“You deserve a break today!” – the longing of a time-famished nation

“You deserve a break today!”

The jury is in.  We are all stressed out, needing a break, longing for a good, old fashioned vacation – although an actual vacation would drive us all crazy (but that’s another post for another time).

Slate.com, just about my favorite daily read, has a terrific article about the surprising drop in drive-through sales at fast food restaurants:  We’re Thru — Has the American romance with the drive-through gone sour? by Tom Vanderbilt.

In the midst of the article is this great paragraph:
The drive-through was the spiritual successor, of course, of the drive-in restaurant, which still haunts our imagination with its carhops on roller skates, rock music coming through tinny speakers, and root-beer-laden trays attached to the window. But that was car culture 1.0: We were still trying to achieve some marriage of driving convenience and the desire to interact in public. The drive-through, on the other hand, is an adjunct of the growing American commute. People are now too time-starved even to leave their cars, much less sit around and listen to Bill Haley.  (Commuter culture is taking hold around the globe, too: As a Burger King exec told the Wall Street Journal, speaking on the emergence of drive-throughs—ventanillas—in Latin America, “everybody becomes more of a drive-through, hurry-up-and-eat-on-the-run kind of culture.”)

Here’s the line: People are now too time-starved even to leave their cars, much less sit around and listen to Bill Haley.

We really are that time-starved.  It reminds me of this quote included in Womenomics:
“We are very much a time-famished nation.  People want more control over their time.” (Kathleen Christensen, the Sloan Foundation).

I don’t have any new or brilliant solutions, I’m just passing along the problem – we are all a little time-starved/time-famished, and we really could use a break today.

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(a personal note to those who look for my posts in this blog.  My wife and I are moving to a new house this week, and I am teaching a heavy “Wintermester” Schedule.  So, it may be a few days before I get back to the regular posting schedule that I have been following.  Thanks especially to Bob Morris, who is always on this blog with new and important and useful posts.

How design strategies are shaping the future of business

a fine line

In a fine line published by Jossey-Bass (a Wiley imprint) in 2009, Hartmut Esslinger explains how the use of design can “humanize” technology, especially the “disruptive technologies” that Clayton Christensen discusses in The Innovator’s Dilemma.

“In my experience, true success comes for the designer and the business executive when the two can bridge the artificial lines that have too often separated their worlds. This book also talks about building that bridge – about how creative minds and business minds collaborate, and how both sides of the business-design partnership can prosper within that process. I won’t say that this collaboration is a silver bullet for every problem facing a company, but I do believe it is the best way to develop a better business today and to build a sustainable future for that business.”

How do the designer and the business executive collaborate on helping their company to become an “engine of innovation”? Esslinger suggests a three-step process:

Step 1 — Groundwork: Preparation and research requires both competence and selectivity (e.g. choosing the right goals, teams, partners, clients, projects, metrics).

Step 2 – Creative Collaboration: Successful results-driven teamwork involves rituals (e.g. brainstorming), projection (i.e. shared vision of change to be achieved), and management (e.g. consensus-building, support planning, “shepherding” innovation to implementation).

Step 3 – Marketing: Introducing a product (both internally and externally) while refining and proving its benefits, optimizing the innovation’s role in the business model, and providing the leadership tools necessary to take the innovation to market).

Other sources to consider:

Roger Martin
Opposable Mind
The Design of Business

Howard Gardner
Five Minds for the Future

Tim Brown
Change by Design

Roberto Vagrant
Design Driven Innovation

Thomas Kelley with Jonathan Littman.
The Art of Innovation
The Ten Faces of Innovation

Esslinger is the founder of frog design, inc., a global innovation firm, and one of the most respected designers and business consultants in the world. His designs are in the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in NYC.

How to improve decisions immediately

Think Twice

In Think Twice published by Harvard Business Press (2009), Michael Mauboussin explains how to “harness the power of counterintuition” and thereby avoid making mistakes in situations when “the stakes are sufficiently high and where your natural decision-making process leads you to a suboptimal choice.” He makes seven specific recommendations:

1. Raise your awareness of mistakes that are almost always common, identifiable, and preventable. What isn’t working? Why?

2. Put yourself in the shoes of others by embracing “the outside view” and consider “the power of the [given] situation” in terms of its potential impact. What are others seeing, thinking, and feeling? What motivates them?

3. Recognize the respective roles of skill and luck and understand when each is operative. When offering cnstructive criticism about another person’s performance, for example, comment only on the skill component. No one can control luck.

4. Get feedback that is timely, accurate, and clear from as many different reliable sources as possible. Welcome principled dissent and constructive criticism. Ask the right questions and be an alert, appreciative listener.

5. Create a checklist before making an important decision. “A good checklist balances two opposing objectives. It should be general enough to allow for varying conditions, yet specific enough to guide action.

6. Perform a postmortem, a rigorous analysis, once the outcome of a decision becomes known. The primary objective is not to assign credit or blame; rather, to understand what did (and did not) happen…and why.

7. Know what can’t be known and focus on what can be known. “Also resist the temptation to treat a complex system as if it’s simpler than it is.”

Mauboussin concludes with some general advice: So prepare your mind, recognize the context, apply the right technique – and practice.”