If Design Thinking Can Power Up Companies, How About "Art"? - Idris Mootee

If "Design Thinking" Can Power Up Companies, How About "Art"? "Art" Should Not Be Reduced To Something Just For Display. "Art" Is The Soul Of Design. L1010301 This is the view from my temporary office. I have received a lot of great feedback from my last post and I guess it is a popular subject. And there are many different point-of-views out there. I want to continue on the subject and this was written on my 18 hour transpacific flight while eating a stack of home made French toast because I can’t stand airline food. Executives are increasingly convinced that businesses are not merely offering functional devices or products to help customers to get their jobs done, but also visual imagery, customer experiences, user identity and social connectiveness. This new design consciousness is a result of many factors including the commodization of quality manufacturing, proliferation of channels, oversaturation of brands and products and rapidly changing customer expectations. Plus a heightened demand for better aesthetic experience and usability given the increasingly complex interfaces for technology products. Design has (and should) become a critical element within the strategic tool kit for new product development. But it can be useful as part of the business strategy tool kit to create growth.

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The Evolution of Change: Some Signs for the Future of Business - Michael Fauscette

I like taking the time once in a while to tie different trends together, it just helps me focus on what's really happening now and helps me understand where things might be going. Taken individually there are some very interesting things happening in technology and business but when you link them together a picture starts to emerge that is almost staggering in depth and breadth of change potential. I was reading "The Singularity is Near" by Ray Kurzweil the other day and a point jumped out at me that I think is extremely important when looking at change, whether you agree with Kurzweil's ideas on singularity or not.

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Why Storytelling Worked For Us and Some Tips from Salesforce's Marc Benioff - BusinessWeek

The co-founder and CEO of the $1 billion company offers advice on how to shape and articulate your vision for your own brand Software-as-a-service pioneer and salesforce.com (CRM) co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff credits storytelling as one of the primary reasons for his company's rapid success. "Communication is probably the most essential part of my job," Benioff told me in an recent interview about his new book, Behind the Cloud. The book describes how salesforce went from idea to $1 billion company in less than a decade. Whether you own a small business, run a large company, or have a great idea for The Next Big Thing, consider these seven tips from Benioff about how to shape and articulate your vision.

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The Art of Choosing - Sheena Iyengar, Columbia Business School

Another great TED presentation. We all think we're good at making choices; many of us even enjoy making them. Sheena Iyengar looks deeply at choosing and has discovered many surprising things about it. For instance, her famous "jam study," done while she was a grad student, quantified a counterintuitive truth about decisionmaking -- that when we're presented with too many choices, like 24 varieties of jam, we tend not to choose anything at all. (This and subsequent, equally ingenious experiments have provided rich material for Malcolm Gladwell and other pop chroniclers of business and the human psyche.)

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Putting a value on training - McKinsey Quarterly

Training programs generate greater value for organizations when the curricula reflect key business performance metrics. Testing real-world outcomes is crucial,  claim Jenny Cermak and Monica McGurk, Principals in McKinsey's Atlanta Office. This article makes the point that very few training programmes offer any metrics on the value of the training and offers some very helpful tips.

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