I read a lot of blogs, but I usually find myself responding to the Business Week Blogs more than others. Today is no exception. Bruce Nussbaum recently gave a speech at the Royal College of Art stating that CEOs Must Be Designers, Not Just Hire Them. Think Steve Jobs And iPhone.

My Response:

So Bruce, I have to disagree: CEO’s should be CEO’s, but a good CEO knows how to spot talent. But I do agree with the sprit of the statement, today MBAs and designers, need more than a solid background in a single discipline, its part of the rebellion against the specialists. There are already programs trying to address this, such as the exchange between the Art Center College of Design and INSEAD. When you say CEOs must be designers (and I might say they need to be anthropologists) I think you are wishing for the extreme end of the pendulum swing that started when we all realized that teams often worked better than individuals. In the dusty past I wrote on the importance of the multi-disciplinary team: gett the designer, engineer, researcher and marketer in one room and you can avoid the silo effect. It was an interesting idea at the time that many companies tried to make work, but it was also wrong. People still could not speak each others language. The result was often no result at all or something pretty mediocre (a classic design by committee problem) or worse, it turned into a cage match and a struggle for power. It was those early attempts that made a few of us realize that you needed multi-disciplinary people. That rare bird that not only had an eclectic background of business, design, research, and strategy among others, but could synthesize information across those disciplines’s to get a new insight. But I think even this is old news for most of us at the center of the work today. It is just these multi-talented folks that we are looking for in my office. When my friends that are recruiters call me to see if I know of anyone for a particular position, this is what they are looking for as well. But its not that these people are in-depth experts in all those areas that matters. What matters is they have enough aptitude for a variety of fields and enough common language and empathy to work in teams with people that have various and complementary strengths

To suggest that CEO’s should be designers, designers should be MBAs and MBA’s need to sketch would be, in most cases, a tragic mistake if taken literally. A friend that chairs a small anthropology department and I were discussing your blog the other day, part of my on-going conspiracy to get academics interested and enthusiastic about business. I argued that what the CEO needs to know about design is the difference between Great, Good and Crap and how design drives and is the customer facing expression of corporate strategy. This is not news, people have been talking about the strategic value of design for years, even if not acting on it with great effect. Her take is that the CEO needs to know enough about design to get the hell out of the way and let the pros that hopefully are smarter than they are to get on with it. It’s the whole “Get the right people on the bus, and let them do their jobs” strategy. The idea that people should be able to do it all is an over-enthusiastic reaction to what we have learned over the years about the dangers of hyper-specialization. To quote myself (I am not a journalist or an academic, so I can do that, right?) from a comment in another BW blog: Steve Jobs didn’t show up in Cupertino one day with a pair of stone tables that had the iTunes business model on one tablet and a CAD drawing of the iPod on the other. The iTunes explosion was the result of a lot of people at Apple working hard, not to mention the MP3 players that came before, and a visionary leader in Steve Jobs that understood the significance of putting it all together. That’s the key: its not a CEO that can design, but a CEO that can weave together diverse threads of understanding to figure out what’s next.

We have all heard the story of the amazing product by that a lone smart person in the bowels of some corporation who stuck by and fought for it tooth and nail for despite everyone telling them it was a bad idea. The way the story usually goes is: The product is a hit and that CEO or some other muckity-muck praises the tenacious engineer, project manager, etc for bucking the system, pressing on in the face of adversity, etc. How come no one turns around to the CEO and others and says “Ummm, why are you proud of the fact that you can’t tell the difference between a good idea and a bad one?”

CEO’s don’t need to be designers, they need to be critical thinkers that can weigh the merits of strategy, markets, risk and know how to find people that can help them place design strategy in that context. Job has been a huge and positive influence on design both aesthetically and how it can drive bottom line revenue growth. But not just because he has a deep intuitive understanding of design, but because he understands how to use all the resources available to him to tap into deep needs and meet those needs in clever and compelling ways.

By the way, your word processor made a wee mistake. You say “You, as designers, can’t just do ethnology anymore.” I know you mean “ethnography.” But for your readers: An ethnology is a study and analysis done by comparing across cultures to answer big questions like “How common is the incest taboo?” Ethnography is the study of a culture of particular group of people, for example a tribe in the Amazon or in the case of Design Ethnography, young video game players. An ethnology is done by comparing multiple ethnographies.

I recently responded to a post by Helen Waters on the Business Week NEXT blog titled “How to create a product that lasts today.” She has a quote in the entry that seems like it is a bit more old-school thinking. The text is below:

It’s an interesting thing to see a quote like “Great design is simply the personification of its creator” in the context of a blog about innovation in 2007. Most of our clients (Jump Associates) are aware that relying on a single genius who seems to have the muses on speed dial is a short term strategy at best. That’s why the companies that understand design as a strategic competence understand there’s more to it than tossing colored pencils to those funny creatives the marketers never talk to. Great design is more often the result of the hard work of many people, insights that other people missed, and having the skills, talents and resources to execute on that design in a defensible way. Steve Jobs is one of the most significant influences on design today, but Apple has an army of brilliant designers of all kinds that actually design… not Jobs. He didn’t show up at the office one morning with the iTunes model engraved on one stone table and a CAD drawing of an iPod on the other. (Though I certainly admit, it sure seems like that’s possible.)

Being able to create buzz and adroitly follow trends, is not the same thing as monetizing that buzz for sustainable growth and remaining relevant to the motivations and needs expressed in those trends. It’s just those companies that rely on buzz or trends that don’t generally stay afloat. What got a bigger buzz than Segway? For every Facebook and Myspace, I can’t count the number of dot-bombs out there that are dead or dying trying to follow that trend. The skilled ability to monetize buzz and surf trends without chasing them is just what the fashion industry is exceedingly good at. The fashion industry is often the place we look for “what’s next” in color, materials, textures, even emotional out look. But the major names don’t change their Look with a capitol “L” with every fad. It does not matter if you are talking about Gucci and Armani or Land’s End and Diesel, they have a distinctive look that responds to trends, but are not tossed out wholesale and started over because of them.

There are designs out there that are all about being the personification of its creator. I am interested in those as well, but they have a different place than something like the iPod. Take Philippe Starck as an example. I don’t go to a hotel designed by or in collaboration with him to have an experience I am used to; I go because I want to experience his vision, his whimsy. But what Starck is after is quite different from what Jobs is after. Jobs is looking for design to express a vision that will resonate with people and reframe how we see such ordinary tasks as buying music. Starck is more interesting in tweaking the world’s nose, letting you see what resonates with him.

The iPod can be compared with the Olivetti Valentine typewriter, as a design icon of its own, that celebrates the elegance of form and function to a mundane task. In contrast, Starck’s Juicy Salif juicer is a much closer relation to Duchamp’s Dadaist Fountain urinal installation. Starck’s juicer is a monument to uselessness. The unholy love child of a 1940’s rocketship and a sex toy, his juicer, like Duchamp’s Fountain, makes no pretense to actual functionally. That and people like to metaphorically pee on both of them. Its all about the designer expressing their desire to create an artifact and the actual outcome be damned. I’m fine with that, I like sculptural things that aren’t really functional if that is what I am expecting. If I want to juice, I have a $2 plastic hand juicer that works like a dream in my cupboard.

There is a place for the lone genius, and the hard working team, the question is who’s ride do you want to take in the moment?

So I’ve been struggling all weekend trying to think of a unique take on the Maker Faire. Frankly I’ve given up. It was a lot of fun and I enjoyed it and I think it is best to point you to this Wired article. I know it’s cheap not to write my own, but frankly, if you ever been to Maker Faire, its hard to understand the concept of “Maker Faire shock.”

Well, Bruce Nussbaum has being making me think alot apparently, I posted yet another comment to his recent entry asking if CEO’s have “innovation fatigue.”

I think that is partly true, but I wonder if it is more about “broken promise fatigue” rather than “innovation fatigue.” Companies that you listed: the Nikes, GE’s, Apple’s of the world have all seen great returns on big bets, and can also stomach the loss they have experienced in the past as well. They know what this Practice of Innovation can offer when done in a disciplined way, and are experienced in working through the failures that are also part of the process. Trying to squeeze out more efficiency is a short term bet that has short term results. The fact is that most of the world-class manufacturing players are pretty blasted efficient already, and there is not much water in that well. Many are already seeing the best efficiencies of scale they can get. Who are the people that are most susceptible to broken promise fatigue? I suspect they are the ones that approach trying to create compelling new opportunities for their companies in the same way, and with the same expectations, as they think of squeezing profits from efficiencies. Rather than being part of a systematic whole, expressed strategically, it is approached on a very tactical level. It would be like building the iPod without iTunes, partnerships with the music industry, and signaling a direction for the entire company.

So this word “innovation” popped up as the next silver bullet to improve revenue streams as the other methods: downsizing, manufacturing, squeezing other people in the food chain, have been tapped out. I suspect that over time, innovation as the primary word for this practice will fade into the background, as it should, to be replaced with a core intellectual competency that is as standard to a modern business as having an HR department. Humans (as opposed to companies, a legal construct with no thoughts or feelings) have been in this business of innovation for hundreds, if not thousands of years. The printing press, the cotton gin, the original walkman, all innovations that somehow changed the landscape.

I think what is tangibly different now is that shift we talked about previously. Now companies are talking about making the practice explicit, rigorous, embedded in the culture so it is far less random. People are realizing the problems of waiting for the company guru, like a Henry Ford or Steve Jobs, to have a eureka moment, or the seemingly scatter-shot approach to R&D of many avenues of research in parallel. Instead, we are drawing the threads of the company together in a conscious and deliberate way to create an approach to increasing revenue that can set a large strategic vision, and has an output of a roadmap of tactical action.

Perhaps the job skill of the future might not be “manager” but “facilitator”. Who cares about your degree, can you help different parts of the company tie diverse activities together in delightful and unexpected ways? Are you able to have draw out and help people expand on their best ideas? Can you prescribe for them the actions to take to go to the next level? That’s how you build revenue in the long term.

This is the comment I made on the Nussbaum on Design blog the other day for those that prefer to read it here. Its not the first time I’ve tried to define the Practice Of Innovation, it’s part of an earlier entry.

James Todhunter over at Innovating To Win also picked up the comments, emphasizing that The Practice of Innovation, rather than simply innovation is a core competency that should be seen as a C-level issue. Based on my experience at Jump Associate, I would say that companies are certainly taking notice at that level. The new VP’s of innovation that are emerging are not on-off imagination product wizards, but intertwined with corporate strategy on a very deep level.

Ah yes, the “Clown Theory” of innovation. I prefer to call it the manure theory, toss a bunch of “wacky” people into a room and hope something tasty grows. Your post points to a couple of issues, that people are still looking for that magic bullet to solve problems now, and the other, more problematic phrase, that people don’t “get it”. People still tend to think of innovation as a one-off product, they see the iPod as spawning all these other goods and services. The innovation was in the how’ and the whys of reframing what the model for digital entertainment looks like. The iPod is an extremely important cog in the machine, but it is not the primary innovation. This is why I prefer to think of the Practice of Innovation, rather than just Innovation as a verb.

Companies that are on the cutting edge of the Practice Of Innovation are ones that have learned that a groundbreaking product or service (the innovation) is the happy outcome of a lot of hard work. In my view, this Practice of Innovation can be defined as:
The art and science of unraveling knotty problems in a way that reveals underlying needs then reframes them in a unique and robust way that guides and inspires long-term strategic development.

People are slowly coming around to the fact the we can craft a discipline around innovation, and those that are doing it are combining design, social science and business brains in clever ways. Rather than tossing all the clever company rebels into a project, it is about finding and cultivating people that have a passion for all three areas, and developing rigorous methods to combine them to gain insight for competitive advantage. Somewhat counter intuitively, the broader the area you are working in, the more disciplined your team needs to be.
I also don’t think it is a question of who get it or does not get it. That is actually a phrase that I am trying to encourage people to stop using. In my experience, when someone says that another person doesn’t get it, particularly when talking about innovation in the abstract, it is often a gloss for: a) I really couldn’t explain my position very well, and they kept asking me questions I could not answer clearly, or b) It’s a neat and tidy way of separating the “smart” people from the “dumb” people. Its just too easy, once you say someone doesn’t get it, you let yourself off the hook for being better at articulating the why.

Aside from the time tellers that have the, sometimes well deserved, belief they already have a good handle on the pulse of what’s coming next, there are other reasons why people appear like they sometimes “don’t get it” so to speak. Sometimes it’s because they just don’t care. When someone tries to explain to me their magical experience at Burning Man and why I should go, it’s a bit of a waste. I get it, I simply don’t care and trying to convince me I should care is taking valuable time away from playing Zelda on my Wii. Another reason people appear as if they don’t get innovation is fear. They understand quite clearly that to make whatever it is being suggested means big changes. Big changes are scary and risky, especially if your business serves the latter side of the adoption curve.

Then there is the worst reason: they have been burned in the past. An ill-conceived or executed “innovation project” was approved and failed on their watch. Lots of cash went with little value in return. But I am hopeful that enough organizations out there are making the turn to the “Practice Of Innovation” that the risk/reward ratio will come into a better balance.