NussbaumOnDesign - BusinessWeek

A Conversation with Singapore Finance Minister Tharman

Bruce Nussbaum — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 12:21:31 +0000

Every once in a while I come across a government bureaucrat who totally surprises me with the person's insight and competence. Singapore Minister of Finance Tharman is one of them. We opened the ICSID World Congress Monday with a conversation onstage. Every nation has a governing elite but Singapore has an exceptionally competent one.

Here are my questions to the Minister. He had a chance to see them before he went onstage.

Q&A With Singapore’s Minister of Finance

Bruce Nussbaum, 2009

Mr. Finance Minister, the last time I was in Singapore was in 1969. I was told I’d better cut my long hair shorter for the visit. Today, you can see that this is no longer a problem. I wish it were.

Mr. Finance Minister, you sit at the epicenter of decision-making in Singapore. You were recently Minister of Education. You served in the Monetary Authority of Singapore. You currently chair the Economic Strategies Committee. Mr. Finance Minister, you helped shape one successful future for Singapore after 1965 and now you are helping to shape strategies that will create a second future for Singapore in the 21st century.

Indeed, Singapore and its leaders have shown a great capacity for visualizing the future. So today, I would like to have a conversation with you in front of this wonderful ICSID audience and talk about three things: 1) How did Singapore create itself over the past 40- plus years, transforming a small island with only the resources of its people into a global city-state that is a model of economic success, social unity, educational superiority and technological achievement;

2) How can Singapore re-create itself into a global city-state that is a model of creativity, originality, innovation and design-driven economic growth?

3) How does Singapore see the world today—are we at an historic inflection point that will transform the global context of the past half century into something very different in the near future?
So let’s begin with the past. I understand that you are a wonderful storyteller. Can you tell us a story or two that captures how Singapore discovered and developed the capacities that have made it so successful today? Can you unpack some of the mysteries for us?

Thank you. The capacities of the past may not be the capacities needed for the future. What kind of capacities do you see Singapore needing and developing for the years ahead?

Singapore’s impressive success has come in large part from a technology-centered, engineering, top-down kind of social and economic model that is a marvel of efficiency. In 2002, the “Remaking Singapore” initiative was launched to turn Singapore into a world center of creativity, innovation, and design. These new capacities are associated with a human-centered, social science, bottoms-up model. How successful is Singapore to date in making a transition to this different kind of model? What kind of education do you need to develop original, creative young people? How do you foster creative talent and keep it in Singapore?

The city is making a big comeback around the globe. New cities are being built, megacities are rising and older cities are being renovated. What lessons can these cities, especially the megacities, learn from the city-state of Singapore, as they strive to grow and prosper? Are there transferable lessons?

Finally, just a small question. Looking at the world from the vantage point of Singapore, where are we going? How are we changing?

Thank you."

The Finance Minister made a persuasive case for strong government intervention in the economy and in society. Compare Singapore today to what it was when I first visited many decades ago and I had to agree with his assessment of economic progress and social harmony. This country has lept from Third World status to First World nation in about 4 decades. Remarkable.

The Minister also recognized that the engineering, efficiency-driven top-down model that has given Singapore so much success needs to be augmented with a more creative, innovative bottoms-up model. The government is recognizing that new industries outside it's usual control are cropping up--such as airplane maintenance--and has policies to move quickly to support them. In Singaporean fashion, the government is redesigning the education system to promote creativity among the young.

Will it work? I hope so but I'm not sure. Many of the young Singaporeans that I am meeting tell me of friends living and working overseas because they find Singapore too controlled, hierarchical and stifling. I asked the Minister about new startups in Singapore and he acknowledged the need for more of them but focussed on attracting big multinationals to bolster the economy.

Other young Singaporeans noted that there is not much of a local culture of risk-taking and failure in the country. And not much of a private venture capital structure either. So many would-be entrepreneurs leave for Australia, the US or Canada.

The sophisticated insight and knowledge shown on stage by Minister Tharman lead me to expect that the government will probably get it right as it promotes the evolution of Singapore from an efficiency-centric society to a mixed efficiency/creativity model. But it might accelerate that progress by bringing more of Singapore's smart young Gen Y generation of creatives into policy-making positions right now. A global mega-city of Singapore's excellence can't afford to let any of its young go.

ICSID World Design Congress Opens in Singapore

Bruce Nussbaum — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 11:21:17 +0000

On Monday morning, I interview Singapore's Minister of Finance to open the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID). We'll talk about how Singapore created a modern 20th century city-state and what it must now do to become a 21st century mega-city. Think of a shift from efficiency to creativity.

The big show will come from the nine incredible Design2050 studio teams put together by Arnold Wasserman that will explore some of the most important and exciting issues of the future. Feng Zhu, founder of Singapore's Feng Zhu Design, is leading a group to talk about entertainment; Chris Bangle, former head of BMW's design group, is leading a group on Emotional Mobility 2050. Stephano Marzano, the head of Philips Design, heads a group talking about Healthcare 2050. Arup's Chris Luebkeman leads a group that will discuss the drivers of change for the next four decades. Ravi Naidoo, the head of South Africa's Design Indaba, is leading a team that will present on urban agriculture.

Cocktails tonight. Gotta get dressed.

President Obama's Asia Failure

Bruce Nussbaum — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 10:37:48 +0000

Sitting here in Singapore as President Obama went through China and flew home from his 8-day trip to Asia, it is perhaps easier to see the true truth of his trip--it's deep failure. The entire neo-liberal economic model promoted by the US over the past decades is now held in such disregard in Asia that a President representing the US system must suffer from the model's decline. Soft power, such as culture and economic models, is always a major component of projecting a nation's power around the world. Right now Wall Street, Alan Greenspan and the Chicago-school of market mania has so undercut America's standing in Asia by the horrible recession they caused, that even President Obama's popularity couldn't overcome it's negative impact.

Obama came home empty-handed. He made little headway in his single most important mission--China's revaluation of its currency, the yuan. A higher value for the yuan makes sense for the global economy, for the US economy and for the Chinese economy. But Obama couldn't persuade Beijing of that because you can't muscle your banker and China is America's banker. And everyone in Asia knows this. You can feel the shift in the way people talk and in the way nation's are beginning to accomodate China. Expect more visits from China's growing blue-water fleet. Expect more Asian students studying in Chinese universities. Asian children are already beginning to learn Mandarin in a big way.

I visited an old British airforce base in Singapore today while I was out birding. It was a strange, nostalgic scene. Unless the US gets its act together and reverses it's global decline, it may one day soon also be remember with nostalgia.

Health Care Reform: US vs Singapore

Bruce Nussbaum — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 09:33:43 +0000

I attended a briefing by the DesignSingapore Council's International Advisory Panel on Friday that discussed making healthcare an economic driver of this city-state in the future. Now think about this. As the politics of the US continues to grind on around providing all Americans with the basics of health care, the government of Singapore has put together a panel of some of the world's top designers to reshape it's already terrific medical system so that it attracts people from all over the world to its facilities--and makes high value medicine a 21st century industry.

The International Advisory Panel consists of Chris Bangle, former Chief of Design for BMW and now head of Chris Bangle Associates; Richard Seymour and Dick Powell co-founders of Semourpowell, the renown British design and innovation consultancy; Steve Hayden, Chief Creative Officer of Ogilvy New York and Vice Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide; Toyo Ito, founder of Toyo Ito & Ass. architects; and many other smart folks.

The IAP said that Singapore's medical system had a great foundation of combining both Western medicine with Eastern traditional practices. It called the remix "harmonic."

And the panel suggested taking the next step beyond implementing efficient process planning and providing excellent facilities to innovate better experiences for patients and doctors and nurses in the practice of medicine. Better experiences lead to better health outcomes, better efficiences and lower costs.

This is similar to the work being done at the Mayo Clinic, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital, Kaiser Permanente and other medical centers in the US. But not in Washington at the national policy-making level, as it is in Singapore. Singapore is a generation ahead of the US in the development of a modern health care system. It has the plumbing down--process and facilities-- and is now working on the next level of value--human experience, wellness and economic growth. And it is turning to the world's top design thinkers to help guide it. Who is determining the shape of the American health care system today? Insurance companies and their lobbyists?

President's Design Award Winners--Singapore

Bruce Nussbaum — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:11:35 +0000

I was over at the President of Singapore's residence last night to watch him personally give four Designer of the Year awards. Boy, are they promoting Design in Singapore!

The winners of this year's Designer of the Year are:

Tham Khai Meng, the Worldwide Creative Director of Olgivy & Mather, New York

Chris Lee, founder of Asylum Creative (I had lunch with him and he's great talent. Lee also spoke in Mandarin to his dad when he accepted the award--the only person in the evening to do so)

Koichiro Ikebuchi, director of Atelier Ikebuchi

Look Boon Gee, managing director of LOOK Architects

The US equivalent is to have the annual winners of the National Design Awards go the White House and be thanked by the President's wife. So the message in the US is, what? Women know design and real men aren't interested?

Life In Beta--How Design thinking Can Help Us Navigate Through This Time of Cascading Change

Bruce Nussbaum — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:37:02 +0000

This is the talk that I gave at the Singapore Design Thinking Symposium on Tuesday. It was a terrific gathering of designers, public servants from the education, defense, health and other Singapore government ministeries. Pee Suat Hoon, the director of Singapore Polytechnic was there. The National Library Board sponsored the event.

Here's the talk:

Life in Beta: How Design Thinking Can Help Us Navigate Through This Time of Continuous, Cascading Change.

"Thank you. President Obama was just in Asia, announcing that he is the first Pacific US President, having been raised in Hawaii. I think a more historically significant “first” is the fact that for the first time in modern history, Asia is leading the global economy out of recession, indeed the worst recession since the Great Depression. Asia—I should say Continental Asia -- is growing faster, producing more millionaires per year, and amassing the biggest hoard of US dollars, than North America, Europe, Latin America and even the Middle East.
Totally impressive. And, I would like to argue here today, totally problematic. The past and even the present are not good predictors of the future. Reliably repeating past success ever more efficiently is a poor predictor of a new, valid future. And we are entering a new future, a very different future, where the low-cost, efficient production of things and services for export to a single subset of overseas consumers--American consumers-- may not generate the same kind of economic value and prosperity as it has in the past. This may be especially true for high-income societies such as Singapore, Korea and coastal China.

I would like to provoke you today by arguing that the engineering/efficiency/reliability model of past Singaporean success needs to be augmented with a new model based on culture/generation and validity.
So allow me to sketch out a narrative that may challenge some of Singapore’s and Asia’s assumptions about it’s future. Let’s talk about Designomics, a term I first heard about out of Korea just a month ago. I like it because both parts of the word—design and economics--are undergoing vast changes. The global economy is emerging from the Great Recession, with a very different shape, a very different trajectory and a very different set of growth engines. Design is also emerging from the recent crisis, with a different form, function and name--Design Thinking. A design-based business model and a design-based economy may well provide the best new opportunities for creating value, growth, revenues, profits, jobs and wealth for the decades ahead.
Why do I say this? Because we now live in a world of constant, cascading change, which is eroding our business and social institutions, reshaping our careers and remaking our lives. Powerful geopolitical, demographic, technological, and economic forces are disrupting life as we know it. Old behaviors and methods of generating growth no longer work as well as they once did. Traditional business and economic models based on making efficient choices among existing options within stable business and economic systems are starting to lose their value for many companies and countries.
Increasingly, people are turning to Design Thinking as a new paradigm to understand the needs and desires of changing cultures and create new options that never existed before. It is the ability to generate new concepts that lead to new products, services and even social systems of great value. In a life always in beta that doesn’t pause or end, Design Thinking is providing a pathway to the future.
This speech, Life in Beta, will examine the major forces changing our lives today and show how Design Thinking provides a package of tools, methodologies and perspectives that has relevance to all our social systems--business, health, education, entertainment.

First, I will discuss three of the five most powerful global forces at work transforming our lives--geopolitics (the rise of Asia and fall of the West); demographics (the rise of the Gen Y generation (which is the demographic group between 16 and 27 years old) and the decline of the Baby Boomers); and innovation (the rise of social media and the spread of new digital cultures). The other two global forces at work are mega-cities and global warming.

Secondly, I will examine the rise of Design Thinking and explain how it is the most appropriate means of generating economic growth today. I will explain how the tools and methodologies have evolved so that Design has moved from creating artifacts to shaping human interactions; from focusing on materiality to engaging social systems. I will end the talk with a suggestion that the organic, generative, culture-based model of Design Thinking may be an appropriate model for Singapore in addition to the mechanical, efficiency-based engineering model.

Let’s begin with the forces sweeping through global society. First, the rise and fall of nations and what it means for culture and commerce. Last month, the internet regulator, ICANN, announced that it would allow web addresses to be written in non-Latin languages. In effect, it reflects the end of English dominance of the web. Chinese, Korean, Hindi and Arabic speakers will be able to address their email in their own language. I predict this move will go down in history as being as important as the dollar going off the gold standard in 1973. In fact, they are two data points on an historic arc representing a trend—the economic rise of Asia vis a vis the West.

So what does this mean for the future? When one nation has the economic, technological and political power to lead world society, it’s tends to dominate much of world culture. Music, education, economic models, art, political systems. We know this. What we sometimes forget is that the homogeneity of world culture also makes it easier for world commerce. You only have to worry about a handful of cultures that you do business in—the dominant one, and the others that copy the dominant one.
Here is the talk that I delivered at the Singapore Design Thinking Symposium: Life in Beta--How Design Thinking Can Help Us Navigate Through This Time of Continuous, Cascading Change.

Today, the dominant global culture, the US, and specifically, the dominant consuming culture, the American consumer, are in retreat. American consumers have woken up to find that they’ve lost a decade—maybe two-- of prosperity and that debt and speculation allowed them to live far beyond their means. For tens of millions of Americans, globalization has meant immiseration. Blue collar, white collar, knowledge workers—all have lost. The S&P 500, even after recovering dramatically, is no higher than it was in 1999. A lost decade.

So the main driver of Asian growth for the past 3 decades, the homogeneous culture of the American consumer, is fading as a force. At the same time, we see rising prosperity around the world. We are moving from global cultural homogeneity to diversity as we move from geo-economic hegemony to multiplicity and multi-polarity. To do business now means understanding many cultures. This means that employing standard business practices ever more efficiently may well generate less and less value.

Let’s now talk about the second big trend, demographics. The rise of the Gen Y or Millenial generation and fall of the Baby Boomer demographic is perhaps even more important than the rise and fall of nations. Each Millenial generation in each country varies of course, but most share a distinctive culture that is very different from older generations. In the US, Gen Y has a unique and powerful culture—urban, collaborative, participatory, green, generative—it likes to use tools and make things. It is also pan-ethnic, trans-gender and trans-national. Millenials in China share many of these traits—but they are very nationalistic and are pro-ethnic. I don’t know what are the cultural characteristics of the Gen Y generation in Singapore, except that the gap between them and their parents is probably much wider than the gap between their parents and their grandparents.

Millenials in the US tend to live in a culture of free information that is instantly available, with constant communication with friends that is global in scope. They live on social media digital platforms that are ever changing. They inhabit a participatory media that gives them the tools to create, share and reappropriate content, including their own fluid identities. I call Millenial culture a Learn-Share-Make culture.

In the US, the Gen Y generation is already changing how society shops, brands, communicates, educates, delivers health care, transports itself and even raises families. The biggest changes appear to be coming in service delivery—of health and education in particular. This Learn-Make-Share generation is already causing a de-massing and disaggregating of all kinds of service delivery in the US. Millenials live in social media and would just as soon have their classes and their medical care delivered through iPhone applications than go to big building and listen to sages on stages.
The third transforming force in our lives is digital social media. For the first time in history, it is now easy and inexpensive to create our own communities, our own cultures, anywhere, anytime. We can belong to hundreds of cultures of our choosing, not just the one of our birth. Social media is creating tens of thousands of digital cultures every year—and they are cultures you need to understand and engage if you want to sell them products or services. We all know there are 40,000 villages in, but 40,000 digital villages are created every week on the web. I’ve heard there is one for Mommies with twins in Brooklyn. Do you know their culture?

These three global forces—the rise and fall of nations, the rise and fall of generations and the spread of digital social media—are combining to transform our world and especially our global economy. We are on the cusp of a New Normal. This New Normal situation in the world will need a new paradigm and fresh tools and methods to generate economic growth and prosperity.

Which brings me to Design. During the time that big political, demographic and technological forces of change have been reshaping the global economy, the field of Design has been evolving into a serious discipline that can help us navigate today’s economic uncertainties and generate value for tomorrow’s products and services.

Design has made a revolutionary journey in the past decade from a narrow field able to focus on the making of stuff to the design of social systems and the transformation of healthcare, transportation, supply-chain, education, not to mention shopping. Today, corporations are asking designers to design brand strategies as well as the products and services composing the brands themselves. And not just companies. The Mayo Clinic and the Memorial Sloan Kettering cancer hospital are using Design to change the way doctors relate to patients while branding themselves nationally as elite medical service deliverers.

How so? Building on the user-centric roots of industrial design, Design has an ethnographic core that allows businessmen and others to connect with any and all cultures, real and digital, anywhere around the world. And Design’s ability to learn from these cultural connections and translate that data into new concepts for products and services gives it the power to generate revenue and profits in a global economic environment of deepening uncertainty. If Six Sigma and management thinking were our guides to efficient choice-making and profit maximization in yesterday’s era of global hegemony, stability and homogeneity, then in an era of global heterogeneity, instability and diversity, Design Thinking can be our guide to deep consumer understanding, visualization of possibilities, generative option-making and strategic brand finding.

So what does this mean for Singapore, especially as the world moves into economic recovery? Technology used to dominate innovation. Today, technology is everywhere and accessible to all. Design Thinking is far more important to innovation than technology. Finding relevance and meaning to people living in a multiplicity of real and digital cultures is the new key to success. There were many touch-screen cell phones available in the world when Apple came out with the iPhone. Motorola had a good one in China. But Apple designed the touch-screen platform to make it so easy to use and opened the platform to developers who created 100,000 applications for millions of consumers. Empathy. Connection. Engagement. Interaction. Options. That’s Design. In the US, the iPhone is the social media, digital platform of choice for Gen Yers. The entire economy is becoming “iPhonized, “ leading to what I call the “iPhonization of service.” Young people want service delivered over Facebook or iPhone or MySpace where they can instantly access it, share it, change it and use it. That means designing games, tax-advice, healthcare, movies and educational curricula so they can be delivered on a social media platform that is key to their individual culture. Knowing their culture, just like knowing the culture of a poor southern Indian farming village, is the key to understanding how to create the new and generate value.

Take the Kindle, the electronic book delivery device by Amazon. The Kindle is the first online technology platform embraced by the elderly in America. Why? It was designed to do just one thing very easily—it delivers and presents books cheaply and easily online in a way that people in their 60s and 70s can use. There’s no interaction, no color, no video. The Kindle provides print on an electronic page, exactly what the elderly, book-reading elderly demographic wants. Designing for specific demographics and their own cultures is crucial when generations are so far apart in their use of technologies.

The challenge ahead for Singapore is to add a new competency, a Design Thinking competency, to its excellent model of efficient engineering. The challenge is to
learn to understand cultures all over the real and digital world in order to deliver what people want, wherever they live, and on their platform of choice. This is where economic value is created today.
I would like to end on a philosophical note. One reason why people are turning to Design Thinking today is that it is essentially optimistic. Design has a future-facing perspective and a tool-using core competence. The whole purpose of Design is to make the new. We live a life of constant beta, a place of uncertainty and cascading change. In this new world, Design Thinking can be our navigator. We should embrace it."

That's it. What do you think?

Singapore's Design Thinking Symposium Was Hot

Bruce Nussbaum — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:21:57 +0000

I had a fascinating time at the Design Thinking Symposium in Singapore. Mark Wee, director of Studio, a collaboration of Mark's design consultancy Union and the National Library Board, put on a workshop for a variety of Singaporean managers from education, defense and other ministries, as well as local designers. Mark told me about the work Studio was doing with the local police in improving the consumer experience. Through a range of ethnographic and other design thinking activities, his group put the police into the shoes of their "customers" and prototypes ideas of how to improve their engagement with people. It was impressive work and shifted the focus of police work from an enforcement, crime-solving model to incorporate the experience of people trying to engage the police to help them.

Kim Saxe, the director of The Nueava School talked about her founding a Design Thinking grade school in Palo Alto (where else), inspired by David Kelley, co-founder of IDEO and the D-School. It was mind-blowing to see the kind of creative work kids can do when given the chance and direction. It's Design Thinking as pedagogy--helping students develop skills to solve complex problems creatively.

Now I'm off to dinner with the Singapore President who is presenting the President's Design Award tonight to Chris Lee of Asylum. It's the opening of the Singapore Design Festival, a paen to Singaporean design. Very cool.

America is Losing Its Innovation Edge

Bruce Nussbaum — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 20:58:05 +0000

Fareed Zakaria wrote an excellent book, The Post American World: The Rise of the Rest, in which he said the relative decline of the U.S. was due to political, not economic problems. As someone who's covered the global economy for decades, and as an old Political Science major, the argument never satisfied. Fareed was right about the delta--the direction of decline, but wrong about the cause. It was economic, as well as political.

Now Fareed is saying what we concede to be increasingly true--the U.S. is losing its edge in innovation. And with that loss, comes the loss of geopolitical clout. President Obama's trip to China is about soothing our banker, not pressuring for civil rights.

Americans are finding it hard to accept their decline in the world. They can't admit that smart Asians and Europeans and others are not coming to the U.S. nearly as much as they used to for study. Or that there are increasingly more innovative startups outside the U.S. than inside the country. They don't see all the people who got advanced degrees at U.S. universities going home to greater opportunities.

Our policy-makers find it hard to understand the consequences of U.S. corporations outsourcing their R&D to China and India or the firing of top-rate engineers, scientists and designers in the U.S. so they can be replaced by cheaper brains overseas.

Mike Mandel has a great cover story out that says "Over the past year, U.S. employment of scientists and engineers—the people who create the next generation of products and make the U.S. more competitive over the long term—has fallen by 6.3%, according to a BusinessWeek tabulation of unpublished data. Yet overall employment has fallen only 4.1%." Corporations are firing designers, engineers, scientists while cutting back on employee education—outsourcing just about everything overseas. To what consequence?

In Washington, they don't see the consequences of an immigration policy that favors the uneducated over the educated. Or an economy based on illegal cheap labor rather than one based on high-value skills.

Perhaps the wake-up call is the growing realization that we have just had what we said we would never have—A Lost Decade. Just like Japan, we're waking up to see the S&P 500 recover to 10,000--where it stood in 1999. We're discovering that our past decade of prosperity was bought with debt and speculation, not innovation and productivity.

I'm not totally despairing. Gen Y is a Learn-Share-Make generation that appears very comfortable with a Design Thinking-type of collaborative, iterative, generative paradigm necessary for innovation. Their use of social media platforms and a general comfort level with digital technology makes Gen Y a born-again innovation generation. I see it almost every day at the Parsons School of Design and so do my buddies at Stanford, the IIT Institute of Design, CCA, the Rotman School of Management, CMU, the U of Cincinnatti and dozen other places of higher learning in the US. They are a tool-using generation that likes to remix and makes new stuff.

I don't see much of this at the policy-making level. President Obama is making some good moves in the direction but not nearly enough. City mayors are way behind their conterparts in Asia and Europe. And as for our business elite, I mostly do despair. There is a big nostalgia binge for Peter Drucker because he saw management as a practice, a calling, like a doctor, with all the social responsibility to employees and community and nation that the notion implies. What we now have is a business elite divorced from nation, community and employees, working only for "shareholders" who belong to a narrow speculative financial culture. It's hard to make innovation work in that environment.

Maybe the Boomers who are messing up badly should all just move over and let Gen Y take power now.

Design Thinking Symposium In Singapore

Bruce Nussbaum — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 04:01:26 +0000

I'm off this week for a swing through Asia and Singapore is my first stop. I'll be speaking at a great Design Thinking Symposium in Singapore on Wednesday.

It's got an interesting program and the audience promises to be a mix of government, private industry, and local creative folks.

Singapore is pretty much an engineering/technology driven society and my job will be to explain how it will take more than efficiency and technology to prosper in the future. I will try and explain that it will take empathy and the ability to understand real and digital consumer cultures, tools to iterate and visualize concepts, creative methods of generating new options where none existed before and a desire to venture into the unknown rather than rummage in the declining present.

Should be very interesting.

Best Quotes From Roger Martin and Tim Brown at Thomson Reuters Talk

Bruce Nussbaum — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 02:19:46 +0000

Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management, Tim Brown, head of IDEO and Will Setliff, VP, Strategy, Insights & Innovation of Target gathered on Wednesday to talk about Martin's new book, The Design of Business. There was a great audience of top managers and design educators at Thomson Reuters. I moderated the conversation, kind of.

Here are my favorite quotes. If you were in the audience, post yours.

Roger Martin: "The business world is full of two kinds of people--builders and traders. Over the past 20-30 years, traders have increasingly ruled. They receive the highest compensation. We need to tame the traders."

Tim Brown: Paraphrase here--"We can use analytics to generate new questions, not just answers. Data visualization is very powerful."

Me: "I don't see any intelligent design in the design of design thinking."

Roger Martin: "27% of all graduate education is in business."

Will Setliff: paraphrase--"We have to reeducate people out of business schools to work at Target. We have classes and they learn what they don't in school."

Roger Martin: "We have to change the way we teach the scientific method. We have to ask, What is the question?"

Someone: "We need a Montessori MBA."

I started off the discussion by saying that I was on Twitter asking people what I should ask Roger before coming and 3/4 of questions involved what to do to get Design Thinking introduced into their organizations. So I asked Roger why we are still at the stage of just beginning to bring Design into business culture. His answer? The discipline of Management Science, with its focus on reliability, totally dominates business organizations and business education. Analytics and efficiencies leave little room for intuition or the design method.

That was a bummer. But Roger is an optimist and he pointed to Target, P&G, RIM and other companies (also in his book) as examples of change.

Warren Buffett's Bet Against Innovation

Bruce Nussbaum — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:32:40 +0000

The U.S. is in deeper trouble than I thought, if Warren Buffett is right. In proclaiming an "all-in wager on the economic future of the United States, Buffett just paid $44 billion for a 19th century technology platform, a railroad, that carries 20th century goods--coal, agriculture, imports from Asia, petroleum. This is a vision of an America mired in the past and in economic and political decline.

And Buffett just might be right. He has a great track record betting against innovation. His company, Berkshire Hathaway, is famous for investing in insurance companies and utilities, and avoiding high tech and innovative corporations. Its stock is up 84% over the past decade, while the S&P 500 is down by 18%.

I'm hoping that Buffett's vision of the future is wrong. I'm hoping that a US economy based on making, not consuming, green, not carbon-centric, based on digital not metal network platforms, will drive economic growth and prosperity. I'm betting on innovation.

The purchase of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad may have one benefit lost on Buffett. A 19th century network platform that is a railroad may have new life in an energy-conscious 21st century economy. Railroads, as we all know, are among the most energy-efficient modes of mass transportation for goods and people. Updating that platform, making it even faster and cheaper, could help propel the U.S. into a very different kind of future than the one envisioned by Buffett. That would be a future where railroads shipped exports of innovation new products and capital goods that reduced carbon energy.

Tim Brown And Roger Martin Together Talking Design Thinking

Bruce Nussbaum — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 21:15:44 +0000

IDEO's Tim Brown has a new book out--Change by Design--and Rotman School of Management' Roger Martin has a new book out--The Design of Business. On November 11, I will moderate a conversation with Tim and Roger, together with Will Setliff, VP, Strategy, Insights & Innovation, Target and it should be lots of fun. Come. As the global economy begins to grow again, everyone is trying to strategize the future. What's the New Normal? What are the new value propositions in the new world? What new social-media based business models are emerging? How do you innovate in this environment?

And, of course, what role will Design Thinking play in navigating this uncertainty, revealing cultural needs and iterating new options for products and services?

Here is the press release for the event. If you miss it, go to Parsons the next night, November 12, at six to see Roger Martin sign books and yak with me on stage about business, innovation, design and life.

Here's the release:

"You and your guests are invited to register for this next session in our ongoing Rotman School of Management Design Thinking Experts Speaker Series.

Date: Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Timing: 3:00 to 3:55 check in; 4:00 sharp to 6:00pm discussion; 6:00 to 7:00pm reception

Place: 30th Floor Auditorium, Thomson Reuters Building, 3 Times Square, New York

Topic: “Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage”

Expert Moderator: Bruce Nussbaum, Professor of Innovation and Design, Parsons New School of Design and Contributing Editor, BusinessWeek

Three Expert Panelists:
Tim Brown, CEO, IDEO; Author, “Change By Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation” (Harper Business, Sep. 09)

Roger Martin,Dean, Rotman School; Author. “The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage” (Harvard Business, Oct. 09)

Will Setliff, VP, Strategy, Insights & Innovation, Target

Their biographies are below.

Fees: per person (include “Change by Design”, “The Design of Business”, the discussion, cocktails):
US $300
US $225 for Rotman or UofToronto Alumni and “Rotman Magazine” Subscribers
US $150 for individuals who work for non-profits and governments

To Register:
If you have not already registered, please do so by noon on November 11. Register on-line here or visit www.rotman.utoronto.ca/events. Questions can be directed to events@rotman.utoronto.ca or call us at 416-946-7462.

If you are unable to attend but wish to purchase Tim and Roger’s new books they are available from leading book retailers.

We hope to see you on November 11th."

That's it for the PR release.

Who is Henrik Fisker? He Just Got a Half Billion Dollar Loan From Washington to Build Plug-Ins

Bruce Nussbaum — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:49:34 +0000

Fisker just got a big loan from Washington to buy an old GM plant to assemble plug-in hybrid cars. But who the heck is Fisker?

Then I remembered this piece on Fiskerin IN:Inside Innovation that I launched with Reena Jana, Matt Vella and Jessie Scanlon. It was reported and written by Matt, the brilliant auto maven.

21 Young Design Thinkers Making A Difference

Bruce Nussbaum — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:31:14 +0000

Check out these people--their schools, degrees and employers. This is the heart of design these days.

Hey Venessa, you are doing an incredible job covering Design!

Design in Korea and the Science of Designomics

Bruce Nussbaum — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:07:29 +0000

I'm going to be giving a keynote speech at the big Design Korea conference in early December on "Designomics." I hadn't heard the term before but I like it a lot, as it combines economics and design in one easy-on-the-ears word. It's very interesting that Korea is embracing it, since the country is pouring billions into design.

Check out this interview with Seoul's Chief Design Officer, Kyung-won Chung who talks about his "Designomics" strategy for the city and South Korea.

Does New York City have a Chief Design Officer? San Francisco? Chicago? LA? New Orleans? Toronto? New Delhi? Shanghai? Singapore? Paris? London? Berlin? Rome? Rio? Abu Dhabi? Tokyo? Beijing? Bangalore?