Consider times when you address people. Be it as entrepreneurs pitching to a banker or equity investor. Or as managers, giving top bosses a review. Or teaching students an odd topic. Or even just explaining something to someone, especially an elder. Whose point of view do you consider when preparing? We often tend to look…
Killer Design What comes to mind when you think of possible consequences of bad design? Of a badly designed product or service? You might think the product generates less revenues. Or a rise in the number of product returns, and unhappy, angry or disappointed customers. Right? But what about death? Of animals? Or worse, death…
The Mortal Risk of Riding Shotgun in an Autonomous Vehicle We live in strange times. And in interesting and amusing times. A recent article I read, spoke about how most automotive manufacturers are misleading (or are confused themselves), when they claim to offer autonomous driving features in their vehicles. Their mindset seems hugely flawed, if…
What qualifies as true innovation? The word ‘innovation’ does get passed around a lot nowadays. From large businesses to startups and perhaps even consultants like myself. If you take a moment to think about it, innovation is not as commonplace as we might assume it is. If you had an almost infinite budget, and you…
Anti-crime colour balls Imagine you are a store manager, and a masked thief has you at gun or knife-point, asking you to empty the cash into his or her bag. How would you recognize the thief outside in a crowd of people? Especially if he or she had an accomplice, and the bag exchanged hands?…
Changing User Behaviour I am currently reading the book Hooked, and happened to read something very important. I shared the excerpt with a design thinking group I am administrator of. The snippet read: John Gourville, a professor of marketing at Harvard Business School, stipulates that “many innovations fail because consumers irrationally overvalue the old while…
I recently came across an article about an initiative to create awareness about marine pollution. Some folks living close to a beach (can’t seem to find the beach’s location), created a giant, transparent fish. Made of mesh and barbed wire, it had a signboard which read, ‘Goby loves plastic, please feed him.’ It made for…
One of the fundamental ingredients of an impactful innovation or successful design thinking exercise, is empathy. The ability to understand and share the feelings of another. Often, in our enthusiasm to create something someone (a customer segment, employees, or even society), or to solve a problem for them, we tend to knowingly or unknowingly speed…
Ava and Dr. Jimmy Patell, dear friends of mine, were extremely kind to gift me a poem that they wrote about my book on design thinking, Design the Future. The poem itself is more priceless to me than the book. Really humbling. Here it is. Design the Future, what does it portend What does it…