Stuck between mediocrity and excellence

Last year I went through this entire Design Thinking immersion period. I took a Stanford Webinar.  I watched a 60 Minutes segment about  IDEO . I watched any TED Talk around product design or that involved anyone with design expertise.  I'm pretty sure that I even took a couple of Coursera courses.  When I die, I hope that I'm reincarnated as a living organism somewhere in Stanford's d.School. A common misconception that people have is that great design is associated with creativity.  If you don't have a creative bone in your body, then you cannot come up cool designs.  That's not true.  Both creativity and design can be a habit and process respectively. You just need to embrace it and dive into the areas head first. (That's what I'm going to tell myself anyway) Here are some resources to get your journey started.  Creative Confidence  by Tom and David Kelley Change by Design  by Tim Brown How...

Who remembers the Mike Myers SNL skit Simon ?  (For an introduction, or refresher click the link ) Somewhere along the way of becoming an adult, we've stopped communicating visually. If you look at Mike Myers in that SNL skit, he's doing the most basic form of effective communication-- combining pictures with a story.  PowerPoint slides with bullets. Carefully formatted Word documents. Long emails that are grammatically challenged. These are the things that dominate our business communication.  And you wonder why business people complain how horrible communication usually is within the company... In Creative Confidence by Tom Kelley which is a book that I read a while back on my Design Thinking binge, he writes a section on Drawing Confidence. In that section, he refers to Dan Roam who is a visual thinker. This is a guy that can basically wake up your right brain if you choose to awaken it. (Click on his name to see what he's about) An effective way to f...

When I was recruiting the best and brightest minds into management consulting, we always said that we wanted "out of the box" thinkers.  And then we wanted them to conform to the rules and methodologies of the Firm. Such is the irony.  I don't think it really hit me what out of the box meant until I watched a Project Innovation through Design Thinkin g webinar that was available for free on Stanford's Center for Professional Development site.  It presented a question that asked, "How much can you make with $5 and 2 hours?"  It turns out that the top 3 answers were this: One group thought like I did and framed the question as an investment one. They bought a bicycle pump and went out on campus to offer the pumping of tires for a fee. That really didn't catch on. So they changed their strategy and offered pumping tires for free, but asked for donations. They made considerably more by asking for donations than they did when charging  a fee.  An...

My latest book binge includes the following:  MIndgym - Exercises to improve your mind just as you would improve your body by following a training regimen in the gym.  Contagious - Understanding "what" makes things go viral. The Smartest Kids in the World - An analysis of the dynamics of education in different parts of the world. In Search of Excellence - For all of you management consulting fans, this is where McKinsey's 7s framework is explained. Additionally, it identifies the 8 characteristics of excellent companies and is written in such a way that you don't have to be an academic to understand it.  Thinking Fast and Slow - An explanation of the two systems that drive the way we think.  Because I can't read two words out of any of these books to my son during bedtime without him completely ignoring me, I'll add Curious George Storybook Collection to the list.  In the book, it lays out the steps...