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The Customer Experience Dilemma (Part 2)
In my last post I described what I call the Customer Experience Dilemma. The tension created when you need to develop a new offering with the ability to disrupt the market, and the competing forces often imposed by those that measure potential success based on...
The Customer Experience Dilemma
I have spent my career designing customer experiences and the innovative products and services that enable them. Through the years there has been a consistent dilemma between designing to deliver on what consumers say they want, and designing to...
How did you learn to do that?
A few weeks ago, I met someone at a networking event and we were chatting about our work. During the course of the conversation she asked me "How do you learn to do what you do?" I realized that this was probably the most useful, insightful...
Are you creating a corporate dust bowl?
Image Credit: Courtesy - PBS.org The economic devestation of the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression is pretty well known. What is less well known are the underlying causes that enabled the severe drought to do such widespread economic and environmental...
All Fur Coat and No Knickers
Have you heard the phrase All Fur Coat and No Knickers? It's an old phrase used to describe people who have all the style and outward appearances, but no real substance underneath to back it up. People like this exist in many fields, and they...
Who’s running cover?
Let's face it, it's difficult to innovate from within corporate walls because the majority of the company is doing what it should be doing: cranking out existing products and services reliably, and efficiently, while reducing risk for stakeholders. It...
New books are here!
In the past year I have written several chapters that are coming out in two books. The first is called Disrupt Together: How Teams Consistently Innovate. This book is based on the work championed at Philadelphia University by Steve Spinelli, created and...
Making innovation less scary
In my last post I talked about how the truly scary thing about innovation from an organizational perspective is at it can't be controlled by senior management in traditional ways. However, the inability to know whether is project is on track through Gantt charts...
The really scary thing about innovation
We know that innovation is scary. It should be. We've evolved to learn that it can be dangerous to do things differently, to leave our comfort zones, and to to embrace uncertainty. But we've also learned intellectually that we need to do these things so that...
Focus group fashion shows
I want to take a minute to talk about prototypes. When most people think of prototypes, they think of product samples used in what I call Focus Group Fashion Shows. The prototypes are paraded out on the "runway", and consumers got on which they like best....