This week Peter talked with BusinessWeek reporter Matt Vella about Subject to Change and the approaches necessary for focusing on experience as the product you deliver to customers.

On of my favorite points from the podcast was on lessons learned from our recent Managing Experience Conference. Peter put together patterns he was hearing from design leaders like Cordell Ratzlaff of Cisco and Chip Conley of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, California’s largest boutique hotel company:

“They both talked a lot about culture, and corporate culture… In order for an organization to successfully deliver great experiences, it’s a matter of mindset of people in the organization, that that is their orientation—to deliver great experiences. You need to have a corporate culture to do it.”

Here’s the podcast, which you can also get through iTunes.

Tomorrow at the IASummit I’ll be presenting on The Long Wow, a systematic approach for building great customer experiences that lead to real customer loyalty. It’s one of three approaches to practicing design differently that I outline in Adaptive Path’s new book Subject to Change. This is a talk that I have a lot of fun with, so I’ll looking forward to doing it.

The premise of these three approaches is simple: If we all practice design (or IA, or UX, or whatever you call it) the same way within organizations, then no design practice will be considered truly strategic. Strategic applications of design only exist when design practices are focused on the aspects of an organization that make it distinct. Otherwise you’re just employing best practices, and your executive leadership will only see you as a cost center.

I’ll work to get the presentation onto Slideshare soon, but until then, here’s some detailed notes on some of the references I made during the talk:

• My essay on The Long Wow
• Learn a little more about the Net Promoter Score and the corresponding research study from Bain & Company on “Closing the Delivery Gap“
• Here’s a brief review of the peak-end rule from Daniel Kahneman. Also, the very interesting book Paradox of Choice makes some references to the peak-end rule and how it applies to concepts like the experience of colonoscopy exams.
• For those not familiar with the often told story, here’s the history of OXO Good Grips and Sam Farber’s original inspiration
• TripIt is the travel organization service I referenced as a good example for finding a wide area of customer need that they can return to again and again for new inspiration
• Peter Merholz’s interview with the CEO of Zipcar
• And who can forget radiators.com!
• The flickr Color Contest outage message, and the winners
• Adaptive Path’s book, Subject to Change

And here’s where you can download a PDF of the slides (48.5 MB) from the talk. As a reminder, you can register for upcoming Adaptive Path events in San Francisco and Minneapolis for 15% off by using the code FOBS.

It’s may sound a bit crazy, but we’ve decide to announce our CEO search and request suggestions via the Adaptive Path blog. We’re in a great position today, as a firm, and so there’s no reason we shouldn’t openly reach out while we’re looking for someone to help us keep striding forward. We love networks, and we love openness, so this is just another way of showing it.

Over the past year-plus, I’ve been working on a book with my colleagues Perter Merholz, David Verba, and Todd Wilkens. The result is an interesting take on how organizations can embrace both the emerging and the long-held concepts behind research, design, and agile development to become more nimble and prepare to succeed in an uncertain future. We called it Subject to Change.

We’re glad to see that Don Norman liked it to. After some grumbles complaining that we wrote a book that he couldn’t put down, he said Subject to Change is:

“Short, but powerful. Easy to read, yet profound. I’ve been searching for just this book: the one perfect book that summarizes the essence of modern product design. This is it. The lessons are as powerful as they are simple: The product is NOT the goal. Successful products are systems. Focus on the experience. This requires empathy, agile product management, real understanding of the target audience. This book practices what it preaches. I will use it in my courses for MBA students. You should use it for, well, for everyone. Short, simple, persuasive, and powerful.”

Over the past months, I’ve had the chance to put together with Henning Fischer the conference that I’d love to attend. It’s called Managing Experiences through Creative Leadership, and it’s about what it takes to be successful in getting great experiences out into the world.

We’ve assembled a group of thought leaders that can share a diverse set of input from many different fields:

• People who’ve been successful at doing it. People like Cordell Ratzlaff, who lead the UX design of Mac OSX, and has more recently been hired at Cisco to help turn their focus towards creating great experiences. We’ve also got Peter Coughlan, lead of IDEO’s Tranformation Practice (wow!) will be sharing his thoughts as well as Secil Watson, SVP of Internet Channel Strategy from Wells Fargo. Secil’s fascinating, as she comes to the management of experiences from a business background, but still has the mindset of a designer (listen to her interview with Jesse James). And we have Julie Peters of Virgin sharing with us how they plan and develop new experiences across Virgin’s many brands. Oh, and we have our keynote Chip Conley of Joie de Vivre has based his entire hotel business on creating and managing great experiences!
• People who are experts in specific skills you need to be successful at delivering great experience. Folks like Margaret Gould Stewart of Google has a fascinating talk planed on what it takes to build and lead a strong team, Stephen P. Anderson has a very entertaining presentation on leading a revolution within your organization, and Ryan Armbruster will help us all think twice about how we incorporate emotions into our design process (one of the big things that sets design and design research apart from other development methods).
• People who can help us think about future experiences that we’ll all need to plan ahead for in our organizations and in our careers. The incredibly smart and witty Matt Jones from Dopplr will help us think ahead about social media, and fabulous Rachel Hinman will introduce us to the future world of mobile in which she lives. Björn Hartmann will reveal an new realm of interactions that will make up future interactions.
• And OMG there’s so much more. People from neighboring fields that we should get inspired by and steal creative leadership ideas from. People that train and teach design leaders (Nathan Shedroff chair of CCA’s MBA in Design Strategy) and people who coach organizational leaders on how and where to apply UX strategically (Scott Hirsch of Management Innovation Group).

And beyond the content and speakers, we have many things planned to make the event itself an incredible experience. Emerging from the conversations and presentations, I expect we’ll all find that creative leadership of UX is itself a discipline–something we need serious talk about and a new skillset to make successful.

If you’re interested in joining us at the MX Conference, you can register and get 15% off with the discount code FOBS. Also, today’s the last day before the price jumps!

There are thousands of case studies where design leads to success. But what about the cases where design leads to failure? These cases get swept under the rug and never talked about. So we never learn.

I was inspired by this when reading Jonathan Baldwin’s post about designers needing to take responsibility for the fault of Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport. Imagine what might be learned if the design discipline treated this case like engineers treat a bridge collapse. By revealing failures and causes, a discipline can actually gain public trust.

For my part, I enjoy talking about failure. It’s a part of what I teach during the Design Strategy day for UX Intensive. I used a case of failure in my talk about Strategic Experience Design. And one of my favorite case studies of design gone wrong is Pallotta Teamworks (full case study, 1.5Mb PDF).

Surely other designers fail sometimes??? If you know of other cases, please tell me. I’d love to read about them!

As a kid vacationing on the Redneck Riviera, I’d go nuts over the airbrushed t-shirts in the local surf-shops. I dreamed of growing up and becoming the guy behind the counter painting Trans Ams, palm trees, sunsets, and Donna loves Bubba all day long.

Those days are over, but maybe it’s time to bring some of those experiences back. Rebellious kids everywhere are whining about the unfair parental rules preventing them from getting that tattoo or body piercing that would surely rocket them up the school popularity charts, or at least inform everyone else their too cool to mess with. So what better than a tattooed t-shirt as the next best thing? And with t-shirt popularity being at an all time high, it’s the perfect collision of trends.

The tattooed t-shirt experience could be much the same as the real thing. You go into a hole-in-the-wall store, peruse the designs pinned to the wall, and have a guy named Gus tailor-ink your design while you wait. He hands over the results, and tells you not to wash it in the next 24 hours to, “keep it from bleeding.”

The business model might work as well. Sell the shop the inks, t-shirts, and the basic designs. You sell Gus the gothic type templates, as he can’t use swoopy cursive with hearts for the dots on the i’s, like his airbrush grampa used to do. Beyond the t-shirts, your brand could supply tattoed wall art and other merchandise. All made from sustainable hemp and soy-based inks, of course.

JSCIMW? (Just so crazy it might work).