The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage
The Design of Business
I just read this book, and it was good. Not quite 5-stars good, but a good book nonetheless. A couple of chapters definitely stand out. The P&G analysis is fantastic, while the RIM introspection is hilarious. To be fair, it’s only funny because RIM stopped doing what the book is praising them for.
Here are a some of the notes I took (hopefully I don’t break copyright):
The minute you start analyzing and using consumer research, you drive all the creativity out of the product.
No good product was ever created from quantitative market research. Great products spring from the heart and soul of a great designer, unencumbered by committees, processes, or analyses.
Even as corporate leaders chase the vital, elusive spark of creativity, their organizations structures, processes, and norms extinguish it wherever it flares up.
Once knowledge has been pushed to a logical, arithmetic, or computational procedure, it can be reduced to software.
In most large business organizations, three forces converge to enshrine reliability and marginalize validity: the demand that an idea be proved before it is implemented, an aversion to bias, and the constraints of time.
An organization that engages exclusively in exploitation will ordinarily suffer from obsolescence.
Of the original Fortune 100 companies, published in 1955, only eleven are still on the list.
When a team can come together around a creative cause or a knotty problem, they want to come to work every day.
Laliberté (founder of Cirque du Soleil) had done no research to forecast the size of the market for his new form of circus. How could he? The market did not yet exist.
and finally, one of my favourites:
Mastery without originality becomes a cul-de-sac.
Next on my list: Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street
