Are goals the way to change?
An excerpt from Wharton’s review: In early 1969, just as the U.S. was preparing to reach John F. Kennedy’s lofty goal of sending Americans to the moon, the famed Ford executive Lee Iacocca gave a similarly ambitious mandate to his team of engineers. Faced for the first time with competition from low-cost, high-mileage foreign imports, Iacocca set a specific target: Ford would design a new automobile that weighed less than 2,000 pounds and sold for under $2,000, and it would be on the showroom floor in time for the 1971 model year. What resulted was a mad dash to create the Ford Pinto. It seems many of the worst blunders in business can be said to be in-part due to the poor use of goals: Sears overcharging for car work in the Nineties, Enron not evaluating the actual profitability of the deals its salesforce made, and maybe even No Child Left Behind. Like pain meds for talk radio hosts, goals have be over-prescribed in organizations. The review goes on to quote past MX Conference keynote and organizational behavior expert Chip Heath of Stanford University, who “found that people tend to think that other people need extrinsic rewards more often than they really do…. To us, our work is interesting and meaningful, but we tend to think that other people come to work because of money.” This is one reason I like when organizations focus on concrete things. Prototypes, pictures, whatever tangible thing they want to focus on to make happen in the world. Things make it easier to consider consequences and make results visible to everyone in the organization. Prototypes and other things certainly may not address every situation (e.g., sales targets), but I think they move groups of people closer to the intrinsic reward that is both interesting and meaningful. [photo by chadmiller]
We’ve all heard JFK’s goal to send an man to the moon within the decade. At workplaces, we use goals to set targets and motivate each other. I myself am very goal oriented. But theWharton School of Business has a great reviewof a new paper by Lisa D. Ordóñez from the Eller College of Management and Adam D. Galinsky of the Kellogg School of Management titled, “Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting.”
designers should talk about failure
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 theDesign Strategy day for UX Intensive. I used a case of failure in my talk aboutStrategic Experience Design. And one of my favorite case studies of design gone wrong is Pallotta Teamworks (full case study, 1.5Mb PDF).
Geek Squad takes creative where it isn’t
Geek Squad started with one college drop out, a car with a logo, and a lot of creativity. Founder and Chief Inspector Robert Stephens just spoke at “Customer Service is the New Marketing,” Sataisfaction’s one-day conference in SF. Robert dropped out once from tech school and then again from art school. But between the two he seemed to gain a deep appreciation of the difference between right-brain and left-brain thinking. He said (as closely as I could capture it), “Right and left brain struggles exist in most businesses… there’s what you do [left-brain] and how you do it [right-brain]. How you do it matters… When two companies do the same thing, what’s going to differentiate one company from another? Customers crave an authentic experience. Just delivering an experience isn’t enough. You have to deliver an authentic one.” Robert naturally considers service the means by Geek Squad differentiates. “Service is the intangible stuff, the stuff you can’t measure, and the stuff your competitor isn’t going to copy.” But it’s also interesting how much of his story and obsession is with the cars, uniform, and other livery that signify the brand. But he feels it’s the creative and cheap way to remind people of Geek Squad, calling it “time release marketing”. Police cars obviously inspired their cars (because the pattern could adapt to any vehicle). NASA mission control inspired the uniform. He recognized the value of going for the geek-style uniforms, noting, “[I realized] these are things my competitors are not going to do.” Overall, it was entertaining to hear from a founder that so clearly got how culture, trends, service, and referent leadership all fit together. On the topic of trends, he understood that technology in the home represented an opportunistic social shift: “now the most popular people in society seeking out the least popular people in society for help.”
managing ambiguity
“The most important job of any manager is to break down a situation into challenges that subordinates can handle. In essence, the manager absorbs a good chunk of the ambiguity in the situation and gives much less ambiguous problems to others.” — Richard Rumelt on management and strategy. Check it out, there’s plenty of good thinking there.
