Names matter. Years ago, back in the salad days of the late noughties/ early teens, there was a conversation I had with a whole lot of startup founders. It was a conversation about money, specifically how they would make some. Their investors were starting to ask for returns. As is my way, I sat down with some of these founders …
The only thing we have to fear…
It’s ok to be scared. There is a prevailing sentiment out there that fear is a sign of weakness, but the truth is, fear can be a productive thing. Understanding our fears and engaging with them is the healthy way to move forward. Cancerland taught me a lot about fear: about my own, which was abject and all-consuming at first; …
‘Why’ beats ‘what’
How are you doing? I’m still not dead yet. But that doesn’t tell you anything useful about how I’m doing – I might be scaling mountains at the weekend; I might be bed-bound and miserable. ‘Not dead yet’ doesn’t tell you much – just like a company’s revenue, margin and active users don’t reveal all that much about how they’re …
Design Thinking: the Baby vs. the Bathwater
There’s a lot of talk around here lately about ‘the Death of Design Thinking’ as IDEO goes through a massive round of layoffs and restructuring. “Is Design Thinking dead?” everyone is asking, and for a lot of people the answer seems to be an enthusiastic YES. But there is a big difference between Design Thinking(TM), a specific service offered and …
Cake or Death
Can we all agree that how we experience the world is important? So why do so many businesses still see experience design as an optional extra? This has come across my desk often enough this week for me to feel a need to post about it. Too many designers are still fighting for the right to do the jobs they …
What’s the point?
Articulate your purpose. Sounds obvious, right? Every business I’ve ever worked with has struggled with this on some level. Sometimes it amounted to not much more than a communication hiccup, but in most cases it ended up having deep impact on the company in some way, whether that was in customer trust, talent, time to market or lost revenue. Large …
Inadvertent dinosaurs [post 49/100]
[NB: The blogging hiaitus is still on – due to a few personal matters, I’ve needed to reduce my areas of focus. I plan to pick it up after the summer holidays and finish these 100 posts I so recklessly allowed myself to get muscled into all those months ago. In the meantime, this post demanded to be written, so …
False prophets [post 48/100]
Aaaaand we’re back. Please excuse the break – life very much got in the way and trust me, taking a break was way better than the schlock I would have been churning out if I’d forced myself to post every day. Then again, maybe this is schlock too. You’ll have to be the judge, dear reader. Anyway. Onward. A couple …