Lance Wiggs

Casey Sheahan is the CEO of Patagonia, the apparel company with a conscience. He was introduced by Jeremy Moon from Icebreaker who is a big fan of the company. (When living in the US a friend and I used to call Patagonia Patagucci – due to the price of their clothing. Despite that I still managed to end up with far too many pieces and loved them on my motorcycle travels. These days I am overloaded with Icebreaker stuff, which is even better.)

(We are a secular society, and Casey started with a deep breathing and contemplation exercise that I struggled with – it ended with ‘think about whoever you believe is responsive for this great natural abundance.)

Being happy

When you are happy, your customers, employees, vendors are happy. That’s conscious capitalism. Patagonia are based in Ventura, CA, a great place to work with surf, solar panels and so on. He really enjoys going there (commutes from Colorado), and stil does after 7 years. Their receptionist is a former surf champion and frisbee dude, and sets the vibe of the place. They have a childcare center on the site, and the 75 kids voices permeate the building. (This is awesome – especially when you consider the teddy bear story. ) This all stems from the (married) founders own philosophies. The child care is certainly transformative – helping attract and retain awesome women in particular.  Yvon Chouinard, the other founder, at 73, still turns up to the office 6 months a year. Patagonia’s mission is very well put, and known by it seems all employees.

Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.

The are trying to get more companies to be more like them (the inspire part), and help get a common understanding on what business should be. (They are succeeding) Patagonia is expanding globally, but rather than cookie cutter stores they use old spaces rather than use new stores. You get what you intend to do.

Patagonia grow organically, within their means, taking inspiration from how trees grow. They adapt their growth approach to the economy, growing more in boom times, and less in quiet times. They are passionate about the products, placing incredible attention to detail. When designing they take things away until there is nothing left but product.

Patagonia were early adopters (or inventors perhaps) of recycling soda bottles into fleeces. They work hard to reduce packaging volume and waste. Back in 1995 they adopted an organic-only approach to cotton and in 2004 they commenced a recycling program – customers could bring back polypropylene clothing and it would be recycled.

As a company they look at being responsible to minimise their impact on their planet, each decision, each day. It can become a game with an example of a Tokyo store tracking and trying to reduce power to zero. Gore(tex) lasts forever in landfill, and so they worked with an outside firm to develop a new process for Patagonia and Gore.

They seek to minimise environmental harm, and embrace an open approach to information on how they ship products. They publish this as the footprint chronicles, also providing information and leadership on the field. On openness (from a video) “If we started to squirm in our chairs …we were probably hitting the right point.” They show, for example, good visibility on the offshore factories where the products are made.

They don’t have a great wool story versus Icebreaker, so went to Southern Argentina to look for a merino story. They saw that herding there actually helped plants regenerate quickly, and are launching it in socks soon. (Sounds a bit pushed). Like icebreaker they will track the source, even down to the individual animal. Japanese are the toughest consumers, demanding visibility to sources of food and water.

Common Threads initiative is aimed at asking consumers to look at consuming less. Be aware of your purchase decisions, if worn out repair, sell on eBay but fundamentally buy less stuff. “Consume not what we vaguely want, but what we need.” 25000 people have taken a pledge on this.

Patagonia ran a now well-known advertisement “don’t buy this jacket” on Thanksgiving Friday, promoting purchasing less products. Perversely their sales went up.

Founder Yvon Chouinard is still an evangelist for Patagonia’s approach. (I missed this but I thin he was responsible for…) Wal*mart saw what was happening, listened, and started making internal moves to be more sustainable. They began asking suppliers to reduce packaging and so on, which has had a profound roll-on effect through industry.

Patagonia’s own factories are changing too. One in Vietnam is opened up to the outside. “You can’t make a Ferrari in a GM factory – Jef Stokes, President Maxport (video)”. Jef went on to say they we should have a right to know how our products are built.

Patagonia gets 1000 applications for every job – from disaffected MBAs looking for the value based mission, to surfers, climbers and fly fishermen and environmentalists. College kids, millenials are fired up about the environment and will do something about it. (Something I was chatting about earlier – the new generation natively get climate change and sustainability, so that will be solved eventually. The issue is getting the older folks to get it now.) 

On customers and sustainability – it’s Lennon and McCartney, we have to work together on this.

All up – I’m a big Patagonia fan, and this resonated with everything I’ve seen and heard about them to date. We can all learn from them.

Dev Patnaik is from Jump Associates, which apparently sites between McKinsey and IDEO. He is the author of Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy

Dev (pronounced Dave) started with the announcement of the Sony PS2, which Microsoft saw as a genuine threat to the PC, and so launched the Xbox program. This was going to be a culturally difficult thing to do, and so they formed a team and gave them a complete mandate. The team loved to play video games, specifically games aimed at more mature audiences. They were males, loved violent and male dominant oriented games, and so developed the XBox to be able to play these. Their signature game was Halo, which was sold out for weeks.

They adopted the same skunkworks approach to respond to the iPod, and delivered the woeful Zune.

Dev and a team dg into this to discover what differentiated the two programs. The answer was captured in a quote – “The biggest challenge with Zune was trying to figure out who we were building it for. We XBox we knew those guys – hell we were those guys.” The Zune relied on consultant reports and data – and failed.

Patnaik sees three sources of innovation – empathy, creativity and execution, with the latter two pretty well covered by business literature. Empathy is the ability to walk in someone else’s shoes, and we have that instinctively individually. However we generally lose this when we work in groups.

He uses Harley Davidson as an example company that gets this – with HD motorcycle parking prioritised over cars and other bikes. They refer to their customers as riders, and are riders themselves. (This BMW rider suspects that most US HD riders simply ride to the coffee store and spend most of the time with their bike cleaning and polishing it. But riding is so much better than not riding, and as one HD salesman cleverly said to me once “there’s a Harley Davidson in everyone”)

Nike has a similar approach, with each sport-oriented department decked out in the appropriate attire, the names of the meeting rooms reflect the sort and so on.
The blur the line between outside and inside, think like the people who are their customers. The surround themselves with information from the outside world but are often not great at research or very touchy feelly. (I 100% agree here – its far better to be the customer than to try to understand the customer. On the flip side don’t try to do something you know nothing about – go out and hire and be people who are genuine fans).
Empathetic companies have the intuition to feel a vibe, gut sense to take action, passion to take a leap, courage to stick with it and clarity to make decisions faster.
Delta Airline executives live near their main airport, get their flights booked by an assistant, get driven to the airport through a special hole in the fence and greeted on the plane with a drink. They don’t understand customers as they are not living the same experience. They have to commission expensive reports, endlessly discuss them and so on before realising intellectually (forget about emotionally) that they suck.
Many companies (in the US) have become impersonal, focusing on the powerpoint decks and not on the world around them.
Why not hire customers? Customers have to appeal to multiple types of people, and over time even former customers lose touch, while they will miss the emerging threats. (Entertainingly Harley Davidson is an example of this – and initially got whacked by the Japanese bikes). The Wii was a good example of a product that attacked a part of the video game market that formerly didn’t exist.
To become a empathic company requires that you

• make it easy (avoid creating extra work),
• make it experiential (no powerpoint); and
• make it everyday (a habit).

He uses the example of Jetblue founder getting on flights, sitting with the punters and working with the crew. (Standard practise these days it seems). The best way to lead is to model the behaviour you want. Skip meetings and go outside to be with customers and your products, and conduct meetings outside. Target executives often conduct meetings in their and competitor stores. The office environment is a reflection of the company – so change it and you will change behaviour. Higher ceilings create more formality, lower ceilings less formality and more honesty.

He likened California to New Zealand, similar climate, remote and so forth, but with a created mythology to live to. (Remote, hippies, gold minters, coders). Is this a design challenge for NZ – what is our narrative? He believes we need to actively craft one.

He finished with the payoff – that you’ll realise why it all matters.

A great talk, a great speaker and excellent content – read his book. Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy

In the intro Jeremy Moon recounted how clothing companies moved from wholesaling to wholesaling and retailing, worrying unnecessarily as it turns out, about retailer concern about disintermediation. , Their latest challenge for the industry is selling directly online, again worrying about the response from store retailers but it seems again unnecessarily so,

Lorna Borenstein – speaks about the youth of today.

Youth are creating new habits which we are adopting – they are the Bellwethers. (No kidding – more specifically teenage girls are the leading indicator of what’s coming).

• They are extremely productive and always multitasking. (Kind of like I am doing writing this while listening to Loren.)
• Their filter for immediacy and control. Self expressive yet in groups which they belong to rather than individually. The younger folks are never alone – always with a group online, and wanting to know what everyone else is doing.
• Coddled and Complimented – they are raised to beleive that everything about them is special, with the pass/fail moving to constant praise, multiple graduations (in the US) and so on.
• Optimistic and Self-entitled. 
• As a generation they are special, sheltered, confident, team oriented, achieving, pressured and conventional. They process information up to 5 x faster than (most) adults. Books are slow, realtime more faster information is best.
• Targeting youth means interactiveness, personalised and moving media.   They want to be part of what is new (Tumblr example of creating and sharing), share and take part. Media sharing is a form of communication.
• They have money, are wired and want to make their own content. Social Media is tech, people and media converging.  Pew study – 77% have computers, 44% smartphones 18% tablets, each of the last 2 rising quickly. They are all used at once = with news, for example, is accessed from multiple devices. (I’ve used a Macbook Air, iPad and my iPhone to blog, tweet and goodness knows what else today.) The consuming device matters – we expect different user interfaces on each device.
• Younger folks embrace and use their devices much more than older ones. It pays to create personas to understand how and when they consumer media. Waiting in line at the coffee shop, commuting, while watching TV and so on.

Lorna says that brand preferences are set between the ages of 10-15. (Source: Cognitive Marketing Inc – NOP World/Roper 2005). That’s before the time that they have much direct money to buy products, so it’s important to engage early, right now that means  Facebook.

They also filter from multiple sources, and the different devices encourage different methods of filtering. Discovery is also through connection, e.g. 39% of Twitter users say the news they get from there is news they would never have received otherwise.

The first generation of digital natives are now, apparently, coming of age. (I’d argue they have been here for quote a while.) Borenstein uses the cinnamon challenge as an example, with her own son trying the challenge (posted by somewhat idiotic glozell) and posting the result on YouTube. They did so to get feedback, but no advertisers were there at the time to understand the trend. Marketers need to watch for these moments, and take some risks.

Her son also started a Tumblr blog, and she raised Pinterest, the new hotness. Polyvore a Pinterest competitor, had expert stylists to create their boards, and failed because they failed to let the consumers create and they would denigrate their brand. (Polyvore’s site is horrible compared to Pinterest).

Millenials have no fear of losing privacy. There are 100m 11-29 year olds (born 1982-2000) spending 200 billion each year. They are the tastemakers and the customers of the future. Word of mouth amplifies everything tremendously. They make no distinction between sharing and communicating and prefer sharing via text to live interaction as it allows them to control the conversation.

Brand advocate millenials tell about twice as meany people about their purchases as non advocates, and will disproportionally generate revenue through brand purchases. They are more likely to both recommend and to get friends to actually buy products. 18% of advocates (and 9% of non advocates) write a blog post about their purchase. The same stats apply to IMing, posting pictures, reviewing and so on.

(Disturbingly Loren kept trying to differentiate between ‘over 40 year olds’ and younger people, saying there are differences for example with how people consume online, use electronics and so forth. Not my personal experience.)

Matt McKendry

Learned from Apple that the employee experience is as important as the customer experience, something that applies absolutely to consulting companies like Deloitte.

Learned from Stanford D School (design school) to move away from Powerpoint. Ironically Matt is using powerpoint to show pretty pictures during this talk.

Matt took some learnings back, and first tried to understand what the employee experience is like. They found that employees often felt they were kept in the dark, asked to trust the system, process and rules. Often they didn’t know what they were doing. Matt sees they are a training and education business with respect to employees, and these methods were mired in the past. They have moved from rules and checklists to experiences, using interior walls as canvas, asking what they are good and not so good at.

It’s still very early, but very encouraging to see a monster like Deloitte move into design thinking land. They are actually seeing productivity increases, and certainly are seeing a better employee environment.

Comvita’s David Bathgate

Comvita, which is led by a fellow B Tech alum, Brett Hewitt, went has been through the BBD process. Brett stood up at the 2010 BBD CEO conference and said he was going to appoint a designer, and David asked him for the job – which he got  They have and continue to achieve remarkable growth, with a CAGR over the last few years of 23%.

David’s first job was to go bring people out to meet customers and gain end user insights. They developed personas, understood their unmet needs and opportunities to capture them. They now have product ideas which they are turning into products.

Following the last summit and CEO tour they also knocked down some walls, created a design space and put more information on the walls in the spirit of show and don’t tell. This last point helps speed communication, gets ideas out early, promoting discussions early and often.

They have also tried to spread the notion of customer empathy, using a gift giving exercise build for the purpose. They put large posters up of representative core customers, along with data, and took videos from customer videos.

They largely did this on their own, and while he admits expert advice may have helped them do it better, the most important thing was that they did it. (I 10% agree).

His parting shot was that it’s a journey, and it’s about being better through changing the way they do things. They are seeing better results, shifting from 3 to 78 retail outlets moving from whlesale to retail, from 3% to 20% direct to consumer sales. The gross margin has also risen from 43% to 57%.

(Comvita was subject to a hostile takeover bid in the last year, a lowball offer which was rejected. I’m pretty sure shareholders will be very happy with future results.)

Icebreaker’s Tony Balfour

He went through the gift giving process at IDEO, creating ‘the best gift ever’ for someone. The session rapidly progressed to rapid prototyping, and his lesson was that anything can be prototyped. He uses examples from childhood where we turn anything (like a cardboard box) into anything else.

Prototyping is taking something out of your brain and putting it onto explainable form. It’s difficult to do so in traditional environments. Design is not a department, and shouldn’t be left to designers. Everyone can prototype.

Leaving design to designers is like leaving people to the HR department.

Pens post it notes, paper and iPhone are the main tools for Icebreaker. They use iPhone to take pictures and send around the world.

Icebreaker does 40% of their store business from their compact in store base units. This came from a pencil drawing prototype. As did (from prototype)  a new tagline greeting customers in each store “Welcome to Icebreaker – we believe nature is better than plastic”

Icebreaker uses two team for prototyping – a building team and a feedback team. They use a bitch list (situation analysis) to capture issues, turned into a from/to list to make it actionable. They then draw up an objective or intention that explains what they are trying to do, and they work hard on word-smithing to get the meaning correct. Next are visual models, which seems to mean diagrams on a whiteboard. Project management is the final step.

Golden rules are 1: get the right view, before you choose the right way; 2: prototype like you are right, listen like you are wrong 3: Use speed to reduce attachment, and 80/20.

They even used this to design their new ERP system, in-store customer journeys, as well as launches, website, reporting tool and product development and the Christmas party.

A fantastic series of talks – BBD in action and delivering change and profits.

 

Keith Yamashita from XYPartners.

Seeing defects. CEO as designer.

Yamashita San (I’ll refer to him as Keith from now on) worked for Steve Jobs at Next Computers as his writer when he was 26. His job was apparently to extract what was in Steve’s mind and get it on paper – an impossible undertaking.

Keith was tailing Steve Jobs on day, off to a meeting of engineers designing Next. Steve Jobs entered the room as he normally did – by kind of falling in. The group was looking at the Next motherboard, and after a while Steve’s comment was “why is the board so asymmetrical”, after which he walked out of the room. What happened next was that the hardware and software people started talking about what the end users would do. Steve returned and said we (simply) can’t have defects in the product’s hardware or software. He bought back that culture of excellence and perfection to Apple on his return.

Steve had an extraordinary ability to see defects, and was all about building cuture that would not tolerate them, whether in a product or in the environment around them.

More recently Keith consulted to Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg (at 15 million users on Facebook) characterizing him as an extraordinary contrarian. He rejected existing ideas from other companies, and most advice Keith gave was rejected. Mark apparently has a gift for seeing human experience, the connections between people, and designs connections between them.

MOMA installed cameras to watch their art, and observed to their initial dismay that patrons enjoyed touching the art. After a while they realized that this was an opportunity rather than an issue, and took it as a challenge to fulfill.

Apparently CEOs make the worlds best designers. They deal with ambiguity, make decisions in things that may not be seen as logical at the times.

Keith defines design as a method of imagining something that does not yet exist, arranging elements to make it reality, embracing constraint, challenging status quo and summoning courage. His company SYPartners works with CEOs on helping them become more design led.

Keith raises four lessons from SYPartners work:

1: a CEO designs only as well as a CEO is willing to see

We all use different lenses to observe situations, and need to use many of them constantly looking internally and externally to see beyond the obvious.

2: a CEOs job is to define the corporate character of the institution

He uses he nutcracker suite as an example of music that is holiday, gets you engaged music. (I have to say that Tchakpvskiy’s music invariably makes me feel angry, and it seems he was an angry government clerk who left his job, worked on music for 30 years before releasing that piece. I still hear the anger, even if nobody else does.)

(I think a better example is one he mentioned earlier – Tom Watson setting the standard that continues over 100 years later.)

Keith played the Bond theme music and sounds as something that sets the a standard which endures, and that the details of that are what makes it work.

He raised the US founders belief in life, liberty and happiness, and how that bonds the nation together – driving the notion of fronterism, new ways and travel to space. (sadly this is less and less evident, as travel through any US airport will inform.)

Institutions have character, and like great people that are defined by it.

3: to help make that character real, a CEO must get it right in every detail

Keith introduced a framework of concentric circles  – outer circle first.

A company must:

• look like what the company is about. Logos, clothing.
• sound like what the company is about. Websites, speeches.
• think like what the company is about. How they work.
• perform like a company is about. How they deliver.

(This is all about consistency, and unsaid is it all rolls from or is encapsulated in the mission, vision and our purpose).

Best institutions are the ones that allow you to perform at your best. Cost cutting is done, it’s about growing ability of staff to create.

4: there are (at least) twenty design jobs a CEO must do brilliantly to be a great CEO.

Keith produced a booklet on these and led an interactive session on some of them.

CEO as designer – from the book

seeing imperfection. Steve jobs example as above.

seeing icons: Shultz at Starbucks and how when he rejoined to do a turnaround they starts with senior leadership and mission and values. Amusingly to me while product quality is a value, the taste of the coffee and healthiness of the products are not. Those still remain to me the fundamental issue with Starbucks.

seeing evolution: Meg Whitman example from eBay – where not trusting each other was seen as the biggest issue at one leadership session internally.

seeing human experience. Zuckerberg as a great judge of human interactions.

Seeing seismic shifts. IBM example, but not the switch to services, but the new CEO being collaborative internally and externally. Unsure on this example being applicable to seeing seismeic shifts. The IBM switch to services was far better eidence of prescience.

Matt Brown is President and Co-Founder big BOING. His introduction, by Judith Thompson, played up that he attracted their attention when he said that play you are immersed in as a child  drives the creativity you have as an adult. Apparently that rolled through to the way he had set up his company.

Trained as a lawyer, he realised he anted to create things, but wasn’t a creator but even more so wasn’t a lawyer. He did like playing though, and so started a toy company 20 years ago – a successful one it seems.

Creative Capacity (or confidence)

He distills what we learn into information, skills and processes. Information is increasingly available on demand. He is interested in processes, which are used to create skills.

He sees a continuum of processes, ranging from the simple to the more complex and meaningful. Explore, discover, classify, remember, predict, plan, organise, try, experiment, demonstrate, imagine and create. Create is what innovative means can I use to express my new ideas. Imagine is what new ideas can I think of, while demonstrating is explaining what he has learned.

Curiosity allows us to stumble upon surprising and strategic insights – we need to be curious, then use imagination before we can create.

‘The smartest person in the room is the most strategically creative” – not the person that knows the most. (That resonates nicely with this strategy consultant, but I’d also argue that the room needs to be very smart and well informed before the strategically creative people get a look-in, and that the room dynamics drives the creative smartness, not the person.)

Purposeful play

There are three ways in which we learn – play, experience and instruction. Play and experience in particular have overlap, but these are represented as a Venn diagram. (I originally learned how to drive computers from play). He uses the example of Tyrannosaurus Rex – learning by rote, learning by visiting a museum and learning by playing.

Apparently we have 9 different play patterns, including dress up. He shows a product his company has released- dinosaur feet and head that make the appropriate sounds. (Stomp stomp stomp. That sounds awesome.)

 

The nine types of play are defined separately, but can be integrated into our lives and businesses.  They can, and are often, be combined.

Pretend play – roleplaying and directing real and fantasy scenarios. We do this in business when we rehearse presentations or pitches before the real thing.

Game Play – all games from sports to strategy with set or spontaneous rules. There are infinite or finite games, with rules changing to ensure the longevity of infinite games. These are great for developing thinking.

Sensory Play – seeking and having experiences purely for sensory development. Swings, roller coasters and so forth. This apparently helps people declutter their mind and get to intuition. People can do this through running, meditation and so forth.

Gross Motor Play – involving large body movements that build fitness. Benefits cognitive and social capabilities.

Manipulative Play – producing fine motor actions or in combination with gross motor play. This includes building, magic.

Construction Play. Assembling pieces to create patterns, structures symbolic representations.

Music Play. Exploring learning and expressing oneself through music, song and dance. This can be solo but is often done in teams, and requires a high degree of teamwork.

Book Play  exploring books and reading to writing expositions.

Art Play – using materials like paint, pencils and clay to express ideas, feelings and narratives.

 

Missing for me is social playing, playing in teams. It doesn’t fit the taxonomy, but all of these can be done in groups. Indeed Matt sees social playing as an important indicator for ability to perform collaborative work.

The hand programs the brain. (As the brain forms the neurons are connected in certain ways – wiring – and this is driven first by physical engagement with the world.) Matt qutes a scientist – “Play designs the architecture of the brain.”

Matt groups the types of processes, and says that playing is important for discovery and creation.

• Play to be curious: Explore, discover
• Instruction: classify, remember, predict, plan, organise,
• Play to create: Try, experiment, demonstrate, imagine and create.

Play (in business say) is intrinsically motivating rather than obligatory. Making work more playful will drive people much more effectively than mandates, and a company purpose and mission that reflects this is important. Play is active, creative, change oriented and has a positive approach to failure. “The opposite of play is depression, not work” – Stuart Brown.

(All this explains why I only blog when I feel like it – I don’t want it to feel like work and so the writing is driven by passion.)

Better Business

The first example was not to say no (a key to good improv), but to go with the flow. He used play speak – such as “Yes, and” rather than “no, but”, to help a team turn around from being stuck and generate new product ideas.

Make Fun – Klutz is a company inside his Boing, and aspires to be a premium toy brand. However they were driving sales through sales – by price. They moved away from that, and embraced the ‘make people laugh’ personality of the brand. They launched a program with no plan where each person inside the company had to pick one thing to make the company more fun. At the entrance there is a ‘take your own affirmation’ set-up, which delivers things like “you are beautiful” to anyone who enters. (This is a neat twist from the standard everyone should improve the business – and a lot more likely to succeed.)

Try to say yes – no matter what the idea. This pushed authority levels down (bosses approved things).

Change perspective. They invented a fort making system, but felt it wasn’t right. They only figured it out when they played with it as kids – getting inside the fort. The play experience after it was made was critical. The resulting Superfort was a great success. At Klutz the design team used to present to the sales team who would reject or accept the ideas, an unpleasant process. They transformed the quarterly pitch meeting and asked the sales people instead to try to make the ideas better. All of the ideas got better, the design team could absorb the implicit criticisms more readily and the sales team feel like a genuine part of the process, and the relationships got better.

 

David Lawee is VP corporate development for Google. He started by trying to articulate why Yahoo! is failing, believing it comes back to their inability to crisply identify a mission statement. (This is quite something from Google, who are failing right now to understand what they are, and are being pilloried for moving away from search to some sort of AOL ‘everything’ approach).

He has made about 1000 informed bets on companies,  making 120 acquisitions, with two thirds deemed a success so far.  He sees the average as between a third and a half of acquisitions as successful. (I’ve been involved in one or two companies that have pitched and failed to be purchased by Google.)

Google’s mission statement is to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” (They are drifting from this I feel). Lawee puts a lot of emphasis on the statement as driving the early success for Google. (I’d put it down to simply that they had a search product that actually worked versus the several other search engines out there.) Lawee was invested in DirectHit, a Google competitor, and while they exited for over $500m to AskJeeves. However their code was not used by AskJeeves, being dumped in favour of a newer star-up’s code. He believes that DirectHit was designed to be sold rather than to endure, whereas Google was designed to fulfill their mission.

A core Google value was to ‘focus on the user, and all else would follow.’ (I would argue they are losing this. Indeed this prompted me to delete my search history, which is something we should all do before the Google privacy policies merge.) Thus their foray into advertising was different from other search sites, choosing not to contaminate search results with advertising. This worked.

Yahoo! wanted to “be the most essential global Internet services for consumers and businesses”. This mission was a bit generic, didn’t really change over time and their revenue model was driven by generic banner ads. They certainly have not focused on usability during the last few years, and each time I go to Yahoo to look for Yahoo Finance or currency exchange I despair at what happened to their beautiful simplicity.

Lawee went on to talk about Gmail and book scanning, as being part of the ‘organise all the world’s information’ mission. He sees the success of YouTube, which easily beat Google Video, was to focus on the uploader as the user rather than Google’s approach of focussing on the end users. (All I recall was that YouTube seemed to work, and Google Video didn’t, but ultimately YouTube had all of the content and traffic, and Google was very smart and simply purchased them.)

Lawee reiterated the importance of mission, using Cirque De Soleil and Starbuck as great examples (Shultz from Starbucks says they are in the people business not the coffee business – which may explain why their coffee is lousy and does explain their free wifi.)

Google has objectives (OKRs), expressed as somewhat impossible quarterly gals. One objective was to make the web faster, and that resulted in the release of their browser Chrome.

In Q&A from Jeremy Moon he reiterates that business is about heart and passion, rather than about commerce. He also says that intuition is critical when making business decisions, using the YouTube acquisition and the required faith in the growth and monetization of the site as an example.

My Take

Overall I think Lawee is inadvertently nailing the problems with Google today. I see Google as having lost their well-crafted original sense of purpose, and are trying to be the Yahoo and AOL of old, where we are comfortably ensconced in their walled garden. The beautiful simplicity of the google search site is being replaced by the black bar, the bizarre Google+ and all in the name of chasing Facebook, rather than staying true to their customer cause.

So I asked him about this in audience Q&A. He sees that Larry’s takeover of Google reasserts the original mission, and that our identity is part of capturing all information and building improved products. He sees this as a longer term play.

My take is still the same – that the more Google tries to own all of our internet experiences, the more they will risk alienating their customers. The screenshot below is where I stand, and I’ve already switched default search on one computer to duckduckgo.

Another question teased out that (Larry I think said) that Google’s main cost is opportunity cost – a nice way to put it that they are in a race, that allocating resources is critical and that successful execution is everything.

Tim Brown is the CEO of IDEO, and one of the thinkers who energised the beginning of the design thinking movement in New Zealand. He now says we need to move beyond that phase, noting that life expectancy of companies is dropping. The average life of a fortune 500 company is 45 years, with 40% lasting less than 10 years, and the average for all companies of 12.5 years. (This is nothing new – the longevity of companies on the S&P500 has been the subject of several studies, and it is rare that a company doesn’t go through some sort of major financial event within each, say, 12 years)

He sees a move from simple to complex, planned to emergent, from efficient to resilient and so on. The example of the last is the aftermath from the Japanese tsunami, where companies were unable to cope with the shock to their supply ecosystem.

He sees that the conventional design approaches, aimed at developing individual products, are beginning to fail. That’s related to the speed of change, the complexity and volatility.

The number of decisions required in the face of this complexity increases, and it seems to a stage where it is just too hard to make all of the the decisions, as we cannot imagine the complete system. Brown uses the example of Darwinian evolution, which is bottom up change which is never finished rather than Newtonian physics, where everything is defined.

(I think he’s veering towards but missing fractals, where everything changes and changes again until there is incredibly diversity. Design is about feeding the seed of the fractal. He is also describing how the web start-up ecosystem already looks at design.)

His ideas for a Darwinian approach, which is still early thinking, includes:

• Design behaviors rather than objects. Aim to design to change the person’s behaviour rather than a stand alone beautiful object.
• Design for information flow. COmplex systems are those with more information flowing through, and today we are dealing with increasing information flows.
• Faster iteration is faster evolution. He used viruses as an example of fast iteration, but could just as easily use any successful dot com. (Indeed all of this so far is already known by successful web start-ups).
• Use selective emergence. This is about self-improving algorithms, being intentional, intelligent and emergent
• Take an experimental approach. He mentions Eric Ries’s Lean Start-up book, which is finally recognition of where this thinking is coming from.
• Focus on Simple rules. He compares this to genetics, with the genetic code as the seed. He uses Apple as an example of simple rules, such as the mandate to do things that are ‘insanely great’. (Also fractals – complexity based on simple rules.)
• Design is never done. This is hard for Tim as a traditional designer, but as anyone in web or business knows things are constantly changing, and you need to adapt, lead even, or fade away. (Straight from the web start-up playbook.)
• The power of purpose. Designing for a customer cause, or purpose. He uses the conscious capital movement as an example. Also Patagonia as a company with a purpose beyond making money. (I’ve long been a fan of putting a customer cause or purpose first, and money as a secondary reason. Money of course helps deliver to the purpose, and is not an intrinsically bad thing, but focussing on making money as a primary reason is generally short term and doomed, as Goldman Sachs has recently found.)

Brown uses Amazon as an example company that has used design across all of their business, moving beyond the market and value proposition to all of the business.

He sees we have to change behaviours to fix the underlying problems today, including the climate change, financial crisis and so on. He is a fan of measurement, which we increasingly do, giving a shout-out to the quantified self movement. (There is a lot of measurement – the real opportunity is in the space of understanding the data and providing meaningful feedback that changes behaviour. I’m working with PLTech who are on to this, providing real time coaching advice based on historical and live data.)

Apparently the 21^st century is the creator economy, (Paul Saffo). Ideo created OpenIdeo  to get global collaboration on social good ideas. One trick they use was to allow people to spend anything from seconds to hours on contributing to ideas.

The notion of a blueprint is outmoded, and we should be thinking of design as genetic code, a set of instructions for an idea to go out into the world. (Sounds like fractals again, and sounds like web-design).

In Q&A he sees the ability to deal with ambiguity as crucial for designers – and business people.

I’m here at the Better By Design CEO Summit, which is an excellent event that occurs every 1.5-2 years. It’s targeted at CEOs and senior leaders from the Better By Design client companies, and from companies considering entering the program or who are already walking the design leadership path. The group also contains design and design in business practitioners, and of course the NZTE and Better by Design team.

The BBD program helps NZ companies (over 150 so far), as I put it, become more like Apple.  In New Zealand the exemplars of design led companies include hospital bed manufacturer Howard Wright, which the first, Minister of Everything Steven Joyce, used to Chair. He was involved in Howard Wright at the time of their very successful BBD intervention, and is a fan of the program.

Joyce’s stump speech mentioned that he likes simplicity, we a small country, good looking but remote and needing more economic activity and good jobs to keep people here. Politicians don’t create jobs, in the long run buisnesses that are competitive (not protected) that sell better quality, better designed and lower priced products. He sees businesses depedning on 6 things.

• Ideas and innovation
• Money to build the business (Capital)
• Raw materials
• Skilled people (education)
• Customers
• Public infrastructure.

Apparently the National-led government will focus on these key things, and Innovation is where the BBD program sits.

Innovation needs science, business processes, marketing, identifying gaps in the market, IP rights, exposure to competition, broadband. The new Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment which Joyce will lead is apparently not the cure for everything, but aimed at improving the six factors.  So  there is ministerial support for the program, and as we will hear there is strong NZTE support as well. The program itesfl is in the midst of a reinvention, which is going to expand, I hope, the impact and scope of the program.