingled and need to be carefully balanced to achieve my vision of sustainable living. At the same time, simplicity, self-renewal, incremental improvement and innovations are needed to maintain the process indefinitely.

Perhaps the most challenging part of sustainability is in its operationalization: what should be your sustainability goals, how do you know if you are on track, and what should be measured? As always, this will be based on your definition, your situation and your goals.

I urge you to reflect on your own definition of sustainability, what it means to you and if you are living true to your values. Yes, sustainability may seem like the latest fad, especially with the way firms are embracing it for their marketing. But, starting with sustainability and designing it into your life, your products and processes is a sound business practice. Whether it is idealistic and achievable or not, the road to achieving a sustainable future starts with you.

Technorati Tags: sustainability, sustainability definition

I spent the majority of my afternoon (4+ hours) cleaning up the mess… My Wordpress installation got hacked… Some #!@%*& spammer hacked into my footer and exploited it for his own benefit. Yes, I am not alone and many more Wordpress blogs have been hijacked too. But that doesn’t make me feel any better. Btw, I do think it could have been worse and I’m grateful that it wasn’t. At the same time, I have a nagging feeling that I might have missed something in the cleanup process… Result: upgraded Wordpress, fresh backups, and of course, all new passwords… All that, and I also lost my appetite, though I call it my new Internet-security-weight-loss-diet plan.

Almost 4 weeks, yet it feels too short.. That is how much time I spent in Turkey visiting my family and vacationing in different parts of the country. As always, I had my list of “todos”. But instead, I completely disengaged myself from all my expectations and just lived in the “now“. “Now” being the most important thing that I should do at that given moment. At times it was hanging out with my sister, my mother or just hanging out at the beach in awe of the beauty of my surroundings. A perfect vacation, and now that I’m back, I’m working my hardest to hang on to it as long as I can. I’m still processing my pictures from the trip, which can be viewed on Flickr.

Most of our time was spent between the Aksaz beach, near Marmaris, and in Ankara, the capital of Turkey. On the way back from Aksaz, we visited Pamukkale, a natural wonder which is declared as World Heritage Site by UNESCO. Pamukkale (Cotton Castle), also referred to as the 8th world wonder by Turkish people, is the largest example of elaborate calcium formation and the site is known for hot springs that are used for treatment of various medical issues. Pamukkale also hosts the Roman city of Hierapolis, which was founded in 190 BC and later became a popular Roman thermal bath center. It is an amazing experience to walk down the old Roman streets and realize that their sewer infrastructure is still standing! We also did an overnight trip to Amasra at the Black Sea coast, and visited Safranbolu, another UNESCO World Heritage Site. For a country that is the size of Texas, the cultural and geographical diversity is quite amazing.

Turkey hasn’t escaped the effects of globalization, whether it is the internal purchasing decisions of marble from China (Turkey produces marble) or specialization taking place deep in the villages. I fondly recalled the days I strolled around my grandparent’s fields for lunch: tomatoes, onions, honey, cheese, … You name it, they pretty much produced it. These days, with the pressure for specialization and playing in the global markets, the village has been focusing on growing cherries and apples. As the market fluctuates, so does the price of the cherries and apples. It is no wonder that a few people in the village are doing well, while the others barely survive from one winter to the next.

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing Turkey is her ability to uphold the secular government that Kemal Ataturk has built. As a modern Islamic country, Turkey is a natural gateway to the Middle East. Turkish culture is ripe to contribute to the global marketplace, and Turkish partnerships will go beyond the boardroom as they are about relationships, not just business. As people, Turks are eager to learn and apply. If you do get a chance to experience Turkish hospitality, please do so. You won’t be disappointed.

Technorati Tags: Turkey

I personally believe our world, especially with so many feature rich products, is getting more complex every day. So, when I hear about simplifying products by removing features, I certainly applaud the action. However, there is a right way and a wrong way of managing features, especially when these features are already been introduced to the field and are in use by your customers.

Today, Netflix announced a removal of a key feature (at least it is key to me): multiple profiles per account. This valuable feature allows us to maintain several queues, one for each member of our household. For whatever the reason, Netflix has decided to remove this feature, and their FAQ is below. Note that Netflix is not providing any explanation, or an alternative to allow for an easy transition.

Jeff Lash of How To Be A Good Product Manager has a well written article on how to address feature removal from your product: Do not be afraid to remove features. Looking at Twitter traffic on this topic, Netflix product manager should be reading Jeff’s blog and revisiting this decision.

Should features be removed, and products be simplified? Absolutely! However, before one goes crazy over removing existing features, there needs to be a cost/benefit analysis and a good plan to handle the migration issues.

We will be eliminating Profiles, the feature that allowed you to set up separate DVD Queues under one account.
When? Profiles will be eliminated on September 1, 2008.
Why? While it may be disappointing to see this feature go away, this change will help us to continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers.
Do I need to do anything? Consider moving all DVD titles in your Profiles Queues to your main account Queue. To do so, log-in and visit this page
How will this impact my account? On September 1, 2008:

• All DVDs currently at home or in transit will be associated with the main account Queue
• All Profiles rental history will be added into the main account rental history
• Your additional Profile Queues will be eliminated. If you would like to keep a copy of each
• Profile Queue we recommend that you print them out
• Prior to Profiles going away, we will also email you a copy of your Profile Queues
• Profiles movie ratings and Profiles Friends connections will no longer be available
• You will not be able to transfer your Profiles data to a separate new account
• You will be able to set a maturity filter on the main account

Technorati Tags: netflix, product management