About Business and Product Development

Posted on December 26, 2011 by Skip Walter

The transformation of business is continuing to accelerate as we begin a new century.  We were barely understanding the Industrial Age when the widespread usage of computers in business moved us into the Information Age.  The rapid doubling of processor power, storage capacity and network bandwidth coupled with innovations like the Internet and the World Wide Web not only resulted in a Global Interconnected Economy but also the ability of small firms to participate on an equal footing with the very large firms.  Economy of Scale is operating simultaneously with Economy of Small.  Rapid change is leading us to the Knowledge Age where the fundamental challenge is not to create and access information, but rather to make sense of the enormous amount of information available AND act on that sense making before other competitors do.

Yet, the actions that need to occur must provide economic value and integrate with the values of the human beings that are at the same time employees, customers, suppliers and consumers of the value.  As Amazon.com has shown, the consumers are generating new “products” in the act of consuming.

To develop new products, services and businesses, two new sources of innovation are emerging:

To be effective in building on these new sources of innovation, new tools are needed to capture, analyze, and use knowledge.  Since knowledge is a human activity, these tools must be a natural part of the environments that humans exist in.

Purpose of Business

As businesses grow and become more complex it is easy to forget why the business was created and what it exists for.  The following generic business goals are culled from a wide range of business literature:

Drucker’s definition gets at the heart of what the talent in each corporation needs to focus on.  The first priority is to get a profitable customer.  The second priority is keeping a profitable customer.  It is very easy for employees in most corporations to spend most of their time dealing with internal urgent issues, and forget the important issues of getting and keeping profitable customers.  A large part of the challenge is bringing the customer into each internal meeting.  How does an organization keep its customers’ context real to every employee?  The sales organization is most often chartered with being the keeper of the customer, but the customer relationships must be just as real to product development and manufacturing as they are to the sales force.  A fundamental role for knowledge tools are helping an organization stay as focused on its customers as it is on the spread sheets which keep track of project plans, budgets and actuals.

Digital Business Design

Slywotzky in his book How Digital is Your Business defines digital business as “one in which strategic options have been transformed – and significantly broadened – by the use of digital technologies. . . A digital business uses digital technologies to devise entirely new value propositions for customers and for the company’s own talent; to invent new methods of creating and capturing profits; and, ultimately, to pursue the true goal of strategic differentiation: uniqueness.”

Digital Business Design leads to 10X productivity improvements.  Slywotzky states:

“A 10X productivity improvement is more than an incremental growth in efficiency.  It is a fundamental change in the way companies do business.  It liberates resources to serve customers, leverage talent, grow the business, and help toward achieving strategic leadership.

“Productivity is measured as a ratio of value created to resources used.

“Why are 10X productivity improvements possible when Digital Business Design is employed?  There are several reasons:

  1. Most of the time, in most of the economy, atoms are used when bits would bring better results.  Bits are cheaper.  When bits are used instead of atoms, a lot of big costs go away.
  2. Digital options make it possible to collect very valuable types of bits (such as information on what customers really want) before committing atoms.  The result is that atoms (e.g., inventory or unused factory capacity) are not wasted.  Huge costs vanish quickly when bits precede atoms.
  3. Digital innovators have developed an entire array of bit engines (listed in Appendix A) to collect, process, and distribute bits with extraordinary efficiency.  The goal is not just to focus on bits, but to have the tools to manipulate and distribute those bits in smart ways.  When a collection of powerful bit engines is exquisitely tuned to the needs of customer, value can be generated at an extraordinary rate.

“That’s why it is extraordinarily important to be constantly asking:  What bit engines have we put to work in our company?  How can they be improved?  What new bit engines will we need to address tomorrow’s business issues?”

The Japanese did an excellent job in the 70s and 80s achieving high productivity gains in the manufacturing environment as epitomized by the Toyota Production Method.  A key part of this method involved making everything on the shop floor very visible, whether it was the flow of materials, or the key statistics about production.  The next step in Digital Business Design is our ability to visualize the flow of information and knowledge within complex distributed global businesses such that we can detect patterns, analyze those patterns, and act on the patterns.

Reverse Product Design

In Digital Business Design, Adrian Slowotzky indicates that the Choiceboard technology – the ability for the customer to configure a product before purchasing online in real time – holds the promise of reversing the traditional value chain.  An example of the Choiceboard technology can be found at websites like Dell Computer where you can configure your own PC.  In the typical non-digital business the value flows from:

Assets > Inputs > Offering > Channels > Customer

The author points out that all along the value chain information and value leak out and the product/service producers are left to guess at what customers want.  In a digital business the value chain is reversed:

Customer > Channels > Offering  > Inputs > Assets

The process begins with the key source of information – the customer.  The digital business sells first, then produces.  Companies like Dell and General Electric are particularly good at this model of digital business design.

With a human centered focus, it is now possible to reverse the steps of traditional product design to complement what is possible with a digital business design.  In traditional product design, researchers and engineers start with a technology insight and innovate forward.  They pass their finished product over to marketing where a story is created about how the new product will be “better, faster, and cheaper” than the old way for some hopefully large customer demographic segment.  Finally, the sales people look for a set of customers who might be engaged in activities that will lend themselves to the new product.  This process flows like:

Innovation > Story > Activity

In the information systems business the result of this sequence is that most products are not successful until the third version when the fit of technology to activity is finally realized.

With Reverse Product Design, development starts with the rapid observation and assessment of customer activities and needs.  The reverse flow looks like:

Activity > Story > Innovation

From the direct observation of human activities, filtered through the lenses of physical, cognitive, social and cultural human factors, insights are gained as to the real customer needs.  These needs are processed through the human centered case story method of:

Observation > Contention > Value > Solution

These vignettes are then gathered into a powerful story or scenario of use that guides the product developers to a powerful system of innovations.

Perhaps, the most accessible example of this process in action is the constant stream of innovations released through the Amazon.com Books web site.  From the detailed observations of users trying to buy books in a physical bookstore to the stream of innovations related to trusted recommendations from a myriad of user participation, the site continually reinvents itself by first paying attention to user activities.  The combination of Reverse Product Design with a powerful Digital Business Design leads Amazon.com in providing value to its loyal customers.

At every step of this new product design process, innovations are grounded in the observed activities of real users so that there is little guesswork needed as to what to create for whom.

In practice, there are two types of stories that emerge in the product design and development process – stories for understanding and stories for persuasion.  Once the activities are analyzed, a short story that captures the essence of the observations helps with the understanding of the problem and potential solutions on the part of the development team.  The understanding story is a precursor to the innovation.  Once the innovation is designed, it is then necessary to persuade someone to either fund the development of the project, product or service or to persuade a customer to buy the product.  A story of persuasion must go beyond understanding and create a context for the “customer” to make a decision and move forward.  Descriptions of both kinds of stories can be found in Steve Denning’s The Springboard:  How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations or on his website.  Thus, the Reverse Product Design Process looks like:

Activity > Story for Understanding > Innovation > Story for Persuasion

By combining Digital Business Design and Reverse Product Design, a product development team can:

  • Move from getting information in lag time to getting it in real time;
  • Move from guessing what customers want to knowing their needs;
  • Move from burdening talent with low-value work to gaining high talent leverage.

An important part of Reverse Product Design is adding in the component of reflection at all levels of the model.  Donald Schon spent most of his academic careers understanding the effects of what they called Model 1 and Model 2 behavior as described in The Reflective Practitioner.  The following diagram illustrates the differences between the two:

Abstracting from all the best research they could find on behavior, the authors described what they called Model 1 behavior.  People or organizations are driven by Values, Beliefs and Theories which lead to actions in the context of those Values.  The actions then have consequences which feed back into further actions.  Most people and organizations stop there and operate on this simple feedback loop.  This kind of model is useful for routine interactions but is very poor at learning or adapting to new opportunities which arise.

Model 2 behavior is characterized by adding another feedback loop of the consequences cycling to the Values, Beliefs and Theories level.  People and organizations that utilize this model are quite adaptive to their environments.  Now that we have unprecedented levels of technology and connectedness in the global economy, it is important that we start wiring in Model 2 behavior into our products and services.

Using the Purpose of Business, Digital Business Design, and reverse product design were key ingredients in designing the Attenex Patterns product and the Attenex business.

Posted in Content with Context, Human Centered Design, Idealized Design, Knowledge Management, Learning, Teaching, Transactive Content, User Experience, Value Capture | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

The One to One Future

Posted on December 25, 2011 by Skip Walter

I hate buying clothes, particularly business suits.  But I have added a lot of weight, so it is time to get a new business suit.  But still I delay.  Then, Greg, a neighbor who is the Men’s Clothes Purchasing Manager at the Seattle Nordstrom’s, talked me into at least trying his department.  “It’ll be painless.  I promise.”  So down I went the next day.  We started with the basics, a blue suit and a blue blazer.  In 20 minutes they were selected, tried on, fitted by a tailor, and I was ready to go.  “What time next week should I pick these up?” I asked.  Greg laughed and said, “I’ll stop by your house and deliver them tonight on my way home.”  I think my jaw must have hit the floor.  Each month Greg lets me know what’s on sale that I might like.  Nordstrom now has a customer for life.

Yet, there are things that I value and buy quite a bit of — like books, fine wine and ipad apps.  I spend several thousands of dollars a year on each.  Most of this money is spent with a few stores or companies (Amazon, Apple iStore).  As far as I can tell, none of them knows or cares that I exist.  None of them knows me except through the occasional mailing list trying to get me to upgrade.  None of them bothers to communicate with me as a unique individual.  They are getting good at some aspects of collaborative filtering.  Yet, none of them comes close to the Nordstrom model of perfecting customer service — one customer at a time.

I have a dream of a software company whose tools and services are so good that their customers can look at a design or communication task and say “I can design and produce that!” no matter what the media required (print, electronic, video, or interactive).  The tools are smart enough to know whether I’m new to a particular task or whether I’ve done it a hundred times.  The company keeps in touch with me electronically so that I always know and have the option to acquire the latest stuff that I need even if the company doesn’t make all the products I require.  And the company regularly asks for my comments and suggestions about what is working well and what needs improvement for which I am always recognized and rewarded.  The company also cares about the communications I produce with its tools, and suggests improvements in my work if I want feedback.  When I produce something with this company’s products I never have to worry about sharing the final or editable form with others because of the standards it set.  This company works closely with all the leading hot designers to bring the look and feel of what is cool into templates that I can use for my work.

The 21st Century Company – the relentless pursuit of the ideal one to one communication.

A few definitions are in order:

Communication is the results that you get, not the words that you speak.  It involves a two-way loop between sender and receiver.  The features of communication are:  it is everywhere; it is continuous; it involves the sharing of meaning; it contains predictable elements; it occurs at more than one level; and it occurs amongst both equals and ‘unequals.’

The One to One future will be characterized by customized production, individually addressable media, and 1:1 marketing, totally changing the rules of business competition and growth.  Instead of market share, the goal of most business competition will be share of customer — one customer at a time.  The new rules for the one to one future are:  1:1 media are individually addressable;  1:1 media are two-way, not one-way;  1:1 media are inexpensive (see The One to One Future:  Building Relationships One Customer At a Time by Don Peppers).

Ideal is a “desired state that we can never attain but to which we can always come closer.  If we are to pursue any ideal continuously, we must never be willing to settle for anything less.”  (see Russ Ackoff’s Creating the Corporate Future).

As I visualize this dream, I start to develop expectations of the 21st Century Company:

•  We will treat the customer, our employees, our suppliers, indeed all of our stakeholders as special, as worthy of being known as individuals with special attention paid to each one’s communication needs.  The pursuit of the ideal will lead to new and special relationships with the stakeholders, many of which we will create first.

•  We will provide products and services which will help our customers achieve the ideal of one to one communication for the customers’ stakeholders.

•  As a customer, I would expect to pay more for the specialness of the relationship and our pursuit of the ideal which can be associated with aesthetics.

Posted in Content with Context, Human Centered Design, Idealized Design, Knowledge Management, Learning, Russ Ackoff, User Experience | Leave a comment

Chris Alexander – Patterns Which are Alive

Posted on December 25, 2011 by Skip Walter

One of the many challenges of life is how work and living get separated along with the spiritual and play.  I often reflect on how much I am away from home with my business and how little my children got to see of what it meant for me to work.  Chris Alexander expresses this aspect of human nature as he describes patterns which are alive in his book The Timeless Way of Building. 

“The fact is, a person is so far formed by his surrounding, that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings.

“Some kinds of physical and social circumstances help a person come to life.  Others make it very difficult.

“For instance, in some towns, the pattern of relationships between workplaces and families helps us to come to life.

“Workshops mix with houses, children run around the places where the work is going on, the members of the family help in the work, the family may possibly eat lunch together, or eat lunch together with the people who are working there.

“The fact that family and play are part of one continuous stream, helps nourish everyone.  Children see how work happens, they learn what it is that makes the adult world function, they get an overall coherent view of things; men are able to connect the possibility of play and laughter, and attention to children, without having to separate them sharply in their minds, from work.  Men and women are able to work, and to pay attention to their families more or less equally, as they wish to; love and work are connected, able to be one, understood and felt as coherent by the people who are living there.

“In other towns where work and family life are physically separate, people are harassed by inner conflicts which they can’t escape.

“A man wants to live in his work and he wants to be close to his family; but in a town where work and family are physically separate, he is forced to make impossible choices among these desires.  He is exposed to the greatest emotional pressure from his family, at that moment when he is most tired—when he just comes home from work.  He is confused by a subtle identification of his wife and children with “leisure,” “weekends,” and hence not the daily stuff of life.

“A woman wants to be a loving woman, sustaining to her children;  and also to take part in the outer business of the world; to have relationships with “what is going on.”  But, in a town where work and family are completely separate, she is forced to make another impossible choice.  She either has to become a stereotyped “housewife,” or a stereotyped masculine “working woman.”  The possibility of both realizing her feminine nature, and also having a place in the world beyond her family, is all but lost to her.  A young boy wants to be close to his family, and to understand the workings of the world and to explore them.  But, in a town where work and family are separated, he, too, is forced to make impossible choices.  He has to choose to be either loving to his family, or to be a truant who can experience the world.  There is no way he can reconcile his two opposing needs; and he is likely to end up either as a juvenile delinquent, who has torn himself entirely from his family’s love, or as a child who clings too tightly to his mother’s skirts.”

Posted in Content with Context, Human Centered Design, Nature, Quotes | Leave a comment

Russ Ackoff – The Aesthetics of Work

Posted on December 25, 2011 by Skip Walter

While working with Russ Ackoff, he noticed that the company that we were working with at the time – Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) – seemed to be stuck in OK performance, but not exciting performance.  He pointed me to one of his unpublished essays on the aesthetics of work that later became published in his book Management in Small Doses.  While we were not able to change all of DEC, we took these ideals to heart to improve the performance of our own group.

From Management in Small Doses:

“Ancient Greek philosophers identified three ideals—truth, the good, and beauty—the pursuit of which they belived was necessary for progress and development.  Modern man has added a fourth—plenty or abundance.

“Science is dedicated to the pursuit of truth, and technology to its application; ethics and morality, to the pursuit of the good; aesthetics, to beauty; and economics to plenty.

“These pursuits are relevant to management.  Management science, business ethics and morality, and managerial economics are subjects that are familiar to managers.  But what about the aesthetics of work or management?  What in the world does that mean?  It is not surprising that the answer to this question is not apparent because the aesthetician has been the “odd man out” for a very long time.

“Although most people believe that we have made a great deal of scientific and economic progress and some believe that at least some ethical and moral progress has been made, few believe that there has been any aesthetic progress.  We seem neither to produce more beauty nor to appreciate beauty more than preceding generations.

“Aesthetics is the least understood aspect of progress and development.  Little wonder, then, that most managers have no idea of its relevance to their work and that of others.

“Aesthetics is related to two things: recreation and creation.  Recreation is activity that refreshes one’s mind and body, activity from which immediate satisfaction is derived, regardless of its outcome or consequences.  It is intrinsically valuable; this means that its value lies in the fun and enjoyment we get out of it.  To the extent that managing is fun and enjoyable, it has aesthetic value.

“The creative aspect of aesthetics is reflected in the sense one can have of getting somewhere, of developing.  It is this sense of progress that endows human activity with extrinisic value and makes it meaningful.  Beauty inspires, produces visions of possible progress, and encourages the pusuit of these visions, whatever short-run sacrifices are required.  Therefore, it motivates us to pursue development, to pursue progress.  Recreation provides refreshing pauses in the pursuit of progress and makes the pursuit itself a satisfaction.

“The currently growing concern with quality of life, in general and work life in particular is a matter of aesthetics.  To improve the quality of life or work life is to increase the (recreational) satisfaction derived from what we do, whatever we do it for, and the (creative) satisfaction derived from making progress toward our ideals.

“A few years ago the CEO of a very successful corporation asked me to look around his organization for any serious problems that were being overlooked.  I spent several months traveling on reconnaissance.  When I reported back to the CEO I told him there was one overriding problem that required attention:  many of the company’s employees, especially its managers, were not enjoying their work, thought it was unimportant, and had little sense of personal progress.  As a result, their efficiency and effectiveness were deteriorating.  The company was aesthetically deficient.

“After some discussion of what might be done about it the CEO authorized an effort to improve the aesthetics of work.  A participatively designed quality-of-work-life program for all employees was initiated and eventually succeeded.

“Work that is neither fun nor meaningful is not worth doing well, no matter how much one is paid to do it.”

Posted in Content with Context, Russ Ackoff, User Experience, WUKID | 6 Comments

Japan Study Mission – A Learning Intensive Model

Posted on December 24, 2011 by Skip Walter

In the late 1980s I had the good fortune to participate in a Japan Study Mission while at Digital Equipment Corporation (now Compaq which became HP).  This activity was a great example in several areas of process innovation and adult learning:

  • A new way to provide experiential learning in a collaborative community
  • Direct observation and benchmarking of the world’s best at Just In Time (JIT) Manufacturing and Total Quality Control (TQC)
  • Implementation of learning and the virtuous learning cycle

The VAX systems manufacturing group had just finished a long five years of implementing MRP II and DRP II throughout fifteen manufacturing plants located throughout the world.  The leaders of that effort were asked to take on the challenge of implementing JIT and TQC.  They knew they couldn’t do the same process because it took too long and didn’t achieve the results that they had hoped for.  So in desperation they turned to a consultant for help who recommended going to benchmark the best of the best.

A group of 20 professionals from the manufacturing, sales, information services, and software services organizations were selected for the first trip.  In the two months prior to the three week visit to Japan, the individuals were loaded up with 10 books and about 50 articles to read and absorb.  In parallel, the leaders and consultants developed an outline of topics to benchmark and observe on the trip.  All of the participants met in Seattle for a day and a half to review the study materials, get to know each other, and develop study teams to augment the study guide and further develop the questions to ask to get to the information that was sought.

The group then traveled to Japan for an intense three weeks of plant visits and cultural experiences.  A typical day would involve two plant visits of manufacturers that ranged from a sewing machine manufacturer to Sony, Canon, Ricoh, Toshiba, Matsushita, Honda, and Nissan.  Each day would start with an overview of the plants we were to visit and specific learning objectives for those plants.  On the bus to the plants we would break into study groups that focused on topics ranging from plant finances to information systems to quality processes and inventory control processes.  We would review and capture what we learned the previous day and would develop questions that we would want answered on the visits for that day.

At each plant site we would have a set of formal presentations where we would present what we were there to learn and the plant personnel would give an overview of their operation and the products that they produced.  We then would take a walking tour of the facility where we could gain informal access to our hosts.  At the conclusion of the walking tour we would then gather back in the conference room for additional Q&A and our formal goodbyes.  We all quickly learned that the best sources of information came from the guides on our walk throughs of the plants.  The guides were typically educated in the US, spoke excellent English and were very forthcoming about what we were seeing.  When we were in the conference room however, these same people were so low on the totem pole that they were the ones serving coffee and refreshments.

On the bus at the end of each plant visit, we would pass a microphone around and each of us would give a short summary of what we saw that day that we expected to see and what we didn’t see that we expected to see.  Most of us learned the most from what we didn’t see that we expected to see.

Gregory Bateson – The difference that makes a difference

In his many contributions to the field of cybernetics, Bateson introduced the notion of “the difference that makes a meaningful difference.”  So much of the previous work in cybernetics focused on just noticeable differences and Bateson always wanted to get at the essence of what makes each “system” unique and operate as a system.  When used in a facilitated way, the “difference that makes a difference” is a powerful way to prioritize what is the one thing to do that if we get it right will move us the farthest in the direction of our intentions.

A powerful example of the Bateson question occurred on a Japan Study Mission I participated in while at Digital equipment.

From my own personal experience, the most powerful example of the difference that makes a difference can be summed up in the following story that summarized the end of a three week study mission by 20 manufacturing professionals touring the best Japanese corporations that had implemented Just-In-Time Manufacturing and Total Quality Control:

At the end of the three weeks, we gathered for a day long seminar to summarize the learning of the previous three weeks and all the reading we did before the trip.   We must have come up with over 500 ways that we could improve our plants back in the US.  Then the consultant really earned his keep.   He asked us to reflect on all that we’d seen and then to pick the single difference that would make the biggest difference back in our own plant.  He went on to explain that the typical US manager will come up with 100 ideas and try and implement them all at once, accomplishing very little.   The Japanese manager will select one idea, implement it, achieve significant results and then move to the second item on the list.

The Burlington Vermont management team whose plant produced the largest VAX computers took this advice to heart and realized that the single biggest difference between their plant and all the plants that we’d viewed on this visit was cleanliness.   Their plant was a relative pig pen compared to the Japanese facilities.  So they came back to the US and gave a presentation to all three shifts at the plant about the Japan Study Mission and set a goal to get the plant cleaned up.    It took a week on all three shifts to get the plant cleaned up.  Then they ran into their first big surprise.   It took them an additional three weeks to figure out how to keep the plant clean.  They had to back into every process and work with some of their suppliers to keep the plant clean.

No one was prepared for the second surprise.  As a result of getting AND keeping the plant clean, the operation generated a one time $150 million benefit to DEC’s bottom line by increasing their inventory turns from 5 to over 12.   Many internal consultants tried for years to increase throughput as evidenced by inventory turns and had not had any positive effect. These efforts included large amounts of Artificial Intelligence technology.   Then they hit their third surprise – their quality improved by over 300%.  They were no longer damaging parts by moving things to find work in process inventory and every part stayed in the plant for only a short period of time.

A three week study mission which cost the company less than $300,000 had returned more than $150 million.  Now that’s process innovation.

All of this improvement was a result of asking the simple question “What is the single difference that will make the biggest difference?”

Communicating the Value of the Japan Study Mission

At the end of the mission, we gathered in a Tokyo hotel for two days of analyzing and synthesizing what we had learned.  One of the challenges was to figure out how to communicate to other professionals in our organizations what we had learned.  After a wonderful celebratory dinner, we got up the next morning to summarize and put together a communication summary of our learnings.  The following is from my journal of the three week study mission.

The Last Day

It was real tough to get up this morning. The dinner last night was a gracious finale. The drinks afterwards in Mike’s room were a letting down of our hair after the formality of the dinner. But I gotta get up early to get the damn bags packed and to do my presentation.

I had run my mouth yesterday afternoon in a conversation with Steve and Susan. Somebody needed to give a summary presentation on what we had learned about Human Relations in the two weeks. Since Susan wasn’t going to be there in the morning, she asked if Steve or I would give it. I volunteered by saying “I’ll be happy to. Somebody has got to do a right brain presentation sooner or later. I’m tired of these bulletted lists of facts.”

Those were fighting words for Steve, “What do you mean right brain presentation?”

“Pictures. Man. Pictures,” I rattled back. “I am so tired of these two weeks with this crew of twenty terminal analytics doing nothing but provide lists and lists and lists of facts. A picture is worth 50,000 of those kinds of words.”

Steve wasn’t buying it.  “Look I’ll make you a bet,” I proposed. “You go back and put together a summary presentation for the two weeks however you would normally do it. And I’ll do the same.  I’ll bet you whatever you want to bet, that my presentation will be remembered and yours won’t. ”

Looking at Steve I had clearly stepped over the lines of decency. I was in one of my seldom right, but never in doubt modes.   So I changed the proposition, “Look I’ve watched you the last several weeks and you are superb at sifting through a lot of data and getting at what is relevant and then listing it out. I’m terrible at that. But what I am really good at is taking a sifted list and putting it into a picture that will be remembered. If you are willing, let’s work together on the presentation. You do the sifting, and I’ll do the picture.”

“Now, you’ve got a deal,” replied Steve quite eagerly. “I’ll get the list to you tonite.”

I wasn’t quite sure what form the picture would take but I knew that it had something to do with the triangle, circle and square theme. So I suggested to Steve, “I still don’t have a good picture in mind, but I’m pretty sure it is going to be organized in threes. See if there is a natural breakdown of the material into threes.”

Off he went. I then turned to Susan and did a little brainstorming with her on what the picture might look like. She suggested that somehow the picture should reflect the uncertainty of the new generation of Japanese who didn’t seem to be conforming as well to the old.  Click.  I know just the thing. I’ll relate it back to our Japan cultural consultant showing us the crack in the piece of China. I had gotten as far as my creative juices were going to take me. I had also backed myself into a creative corner.

At dinner Steve gave me a one sheet summary of the last two weeks of human resources observations.  His work was impeccable.  Now all I needed was the picture. After sleeping on it, the last puzzle piece fell into place. Mt. Fuji would be the triangle. Talk about symbolism all over the place. Now my only concern was had I outsmarted myself by being clever too far.

After scrambling to get all my packing done and get a call in to the States, it was time to go to the annex for our last official study group meeting. It was a little sad this morning because all three of the Burlington contingent, John, Zach, and Susan had already left. We started the session off by going around the room with each of us relating what the trip had meant to us personally. Emotions were pretty strong this morning; none of us really wanted this learning experience to end. But most importantly, we didn’t want to lose the close associations that had formed over the three weeks. Tears were the order of the day for several of us, and tight chests made it real difficult for each of us to speak when it was our turn.

I wanted so badly to let each study mission participant know how much I had grown and learned on the trip. For me most of that learning was the result of the interactions with the group surrounding me. The exposure to the Japanese companies provided the screen on which the movie we created could play, but it was this group and their willingness to share that was the heart of the experiential learning.

Steve was up first with his summary of what we could bring back to the states and apply directly, that is, what were the advantages that we had that we need to ensure that we keep.

Finally it was my turn. I was the last one. Somehow I think Steve managed to make sure that I was last, hoping that I could summarize all of the trip not just the Human Relations.

No matter how much I tried to take deep breaths to calm myself down, I was shaking like a leaf. You would think that after all these years of public speaking that I could control my nerves a lot better. No such luck. Today was especially difficult because I wanted to touch to the core of what the visit to Japan had meant to me and to be able to share with these new friends something other than words.

I looked out: paused for a few seconds; took a deep breath and started tentatively. “Whenever I take a trip, I always take several books with me. I never conciously stop to think whether the books have something to do with the trip. I just need something to occupy the plane flights and those hours in the hotel room when I can’t sleep.  I’d like to share with you a short excerpt from one of those books. I couldn’t believe how apropos it is to this group, at this time and in this place.”

I then read this excerpt from Edward T. Hall’s The Silent Language:

“Culture hides much more than it reveals, and#.strangely enough what It hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants. Years of study have convinced me that the real job is not to understand foreign culture but to understand our own. I am also convinced that all that one ever gets from studying foreign culture is a token understanding.”

“The ultimate reason for such study is to learn more about how one’s own system works. The best reason for exposing oneself to foreign ways is to generate a sense of
vitality and awareness – an interest in life which can come only when one lives through
the shock of contrast and difference.”

I tried to look up several times during the reading, but I couldn’t. I was shaking and so hoping that it would be accepted. After finishing, I looked out and the expressions were so heartwarming I wanted to just sit there and bask in the reflections. Several people started at once, “Read that again so we can copy it down!” “That summarizes so well what we have just been through, where did you get it?”

I waited and then said “I’ll finish up with this at the end and I’ll make sure I include it in the journal.”

I then put up the first overhead. Starting from the center and working outward, “Just as Mt. Fuji is the center and focal point for the Japanese geography, employee relations are at the center of Japanese corporations. Surrounding this focus is the workgroup itself sometimes called Quality Circles and sometimes called SGIA. Yet, just as people are important, so is the environment that exists within the plant, and within the Japanese homeland.”

“But I think the key word for me as I reflected on the last several weeks was one that Ken mentioned when we first met – ‘sometimes’.”  I added: “As I think about the plants that we have visited, the geographies that we have toured, I see a lot of contradictions and differences. There is certainly nothing black and white like I expected before I came over.”

I then positioned an overlay on top of the previous transparency. “If we look at the next level of observations,” I went on, “we see some very appropriate summary statements. At the heart of Employee Relations is ‘the nail that sticks up gets pounded down.’ We saw that everywhere we went, that the individual is subservient to the group. But what wasn’t so obvious until after the weekend at the Shinto Shrine and then seeing Brother Industries is that for each individual worker there is a clear relationship between God and man, between employer and employee, and between parent and child. What really struck me with full force is the congruence between these three relationships, that they are all viewed as the same and that the relationship is buried deep in the cultural belief system.”

“As we move outward to the role of the group within the corporation we see the symbols for long term investment for long term growth – the seed, sprout, trunk, flower, and fruit. The Japanese have brought the mentality of the citrus farmer to the corporate world – what I plant today will be harvested in ten years. The Hop, Step and Jump of the Quality Circles at Brother were correlated with the physical life, lifetrend, and life mission of the Shinto value system. Finally, we see the reward system and how it intertwines with the focus on the team, on visible recognition, and the need for self-development to help one’s team members, a self-development that will lead to greater group glory.”

“Where does this path and journey to self-development lead?” I asked rhetorically. “To Wa, to group harmony. Harmony between the workplace and nature. Harmony between people, machines and software. This harmony starts with a value system that embraces cleanliness and tidiness as a symbol of purity. This value leads to the simplification of work flows. to the attention to detail, to an orderliness.”

“Yet, within this vision and embracement of cultural values also lies a firm grip on current reality,” I continued. “‘Brother Industries expressed it quite well. A period of steady equilibrium has replaced the era of high growth. Quality over quantity. The New Realism.”

As I got ready to turn off the overhead projector, someone asked what the jagged line was running through the right side of the picture. Now I knew I was losing it. How could I possibly forget that? “Thanks for the prompt,” I acknowledged. “The jagged line is symbolic of a rent in the fabric of the Japanese culture. We have heard from several sources these last several weeks of the discontent amongst the current generation of merely accepting previous ways. Work may not be the dominant drive of the future, like the past. Concern with family is becoming very important to young Japanese. And this culture really hasn’t embraced a meaningful role for women. Also as the pressures mount from the outside world to open up what is perceived as a closed culture and market, we don’t know what effects that will have.”

One of our study books had an observation about this situation: “It was entirely obvious that Father Pittau deplored this cast of mind and that he attributed it at least in part to the changed atmosphere of the Japanese home. ‘So far,’ he said a bit grimly, “companies and government agencies have been able to take these youngsters and reshape them, giving them the traditional social formation in which loyalty to one’s company or ministry is paramount. But already it’s not so easy as it used to be to instill a spirit of service in young people in this country. And it could get harder and harder.” The Japanese Mind p. 137.

“So the jagged line represents the crack that I see in the superb Japanese economic machine,” I observed. “The question is will the machine break apart or will it be like the piece of china that Jean Pearce showed us two weeks ago and the crack will be covered in gold as the Japanese adapt to this New Reality.”

“It is easy to create a cultural change when there is a crisis, but how do you keep it going when affluence or the overriding vision is achieved? Since the Meiji restoration in 1868, Japan has used the industrial countries in the West as a model for its vision. It has now reached that vision. What does Japan do now to create a new vision to carry forward? Will Japan focus on quality of life with a unique combination of eastern and western philosophies or will Japan slide backwards?” I finished.

If communications are the results that you get, all I had to do was look at the faces in the room to know that I had shared a piece of me with a group of the greatest professionals in the world. Thanks for letting me share this journey with all of you.

As a final gift, I offer a summary of the trip in the form of a brief poem:

Impressions of Japan

Sameness. It’s OK. I can survive.
Difference. I’m not alike. I will thrive.
Spread out. Flat. Hazy.
Grace to graciousness.
Chopsticks – a silent, gentle, natural dinner companion.
Clean. Slow. Fast.
Wa – the synergistic harmony.
The nail that sticks uP
GETS POUNDED DOWn
God and Man
Parent and Child
Company and Employee
Here and Now
Nature. The garden – holistic view, narrow focus.
Elegance through simplicity:
By movement
By set menu
By flowing production
Discipline.
Triangle. Circle. Square.
Just in Timeliness
“Herro, cutie pie.”
“Been in Japan long?”
Rhythm. Incense. Water to smoke to purify.
Form and function integrated.
Both – And: not Either – Or. Together.
We need each other!

Posted in Knowledge Management, Learning, organizing, social networking, Value Capture, Working in teams, WUKID | 2 Comments

Making Intangible Assets Tangible

Posted on December 24, 2011 by Skip Walter

In 2008, Paul D’Antilio, CEO of Future Point Systems called to see if I would be interested in  consulting with his company about visual analytics.  He had recently become the CEO and knew that we’d been successful commercializing a visual analytics product in Attenex Patterns (acquired by FTI Consulting).  As it turned out when he called I was in Palo Alto, helping my daughter Elizabeth move to Stanford University to start her post doctoral research in cognitive psychology.

We agreed to meet on a hot Bay Area Saturday morning at the Future Point offices in San Mateo, CA.  As our discussion ensued it turns out he’d had a very successful career in software product development and was part of the development team at State Street Bank that had developed the mortgage backed securities and received one of the first software patents.

As I presented the Attenex Patterns story and did a brief demo and shared how we’d used the tool in electronic discovery and patent analytics, Paul suddenly stood up and said “this is really interesting.  When we did the mortgage backed securities at State Street Bank we were essentially taking a tangible asset and making it intangible and then trading it.  What you are talking about is taking intangible assets like patents and making them tangible enough so that they can be traded.  It’s the mirror image of what I’ve spent my career working on.”

I stared at Paul for a moment as the thought of making intangible things tangible rolled around in my brain.  I jumped up and exclaimed “You have the other half of the knowledge I didn’t know I’d been looking for the last ten years.  You understand the valuing transforms back and forth between tangible and intangible assets.”

We both knew in that moment that we’d discovered something important, but we didn’t know what to do with it.  Paul realized that while it was a potentially big idea he had more urgent topics to deal with.  So I agreed to consult with him at Future Point and see what we could do with the PNNL Starlight technology.

After a few months we realized that there was not enough capital at Future Point to generate new product lines so we parted ways.  However, the notion of making the intangible tangible enough to be identified, valued, monetized and traded is ever present in my thoughts.

Over the last two hundred years, great wealth resulted from the systematic identification and monetization of new asset classes.  The financial services industry has profited from taking tangible assets like mortgages and turning them into intangible assets that can be traded.  In the music industry, David Bowie was the first artist to bundle together his future “hits” into a monetizable asset.

In the wine industry, Joe Ciatti put together a REIT to invest in winemaking properties that raised a large fund, but ultimately failed at the execution level.  In a different arena, Intellectual Ventures had raised billions of dollars to monetize patents rather than go through the long process of litigation.  At the micro level, fine wineries are having difficulty monetizing their customer assets due to the difficulty of marketing their authentic differences and their lack of better business models and processes.  Inventors face the same difficulties of matching their inventions to customers (enterprises or consumers) who could monetize their ideas.

In the electronic discovery market, no lawyers, developers or suppliers view the problem as identifying the few “assets” in the millions of documents that will prove or disprove their case.  Yet, each large scale complex matter is an exercise in systematically identifying the key document assets and then “monetizing” them by winning the case.

The central observations about large scale customer problems are:

  • The difficulty of recognizing a new asset class soon enough to create a market for it
  • The focus of asset developers are to create an asset rather than on how that asset can be marketed and sold
  • Few industries create “brokers” to trade bundles of assets until the industry matures.

The experiences of using clustering and classifying mathematics in problems as diverse as mortgage backed securities, legal electronic discovery, patent brokering and licensing, and creating customers for life with biodynamic wineries suggests that there is a common solution to a diverse range of market problems that asset class monetization technology proposes to solve.

The following diagram captures my current thinking on Asset Class Monetization.

Asset Class Identification

At the core of the model is identifying new asset classes that are not yet recognized as being tradable and for which no “market” exists and no transparent information about the market exists.  Clues to these asset classes are the difficulty in selling the asset or placing a value on the asset.  Broad examples of difficult asset classes to value and sell are:  patents, enterprise software from new startups, and the selling of a startup for an exit opportunity.

An example is the valuation and selling process for a biodynamic winery.  Recently, a Southern Oregon Winery went through an assessment process to value their holdings after four years as a precursor to taking investment for expansion or sale.  They required four different types of assessors (property, equipment valuation, agricultural value assessment, and quality and volume of the wine inventory) and financial experts.  This assessment was time consuming (six months from start to finish), expensive, and not very accurate.

The above assessment is further complicated by trying to assess the value add (or lack thereof) of the certified biodynamic component of the property.  Is this a short term cachet or with the advent of a growing appreciation for authentic fine wine growing that represents the specificity of the place (terroir) and the accompanying slow food movement is this a long term trend?

While a little more advanced in its evolution, the patent market appears to be moving from a very difficult arena to monetize using litigation or the very expensive sale process of licensing to the attempt to create a market.  Intellectual Ventures and Ocean Tomo are at the forefront of trying to create a market, but their efforts have been primarily aimed at acquiring patent assets or creating an auction for those assets.  Little effort is spent at understanding how to value the assets and create a transparent information structure around those assets (like a Morningstar for patents).  As a result, Intellectual Ventures is having a far harder time in licensing their patents than in acquiring them.

Classification, Clustering, Segmentation and Matching

Once an asset class is identified, sense must be made of the collection of assets.  In most cases with complex assets, this process is expensive and highly dependent on experts.  With the large scale adoption of the Internet, this process is now becoming routine, mathematical, automatic and highly scalable.  Google Adwords and Adsense are great examples of both the power of the mathematics and on the ability to monetize the mathematics.  Wired Magazine had an excellent article on “Googlenomics” showing how Google monetizes content through massive mathematics.

Recent book length treatments of the processes, techniques and tools for classification, clustering, segmentation and matching are:

Redman describes the power of being data driven:

“I find looking at an organization through the data and information lens to be extremely powerful.  To do so, one examines the movement and management of data and information as they wind their way across the organization.  The lens reveals who touches them, how people and processes use them to add value, how they change, the politics surrounding seemingly mundane issues such as data sharing, how the data come to be fouled up, what happens when they are wrong and so forth.”

“Data and information are most valuable when they are flying from place to place.”

Ayres described how he used Google’s Adwords to come up with the book title Super Crunchers.  For a fee of $100 in Adwords he saved himself the $50,000 of consulting fees to name the book:

Connections

The value of an asset grows as there are more connections to that asset.  Whether we are talking about a product with a high sales volume, or a webpage on the Internet (Google Page Rank algorithm), the number of connections to an asset grows the value of that asset exponentially (see Metcalfe’s Law as described in Unleashing the Killer App:  Digital Strategies for Market Dominance by Larry Downes and Chunka Mui).

Daniel Andriessen in Making Sense of Intellectual Capital:  Designing a Method for the Valuation of Intangibles points out that the value of the three types of intellectual capital – human capital, structural capital and relationship capital (customers, suppliers, infuencers) – is dependent on the number of cross connections between the types of capital.  However, today this process of connecting is primarily a manual and high expertise process.

A key enterprise problem when it comes to connections and social commerce is Return on Research.  A.G. Lafley at Proctor and Gamble made a dramatic turnaround from <5% Return on Research to >50% Return on Research by creatively outsourcing innovation through a process of Open Innovation.  The process is described in The Game-Changer:  How you can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation.  The result of this process led to several startups which include innocentive.com, yet2.com, and mynextcareer.com.

Valuation and Social Commerce

Once an asset is categorized and connections expanded, the challenge is to value and price the asset.  Once the asset is priced, then buyers and sellers must be matched.  The mechanism for providing the matching is through the “wisdom of crowds”, crowd sourcing and social commerce.

Social commerce is a subset of Electronic commerce in which the active participation of customers and their personal relationships are at the forefront. The main element is the involvement of a customer in the marketing of products being sold. e.g. recommendations and comments from customers. This happens for example when customers publish weblogs with their shopping lists.

Making the Identified Assets Tangible

I’ve been enamored with Intellectual Capital (IC) since reading several books on the topic by Leif Edvinson, Karl Sveiby, and Tom Stewart (while he was at Fortune Magazine and before he became editor of the Harvard Business Review).  The basic question these authors asked and that Leif Edvinson implemented at Skandia Insurance Companies was how to find a financial set of metrics that worked for knowledge based companies.  Traditional finances don’t take into account the difference between a company’s book value (traditional finance) and its stock price (the realm of intellectual capital).

However, the major problem as identified in the book Making Sense of Intellectual Capital:  Designing a Method for the Valuation of Intangibles by Daniel Andriessen is that valuing the IC of a company the size of Skandia takes 50 KPMG accountants approximately 3-6 months of subjective interviews and wild guesses.  Thus, the real value is completely out of date long before the accounting engagement is over.

Ijiri in his academic articles on Triple Entry Bookeeping (momentum accounting) tries to get at the same kinds of metrics but his ideas have never taken off.

All of these thoughts and the study of IC were swirling through my head while we were developing Attenex Patterns and were automatically able to do the content analytics and visual analytics to look at the digital detritus of a company in the form of their email and documents on PCs and servers.   The following slide shows a recent version of Attenex Patterns illustrating the social network view (in this case the company view by taking the information to the right of an “@” in an email address) and the semantic network view:

Once we had the semantic network, social network and timeline network views, we put together a financial transaction network view for KPMG.  In the process of doing the fraud prototype for KPMG the intangible to tangible asset thoughts really came together:

What I saw with this prototype was that we could put financial information together with other networked unstructured information – semantic networks, social networks, event networks (timelines), geolocation networks, and financial transaction networks.  Once I realized all this information could live in the same visual analytics environment and I reflected on the nature of traditional finances, I could see the way forward.

Traditional finances all rest on a simple transaction format – the debit or credit which consists of a date, time, from, to, dollar amount, and a message as to what the transaction was about.  The rest of the scaffolding of single entry, double entry, and triple entry bookkeeping evolves from millions of these transactions within a company or between companies (wire transfers).  So I asked myself, is there a functional equivalent of the debit/credit for Intellectual Capital.  As it turns out there is – the ubiquitous message we call email (or a calendar entry, or a contact entry et al in CRM systems and on and on).  These messages consist of a date, time, from, to, subject, and message.  Unlike traditional finances though, the unstructured text within the message isn’t very interpretable.  However, with a full set of interesting content analytics like we’d developed at Attenex and the appropriate multi-variable visualizations to go with them it is easy to pick out the patterns and then “automatically” calculate the Intellectual Capital value of the firm.

My assertion is that if you give me access to your email (outlook email, calendar, contacts and exchange server), your CRM system, and your traditional financial system, with the types of visual analytics described above, we can calculate in real time your Intellectual Capital values (talent capital, structural capital, relationship capital).  Because email is the distribution mechanism for most unstructured Structural Capital (business plans, performance reviews, product plans, marketing plans …) everything needed to discover, understand, and value intellectual capital is in digital form.

In the human capital area, the founder of PayPlusBenefits is trying to pitch his service to angel investors and entrepreneurs so that they can “see” the state of their startup investment at any time.  His assertion is that since the major outflow of money in an IT startup is for people, that he is already sitting on the data to understand when the startup is going to run out of money (burn rate).

So in the context of a making the intangible tangible, you now have an accounting and measurement system to actually manage Intellectual Capital which is huge step forward from traditional finances which tell you where you’ve been not where you are going.  With this IC accounting, valuing and managing capability, you now have the ability to make the intangible tangible so that it can be monetized and traded (brokered).

Posted in Content with Context, Knowledge Management, organizing, Transactive Content, Value Capture, Wine | 3 Comments

Facebook Timeline – is the current me happy with the older me?

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Skip Walter

“I can’t believe how much work it is to clean up my Facebook posts before my Timeline gets turned on and I only have 7 days to do it” a colleague explained the other day in a meeting.

Not a regular FaceBook user, I asked my colleague what she was talking about.

“The 2004 Sally on Facebook didn’t know what she entered into Facebook would make the 2011 Sally really mad” she shared.  “The really miserable part is that not only do I have to delete the photos and comments that I put in when I was in college in 2004, but I also have to delete from my timeline all the crazy things my friends put in.”

I couldn’t help laughing as she’d just eloquently put into words what I have tried to get across to my son and the twenty something entrepreneurs I work with.  Maybe I need to start doing guided meditation with these heavy Facebook users to first think about what they are likely to be doing in ten years.  Then have them reflect on what their future self might think of their current spur of the moment entry.

As I was sharing this with my daughter, Elizabeth, she remembered a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip that captured a similar idea.

The complete sequence of the immortal philosophy of Calvin and Hobbes for their time machine process of dealing with the challenge of generating content was nicely pulled together by Stephen Coley.

One of the challenges of the many “digital droppings” we leave everyday is how much good or ill are they doing for my future self.  This challenge is similar to what we face in terms of our relationship with nature and how our actions today will affect the environment some time in the future.

As we think about “content in context”, one of the key forms of context is how this content will evolve in future years.  Stated another way, what is the time dimension of a piece of content.  Does it only have immediacy or is it likely to last?  Will it age well like a fine wine? When will it turn to vinegar?

In the business world, this time dimension of context is what is behind records management and records management policies.  It is also the problem that is at the bottom of electronic discovery in litigation – will this content that I keep help me or hurt me if we ever get involved in litigation?

Wouldn’t it be nice if we had instant content aging simulation software like we now have instant face aging photo software?

Posted in Ask and Tell, Content with Context, social networking | 2 Comments

PhD General Exam – A Model for Mentoring?

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Skip Walter

Earlier this year, I was asked to serve on the PhD committee for Alex Thayer at UW HCDE along with the co-chairs – Charlotte Lee and Jan Spyridakis, and Cecilia Aragon.  I eagerly accepted as a way to understand what the process for acquiring a PhD was all about.  My surprise in working through the process with my colleagues and with Alex is what an interesting model it is for the coaching and mentoring of design and business professionals along with entrepreneurs.

The formal process for the HCDE General Exam shows the timeline and steps.  I viewed the steps I participated in as:

  • The PhD candidate provides a short description of what they are interested in doing their dissertation on
  • A committee of appropriate faculty is formed with each faculty member given a subject area to focus on – theory, methods, society & systems, and media design & application
  • Each faculty member works with the student to refine a list of readings (approximately 20 article or chapter length articles) in the context of the research the student is interested in performing
  • Each faculty member provides a question in their assigned area to the department advisor who will provide the questions to the candidate to write a timed essay on
  • The candidate writes the questions
  • The committee members review the answer to their question (along with the answers to the other questions)
  • The committee member meets 1:1 with the candidate to discuss the answer before the oral exam where all committee members are present
  • An oral exam with all committee members where followup questions are asked completes the process.

Based on my experience and expertise, I was assigned the topic of Media Design and Application to work with Alex.

After receiving the description of what Alex was interested in researching – college student collaboration using eReaders, I discussed his research and past publications with him.  Based on this discussion, I thought he was too focused on one medium – text – and was heavily biased to the Amazon Kindle versus much richer multiple media platforms like the Apple iPad.  I also wanted to make sure that Alex had a richer understanding of collaboration.  Based on this assessment, I suggested the following readings:

  • Alexander, C. (1979). The Timeless Way of Building. Oxford University Press.
  • Bardzell, J. (2007). Creativity in Amateur Multimedia: Popular Culture, Critical Theory, and HCI. Human Technology, 3(1), 12-33.
  • Bardzell, J., Bardzell, S., Briggs, C., Makice, K., Ryan, W., and Weldon, M. (2006). Machinima prototyping: an approach to evaluation. In Proceedings of the 4th Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction: changing roles (NordiCHI ’06), ACM, New York, NY, USA, 433-436.
  • Cetina, K.K. (2001). Objectual Practice. In T.R. Schatzki, K.K. Cetina, and E. Von Savigny (Eds.), The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (pp. 175-188). Routledge.
  • Chan, M. and Liu, K.  (2004). Applying Semiotic Analysis to the Design and Modeling of Distributed Multimedia Systems.  In Proceedings of CSCWD (Selected papers). 437-447.
  • Fogg, B.J. (2002). Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. Morgan Kaufmann. Chapter 5.
  • Keen, P.G.W. (1979). Decision Support Systems and the Marginal Economics Of Effort. MIT Paper.
  • Manovich, L. (2002). The Language of New Media. MIT Press. Chapter 5.
  • McLuhan, M. (1994). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. MIT Press. Part 1.
  • McLuhan, M. and McLuhan, E. (1992). Laws of Media: The New Science. University of Toronto Press: Toronto, ON. Chapter 3.
  • Mitchell, C. T. (1993). Redefining Design:  From Form to Experience. Chapters 5-6.
  • Nass, C. and Moon, Y. (2000). Machines and Mindlessness: Social Responses to Computers. Journal of Social Issues, 56(1), 81–103.
  • O’Connor, J. and Seymour, J. (1994). Introducing NLP: Psychological Skills for Understanding and Influencing People. The American Press. Chapter 2.
  • Rose, C. (1998). Accelerated Learning for the 21st Century: The Six-Step Plan to Unlock Your Master-Mind. Dell. Chapters 4, 12.
  • Ryan, P. (2001). Earthscore for Artists: A Systemic approach to collaboration. Retrieved 2011/08/01.
  • Schell, J. (2005). Understanding entertainment: story and gameplay are one. Comput. Ent. 3(1), 1-14.
  • Vines, B.W., Krumhansl, C.K., Wanderley, M.M., Dalca, I.M., and Levitin, D.J. (2010). Music to my eyes: Cross-modal interactions in the perception of emotions in musical performance. Cognition 118, 157-170.
  • Wright, P., Wallace, J., and McCarthy, J. (2008). Aesthetics and experience-centered design. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 15(4), 1-21.

I went further and grouped the readings by themes:

  • Nature of Media
    • Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan, part 1
    • Laws of Media, Marshall and Eric McLuhan, Chapter 3 “Laws of Media”
    • Chan and Liu, 2005, Applying Semiotic Analysis to the Design and Modeling of Distributed Multimedia Systems, pp 437-447.
    • “Music to My Eyes,” Daniel Levitin
    • “Story and Game Play are one,” Jesse Schell
    • “Objects of Socialability,” Karin Knorr Cetina, Chapter 12 in The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory.
  • Perception and Learning
    • “Machines and Mindlessness,” Clifford Nass and Youngme Moon, Journal of Social Issues, 2000.
    • Chapter 2 Doors of Perception in Introducing NLP by Joseph O’Connor and John Seymour
    • Chapters 4 (The Six Step MASTER PLAN) and 12 (The Magic of Music) in Accelerated Learning by Colin Rose (print)
    • “Marginal Economics of Effort” Peter Keen, 1979.
  • Design
    • Timeless Way of Building by Chris Alexander (print)
    • “The Language of New Media,” Lev Manovich, pp. 212 – 281
    • “Creativity in Amateur Multimedia”, Jeffrey Bardzell
    • “Machinima Prototyping”, Jeffrey Bardzell, 2006.
    • Chapters 5 and 6 from Redefining Design:  From Form to Experience, C. Thomas Mitchell, 1993.
    • “Aesthetics and Experience Centered Design,” Wright, Wallace, McCarthy, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 15(4): 1-21, 2008.
  • Application
    • “Earthscore for Artists: A Systemic approach to collaboration,” Paul Ryan, 2001.
    • “Computers as Persuasive Social Actors,” by BJ Fogg, Ubiquity, 2002.

As you can see by the list, I emphasized the work of authors who worked in media other than text like McLuhan, Ryan, Bardzell, Levitin, Schell and Manovich.  I was particularly hoping that through the Bardzell and Manovich readings that Alex would see a powerful way to organize the semantics of multiple media to aid in collaboration.

From the combination of my assessment and from the readings I generated the following question:

Using principles and frameworks from Marshall McLuhan, Lev Manovich, M. Chan, Jeffrey Bardzell and Paul Ryan, provide an overview that compares and contrasts the syntax, semantics, and semiotics for designing collaborative applications in different media like text, video, and interactive media and go into depth for the syntax, semantics and semiotics for one of the media other than text.

Alex did an excellent job answering the question and demonstrating his understanding of the readings.  I learned a lot from his perspective as he recombined the readings in the context of what he is interested in researching.

The oral exam was an opportunity for the committee as a whole to interact with Alex.  What a great learning experience for me to understand the readings and questions from the full time faculty in their assigned areas.

While I wasn’t fully conscious of it at the time, during the next couple of weeks after Alex’s oral exam I was mentoring my graduate students and entrepreneurs differently than before.  Prior to going through the general exam process, I would set up a meeting and come relatively unprepared and do “leadership jazz” in the moment.

Now I started asking for a couple of items ahead of time like their resume and their aspirations and any publications they might have.  Along with these items, I asked for what kinds of questions they were interested in asking of me.

Now before the meeting I could think through what might be missing that I could help with.  However, I would not make recommendations until we could have some time to understand their backgrounds and aspirations.  The first part of the meeting would be aimed at having them “tell me your story.”  In listening I could get a sense of their strengths and weaknesses and understand better what questions were the right ones to answer.  Then after the meeting I would suggest a set of readings that could help them with their missing knowledge.  However, the key thing is I would end this memo with a core question that would require them to read the material in their particular context.  I then suggested a follow on meeting where we could further explore their “answer” to the question.

An example of this process is the interaction with one of my fellow angel investors who asked if I would have the proverbial cup of coffee to help him think through his next startup in the medical technical arena.  I found out that he was the key engineer in a successful sonography product several years earlier and had done very well when the company was sold.  For the last year, he and his partner had self-funded the development and IP generation for a more portable and less costly product in the same arena.  While he is a very experienced engineer and inventor (he is good at value creation), he has not spent that much time understanding how to go to market and capture the value he has created.

His presenting question was asking me a fairly common question from entrepreneurs – how should I fund my new company?  Should I fund it myself, go to angel investors, take a development contract with a larger med tech firm, or go to VCs?  It is an easy question to ask but the answer is always very path dependent on where they are with the new venture and their previous experience.  So I asked a lot of questions and then shared with him a model that I’ve used for understanding the levers that affect capturing value.  I also pointed him to a couple of references:

At the end of our “cup of coffee,” I asked the entrepreneur “given what we’ve talked about this morning what is the answer you would come up with for how you should fund your next venture?”  I told him that I didn’t want to know the answer now, but rather would like he and his partner to give me a call in a week or two to go through what they recommended and why.

A couple of weeks later they both gave me a call and shared with me their recommendation for which path for funding they thought was best to move forward.  Their thinking was well grounded and indicated that they had clearly absorbed the material that I’d shared with them.  Now that they had thought things through, they were ready to hear a better proposal which combined in an interesting value engineering way a combination of approaches.  They were blown away.

I was excited that the in depth process of the PhD General Exam could also be used at a micro level to mentor my clients.  I was sharing this insight with a colleague and she started laughing “Skip, it’s called the Socratic Method.”  Ah yes, everything old is new again.

Then I went on to share what I was envisioning for augmenting this method with the “content in context” tool described in a previous post on Transactive Content.

She got very serious “Now that is something really new.  How much funding do you need to  get it built?  When can I write the check?”

Maybe it is time for me to start building this “content in context” tool.

Posted in Content with Context, Human Centered Design, Knowledge Management, Learning, Teaching, Transactive Content, University, WUKID | Leave a comment

Eliminating the Professional Priesthoods

Posted on December 22, 2011 by Skip Walter

One of the trends I’ve seen over the years is the systematic elimination of priesthoods in industry after industry.

I first noticed this with the publication of the book From Wall Street to Main Street by Gene Perry.  He described the transition from needing a broker to buy and sell stocks to being able to do it yourself.  We can see this now in computer programming where programs that used to require deep expertise can now be done by novices with no programming experience.

Many years of my life in several different startups were aimed at changing the nature of the health care priesthood.  I was reminded of this discussion by the article this week on Patients want to read Doctor’s notes, but many doctors balk.

It is the same old debate about whether the “idiot patient” can possibly be able to understand the knowledge laden notes of a professional MD.

David Cochran, MD

Those views were put to rest by Dr. David Cochran who was our Medical Director at Lexant, one of my many startups.  One of the reasons David joined us from his position as CIO of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care is that he had noticed the complete change in his relationship with patients over the previous 10 years.  It used to be that he was viewed as a God by the patients dispensing his hard won knowledge.  Then he noticed that all of his patients were highly educated and that with the advent of the internet they knew far more about their specific disease than he would ever know.  So he changed his practice to be a consultant to the patient.  While the patient knew the facts of their disease along with their signs and symptoms, they didn’t know what to do with those facts.  David had to know and be able to manage several tens of thousands of sign-symptom-disease complexes which meant that he knew relatively little about any one disease but he was well versed in the process of health to illness back to health.  His role became augmenting the patient’s knowledge not pontificating from on high.

I would assert that the classroom is still full of priests and is quite hierarchical.  Somehow we have to recognize the student as the center of the universe (and university) not the professor or the administrators.  That is a huge change from the hierarchical system that we’ve all experienced as students and as professors.  Or stated another way at the core of the redesign of the university has to be the shift to learner centered design which includes having the students take far more responsibility for their learning than most do today.

Cathy Davidson has a lot to say about this process and particularly one of the last bastions of the hierarchical approach which is assessment.  I wrote a little bit about this today on my blog entry on learning and the internet.

Posted in Content with Context, Health Care, organizing, Teaching, Working in teams | Leave a comment

Too Funny for Words – Redneck Wine Glass

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Skip Walter

Redneck Wine Glasses

Just in time for the Holidays, we now have Redneck Wine Glasses.

How could I possibly have missed such a creative way to drink wine?

I loved one of the advertising blurbs:

“Break out the hooch and sip in bumpkin style! Not just for the good ole boys, this here redneck wine glass says “yahoo!” for the mason jar and heck yeah for the hillbilly honor! Crafted from a genuine Ball mason jar and fancied with a dang good looking stem, these mason jar wine glasses are terrific for white lightening, your favorite brew, or a nice glass of that there red wine! With the screw-on lid in place, simply tighten the lid on our mason jar wine glass for a break.”

Now who would have ever thought that you could make a wine glass with a built-in lid so that your wine doesn’t get too much oxygen during your evening of imbibing.

I can’t wait for the next Riedel Glass Tasting that we have at the house to populate the table with these Redneck Wine Glasses for the starter course.

Posted in Humor, Wine | Leave a comment