Why Design Thinking Matters - BusinessWeek

Design thinking has received more than its share of attention in recent years, not least from magazines such as BusinessWeek. Somewhat inevitably, a backlash has bubbled up, with designers grumbling that the concept detracts from the purity of the design discipline itself, and some executives skeptical of its worth outside of design agencies or creative consultancies.

Smartly, Martin acknowledges the tension and he remains steadfastly nuanced in his own argument that balance remains the key. Sometimes Martin’s language reflects his long tenure as a university professor, but bushwhacking through the academic terminology is a worthwhile exercise. An accountant can learn to embrace the concept of validity, or leap-of-faith ideas, through the help and guidance of a more creative thinker. Likewise, structure and data can help the free-wheeling, blue-sky dreamer make a difference. Neither can exist without the other for long, and Martin’s is a clarion call for all parties to lay down their defensive weapons in order to move toward a culture of openness and acceptance that nurtures a culture of sustainable innovation.

And while Martin emphasizes that design thinking is of the utmost importance within the C-suite itself, he doesn’t let readers off the hook. Instead, everyone can learn to become a design thinker, and should try to understand the position of their colleagues.

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Why Design Thinking Matters

Titling, categorization and tagging rules for online publishing with Wordpress blogs

When publishers pull apart their archived content and start putting it up on their blog, they have a variety of style options to choose from when posting.

We recommend taking a little extra time to optimize your old articles (whether they are evergreen or not) in order to make that content as valuable to your blog (and audience) as possible.

The following style guide for unleashing your print archives into a blog is specific to Wordpress in terms of folksonomy, but can be applied to any type of blogging platform.

Rule #1: Include at least one primary or secondary keyword phrase in your blog titles and subhead.

Why? Because blog titles are so specific, you might choose to use a secondary keyword in your title (like “repurposed content” in the case of this article) and a primary in your subhead (like “online publishing”). If you want to get ranked on a keyword in search engines (and you do), this is your prime real estate to display them.

Keywords are very important, and the search engines parse your posts looking for the most important words in the text. It is important to highlight them. Which leads to:

Rule #2: Make sure your blog is set up to define your title and subhead in H tags.

Why? H1, H2 and H3 are highly regarded by Google as defining what a page is “about”.

In your “writing page” in WordPress there is a button in the menu bar titled “Paragraph”. In the drop-down menu you will see Heading 2 and Heading 3. I recommend that you use Heading 2 no more than once per page, and Heading 3 for your sub-headings. Edit your CSS to make these headings “pop”.

NOTE: Never use H1 in your content! That tag is reserved for the title of the page and you will be penalized by the search engines.

Examples:

This is H2/Heading 2

This is H3/Heading 3

Rule #4: Assign posts to a single category.

Why? From testing, it’s become abundantly clear that assigning single categories to articles boosts ranking on the category title. Hopefully your categories (or topics) are named as keywords that you want to be ranked on. This can also avoid duplicate content.

You should also keep in mind that your blog should have a few, very focused categories. If you write about cars, for example,you might use categories like Sedan, Coupe, Convertible, then use Tags for more specific topics like Corvette, BMW, and so on.

This is really great information for people that are looking to optimize their online content, and for more information like this, including audio and video with step-by-step instructions and real-life examples, see Writing for the Web, Inside and Out, by myself and Brad Shorr.

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Style Guide for Re-purposing Your Old Content

Do you ever find yourself thinking about something that could work in today’s market? An idea that is unique and unlike anything else out there in the big world of business today? If you are a savvy entrepreneur and ready to tackle the business world like I once was, here are four solid things to remember when applying your first plan:

1. Your business is going to be built on a great idea
2. That great idea is going to connect you to a market
3. You will create a plan based on what you learn, on an ongoing basis, about that market
4. You will adjust that plan over time.

The last item is particularly important. Good businesses don’t stand still; they don’t rely on a single idea. Good businesses adapt to the situations that emerge in the market. Good businesses keep moving forward; they become a nonstop source of ideas, not a graveyard for a single idea that once made sense. If you stick to your first big plan, and execute it with precision and enthusiasm it may take you to places that you may never have foreseen. Remember that if you love something so much, and have a great knowledge on your idea, making it work for you and your business will come that much easier.

Now that you have your plan, with your target audience in mind and you niche clear, you next develop a game plan for your business. This plan does not have to be as elaborate as a business school project, but it should outline what you want your company to do and how you want it to look. Jot down your best ideas on a single sheet of paper this is
exactly how I drew up my first business plan. You must be able to visualize your company growing in the way that your one-page game plan suggests. Think positive, and have long-term goals.

Thanks, Robert.
You can order this book via my Amazon affiliate link:

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Making Your First Business Plan a Great Business Plan

1. Ignore everybody.

2. The idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours.

3. Put the hours in.

4. If your biz plan depends on you sud­denly being “dis­co­ve­red” by some big shot, your plan will pro­bably fail.

5. You are res­pon­si­ble for your own expe­rience.

6. Ever­yone is born crea­tive; ever­yone is given a box of cra­yons in kin­der­gar­ten.

7. Keep your day job.

8. Com­pa­nies that squelch crea­ti­vity can no lon­ger com­pete with com­pa­nies that cham­pion crea­ti­vity.

9. Every­body has their own pri­vate Mount Eve­rest they were put on this earth to climb.

10. The more talen­ted some­body is, the less they need the props.

Number 6 is one of my favorites: Ever­yone is born crea­tive; ever­yone is given a box of cra­yons in kin­der­gar­ten.
“So you’ve got the itch to do something” is how this chapter starts, and I think that we all feel this sometimes. McLeod describes all sorts of situations and ideas that may occur to you to create something, but you are afraid that is isn’t “good enough”, or no one will want to publish it, or any number of reasons not to do it.

So what is his amazing and powerful advice? Do it. Make it. Put your heart and soul into making something amazing that will blow the minds of people that see it. “If you make something special and powerful and honest and true, you will succeed.” If you have even the tiniest bit of creative spark in yourself, you will know that his is true. It might be buried way down deep, but you know it.

Read this book.

Then get started on that amazing thing. I am working on mine and I feel awesome. In fact, after reading this, and an opportunity came for me to take another day job (see #7 above), I took it. Because now the time that I spend on my “creative stuff” feels so much more valuable, more meaningful. And the small idea that I had for a Productivity E-book is turning into something special and powerful and honest and true. And it is going to be much cooler than the original plan called for. Stay tuned.

(I get something like $0.50 if you buy it through this link)

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Book Review: Ignore Everybody by Hugh McLeod

These are the 10 books that [David Cancel] believe every entrepreneur should read:

1. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Business Law
2. Bootstrapping Your Business
3. Purple Cow
4. The Art of the Start
5. The Innovator’s Dilemma
6. The E-Myth Revisited
7. Permission Marketing
8. Growing a Business
9. The Cluetrain Manifesto
10. Bottom-up Marketing

This is a very good list, and I would add Trust Agents, Tribes, and Here Comes Everybody.

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Books for Entrepreneurs

How to Create Blog Content That Rewards Your Business Forever | Visionary Blogging

A Bunch of Ways to Figure Out Who On Earth Your Blog Should Be For

* Observe carefully. Pay close attention to details. Pay extra close attention to the blogs and people whose examples you want to follow. Hang onto their every pixel and word.
* Experiment. The only way to know if a seed will grow into a tree is to plant it. If it grows, it’s a good seed. If not, either it’s a bad seed or its growing conditions are too poor. Similarly, you should have the courage to try things out on your blog and in your blogging routine. If they work, keep doing them. If they don’t, stop and consider changing your approach or replacing your idea.
* Imagine the future. Think of the possibilities and probabilities involved. Should your blog become a company? Depends in part on how many gray hairs or wrinkles you think that would give you.
* Remember the past. What to write about? Well, what worked before? That’s one good approach.

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Who Is Your Blog For

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More on Business Priorities

In fact, I have spent about 3 years learning about what is in this book:

You need to go to Amazon and order this book right now. It’s okay, I’ll wait.

This book is a complete course in how to do business online in today’s world. There is quite a bit of buzz about this book, it is a NY Times best-seller after all. But that is not why I want you to go out and buy it, or why I gush a little about how cool Chris and Julien are. No, the reason is that you can save yourself a lot of time and effort learning the things that I learned the hard way - reading lots and lots of blog posts and e-books and whatever else I could get my hands on.

Trust Agents - Find out what Social Media is really all about

Chris and Julien have put together a reference book and instruction manual for gaining the background and skills that you need to bring your business into the world of Web 2.0 and beyond. To quote from the introduction:

“Trust Agents is the answer to the question,”What do I do now?” It is full of actionable information, supported by research and strategies, studies, and an explanation of the thought process behind what we do on the web. We love all the great “idea” books out there, and we do have lots of ideas packed in here as starting points. In addition to these, we give you actionable tasks that you can execute.”

Ideas and actionable tasks for business

The book starts off with a couple of stories about building trust, social capital, and the state of media today (and this will probably be the only business book you read this year that has stories about mobsters and student loans). Basic Social Media Literacy, followed by an in-depth explanation of what they call the six principles of trust agents.

Now, since this is a review and not a summary, I am just going to tell you about one of these principles:

The Archimedes Effect

This is my favorite, primarily because it is about leverage, a word that lots of marketing people hate to use. Which is too bad, because - even though it may be badly overused, it is the best word to describe the effect.

“Everyone uses leverage every day: Business owners hire employees so that their business can do more; people use technology such as cars to help them get to work faster; companies have systems that allow them to be more efficient. Yet millions use the Web every day and ignore how best to use the tools at their disposal to bring the greatest benefit.”

This chapter has page after page of examples on using leverage to increase the power of your online (and offline) efforts:

• Build on one success to fuel another
• Arbitrage and Pay Per Click advertising
• Applying these principles for online gaming and business
• Building your network and strengthening relationships
• Create your own niche
• Using your time effectively - delegate
• Get creative with your business marketing, be bold
• Protect your community

If you can’t find something in this chapter to apply to your business, well, it’s likely that one of your competitors will. Guess what happens then?

Buy Trust Agents at Amazon, now.

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Book Review: Trust Agents by Chris Brogan & Julien Smith

one of the most intriguing speakers at last month’s TEDGlobal 2009 was notorious graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister. …[who] made an impression with some striking observations on career sabbaticals.

Sagmeister illustrated a traditional career as a timeline comprising three distinct “eras:” learning, work and retirement, with each “era” roughly taking up a third of one’s lifetime; around twenty-five years each.

While a confident minority of people might take a traditional career sabbatical, Sagmeister keeps his perspective and his work fresh by taking periodic sabbaticals throughout his career to date. In essence, Sagmeister closes his studio every eighth year, interspersing some of his retirement years into his active working career. This new career timeline looked more like learning, work, retirement, work, retirement…and so on.

Returning from a sabbatical in Indonesia back in 2007, Sagmeister realized his work had a new clarity, vision and purpose and that his “job became a calling again.” Sagmeister felt his post-sabbatical work was stronger and edgier; his year out provided the insight, innovation and income for the following seven years. So what is his formula?

1. Talk to people who’ve taken sabbaticals about how and why they did it, and what they learned.
2. Add five years to your planned working life.
3. Intersperse those extra years into your career, taking a year off every seventh year.

Humorously, Daniel Pink himself decided to re-imagine “going on sabbatical” as “taking a Sagmeister”!

My own career, over the past 5 years, has been very non-traditional. I have worked in 4 states, in 4 different industries/environments, and 8 different companies - and run my own business. I have not had a “job” now since Septtember, 2008, and I have a very fresh outlook on what I want to do with the next few years (more on this next week).

What do you think of the idea of taking one year off every seven? How would it affect your productivity, your personal relationships? Leave a comment.

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The Sabbatical as a Career-punctuation Mark

Creating desire is equivalent to creating demand. If there is one lesson in new media and our life online, it is that time and time over we go back to the places where we find value, we refer them to our network, we are more likely to become involved with those spaces, the people in them, and the services and products they talk about.

Are we still not making good use of the depth, that third dimension of the Web that opens us through links? How about mapping the user experience? Do we connect the dots? What are the longstanding facts behind your product’s story? How do you get to the product in the first place? We are fascinated by the exploration of the journey, aren’t we? Is the community involvement ready for that part we don’t know about?

In talking with an experienced technology product development professional recently, we were saying that no new technology product works perfectly on day one. The beta phase, the moment when the product is released, is when we start the real development.

Her post is inspired by this one at Newsless: The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are four key parts to news stories, and we typically only get one of them, even though journalists possess all four, and the other three are arguably more important.

Note that when I say “news stories,” I mean an ongoing news topic, such as “health reform,” not a particular article. In fact, health reform’s been on my mind a lot recently, so perhaps it’s a good subject to help illustrate what I mean. I’ll start with the part of most news stories we get in spades:

WHAT WE GET: What just happened

Take a look at this Washington Post topic page on health reform. As I write, it includes a list of headlines signaling recent events in the health-care debate: several Democrats called the public plan essential, key senators are pushing cooperatives as an alternative, patients want more transparency on doctors’ links to Pharma, etc.

This stuff is what most news organizations consider the foundation of journalism: the news. To the extent that any of the other parts of a news story get traction, they must fit into a structure where the news is the main attraction.

Of course, this is also the most ephemeral piece of a news story. …  By October, this story will lose most of its present meaning.

Known Unknowns and Unknown Unknowns

Both writes discuss the very important parts that are missing from news stories of today: transparency and honesty. I have maintained for years that the big, corporate news orgs have willingly gone off the rails of objectivity while pretending to be objective and mainstream. Now don’t get me wrong, I enjoy my biased look at the news just like anybody else. The difference is that I know my news source is biased, I know which way they are biased, and I accept their reportage in that context. I also go looking for other perspectives on the issue at hand, especially if it is a complex one.

Matt points out what is, in my opinion, the biggest weakness in modern journalism - and simultaneously the reason for the financial collapse of print news - WHAT WE MISS (2): How journalists know what they know.

This is a component of every news story that journalists tend not to provide for two reasons: 1) explaining how we get information disrupts our institutional authority and 2) we think it makes stories less interesting.

I think both assumptions are wrongheaded. Understanding how a news story came together is often a vital part of both understanding and enjoying that story.

I agree with Matt, and I will tell you why. Take a look at this: (Ridiculously funny movie, BTW)

This DVD comes with two discs, the movie itself on the first and on the second, commentary, behind the scenes footage, and bloopers. “So what?!?” I can hear you now, “They’ve been doing this for years.” Of course they have. Because the studios have learned a lesson that journalism hasn’t. People like stories, especially the ‘behind-the-scenes’ stuff. They also like to see mistakes, out-takes, and generally embarrassing moments captured forever on film.

But, Journalism is Serious Business

So are movies. The movie industry is a multi-billion dollar enterprise. An enterprise that once thought it might get destroyed by home video. So, rather than sit around waiting for extinction, the studios embraced video, started pushing small, not-likely-to-be-successful movies straight to video and offering special features with theatric releases. ( I know that I am simplifying things a bit here, it’s an illustration.)

This is part of the solution for journalism, especially online journalism, where news stories that get 2 minutes on TV or a couple of column-inches in the paper can be updated, expanded, and crowd-sourced via comments. Good journalists that are also good writers, good listeners, can create conversations with their readers - creating a place where readers would willingly pay to go in order to get the ‘behind-the-scenes’ skinny on a story that interests them.

Keep “News” free, Sell the Backstory

Imagine this scenario as a news item:

Work-at-home-Mom Has Bad Experience with Major Appliance

An area woman had some difficulty with her washing machine recently. A brand new machine that retails for over $1,000 broke down quite soon after she brought it home and it took more than three weeks and multiple visits from repair personnel to get it running again.

The unfortunate woman, Heather Armstrong, had a very difficult time with customer service which she wrote about in detail on her blog (personal online journal) and on Twitter (a text-messaging site where people write about what they are having for lunch). Luckily, a customer service representative from a rival company (@BOSCHAPPLIANCES) contacted Armstrong and offered to replace her old Maytag washer with a brand new machine of her choice.
As the old machine had (finally) been fixed, Armstrong convinced the Bosch rep to donate the new machine to a local charity.

You can read more about Armstrong’s experience here (subscription required).

Of course, I’m no journalist, what do I know. I think that a short, stubby article on a “news story” could be used to draw people in as subscribers. Paying subscribers. Or not. What do you think? Leave a comment.

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How Can Journalism Save Itself