GUEST POST from Matthew E May

FYI – Both Blogging Innovation and In Pursuit of Elegance can be found on Alltop’s Innovation categoryIf you’ve clued in to how best to use Twitter — which IMHO is as a broadcast channel more than anything else — you know that you have to troll the web for value-added “newscasts” for your growing audience. That takes time, or it did, anyway, until AllTop came along and uber-evangelist Guy Kawasaki put together a killer aggregator that is not only customizable, but utterly elegant. It’s my go-to site for just about everything, news-wise. 95% of my online time is spent between AllTop and Twitter.

So why is AllTop elegant?

First, the design (or redesign, last year and again this past weekend) by Electric Pulp is clean and intuitive. (If you want to see the difference between AllTop 1.0 and Electric Pulp’s 2.0 and most recently 3.0, click on Guy’s coverage of it HERE.)

Secondly, and I think most importantly, the great form follows a most elegant function. I love the whole “create your own AllTop page.” (Here’s my AllTop page, so you can see where I draw my info from.) It’s subtractive, because I select from the universe of blogs. It’s sustainable, because it’s the bloggers continuous ideas that supply the ongoing content. It’s symmetrical (something is symmetrical if you can do something to it so that after you’ve finished doing it, it looks the same) because I select my topics, create my own magazine rack, as it were, yet the AllTop site remains unchanged. It’s seductive because you don’t get the whole blog from your AllTop page, just a snippet in the form of a rollover, which whets your appetite for the whole sushi roll.

Finally, AllTop has something missing: push, with a capital P. Content-wise, my.alltop.com is what I’d call as close as you get to a “full pull” site. Contrast that to a newspaper whose editorial staffs decides what you’ll get, or even the much bally-hooed Yahoo! redesign, which looks a little better than it did before, but they don’t get it! They’re still deciding for you what you should be paying attention to. And that simply flies in the face of where social media is flowing. (Does Alltop push? Yep. But really only what you want pushed. You pick and pull what you want form the vast selection, THEN they push. And if you don’t see what you’re looking for, you can suggest new listing heads.

And in the name of continuous improvement, the AllTop Blog has just been given a new facelift by a web firm called Out:Think.(See before and after below).

SO…head to AllTop and create your own magazine rack of the world’s best blogs! Here’s how.

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

Being a sometime pencil sketcher, I’ve been a fan of the Wall Street Journal pen and ink stipple portraits, also known as a hedcut (that’s not a typo) since I started reading the journal in 1982. I love the fact that the portraits are most whitespace with artfully placed dots and dashes — pure black and white — and the brain fills in the rest and essentially creates the gray tones. I’ve tried the technique myself, and it ain’t easy. Much easier is pencil shading.

I decided to track down the originator, Kevin Sprouls. You can find his work at Sprouls.com. You can read about the evolution of his technique and how he creates each sketch on his “Ink Rhythm” blogsite. And if, like me, you doubt the Wall Street Journal will ever do a feature article on you worthy of a hedcut, you can hire Kevin to do it for you for a few hundred dollars. Which is exactly what I did.

Not only is the art terrific — I sent him the blog photo to the right so you can compare — but the service he provides is outstanding. I sent him a request, he responded promptly, I emailed him the photo, and in two days received an overnight delivery (included in the cost) with the finished portrait along with a digital file, also included in the cost.

Make no mistake, you cannot replicate this technique with Photoshop masks and filters. I know because I’ve tried all the tricks available online. It’s gotta be done old school by hand. And that makes it all the more special, somehow. I can even see small whiteouts here and there on the bristol board where a dot was not to his liking.

Over the years Kevin’s mastery has enabled him to crank one of these out in a few hours. He emailed me four hours after I sent him the photo telling me he was done. To me, that’s an amazing talent and skill.

Based on the experience and outcome, I intend to have Kevin do portraits of my family members (including the dog) as holiday gifts.

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

William Bostick over at Core77 wrote a terrific post called “How (Not) To Write Like a Designer.” Design thinking is how I prefer to think about my style of problem solving. I’m not alone…IDEO and Stanford’s D School coined the term, and Tim Brown’s blog is all about it. But what I liked about this particular post was that it talked about writing as design. In other words, writing as designer thinking and problem solving. And anything that reads, “…you work with contraints to find elegant solutions to complex problems…” is sure to catch my eye.

I put William’s five points to the test in reflecting on my process in writing In Pursuit of Elegance, and in the eventual work product.

1. Use Your Skills

• Bostick says ask: Who’s this for? What’s the big idea? What are the pieces I’m using? In developing the proposal for the book, all of those questions were asked and answered. Check!

2. Kill Jargon

• Stay away from buzzwords, acronyms, cliches, formulas, steps, etc. Check!

3. Tell a Story

• The point here is to think less about “what it is” and focus more on “what is happening.” People want stories, want to know what what’s happening before they want to know what it means. Good news: the book is nothing BUT stories. Check!

4. Don’t Be Afraid to Put Yourself Into Your Writing

• In other words, use first person. Check!

5. Finally, And Most Importantly, Don’t Say Too Much.

• Funny, that’s my entire premise. Any book on elegance better be simple yet powerful. No fat, no fluff. It better have some pieces missing. Check!

So, tell a story, put yourself in it, use real words, and don’t write too much. How elegant.

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

My father’s 78th birthday would have been this year, had he lived to see the day. It’s been ten years since his passing from complications arising from a rather rare blood disorder called polycythemia…too much blood. In honor of the decade without him, I thought I’d post part of my book that did not make the final edit. I’ll reprint it here as it would have appeared…the final story in the book.

I will bring the search for elegance to a close with a story my father told me many years ago during a rather uncomfortable drive home from college for winter break my freshman year. For the entire semester I had been wracking my brain, stymied by a particular physics concept that I just could not for the life of me wrap my brain around. With physics in general, I was struggling. My father had been a physics major, but rather than deliver immediate relief in the form of the answer to the particular riddle I was wrangling with, he told me a fable about a simple farmer who comes across an immense boulder when clearing his fields.

I’m not exactly sure if the ringing was of the immortal variety Donald Knuth spoke of when referring to that most famous of Einstein’s equations, but it was most certainly E=mc2 that I finally understood.

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

Just a quick weekend note.

The idea behind the elegance element of seduction is very simple: limiting information creates intrigue and engagement. Why? Because not having the whole story leaves us without the symmetry we naturally seek. So our curiosity is piqued and our imaginations sparked, and off we go to chase closure.

My friend Iain Thomas of my favorite blog I WROTE THIS FOR YOU put it very elegantly in a recent note he wrote me, sharing with me of the story he heard designer Alexander Gelman tell. Says Iain:

“Alexander used the metaphor of a door. If a door is completely closed, no one wants to go inside the room because they assume that it’s closed for a reason. If a door is completely open, there’s no need to go inside the room because you can see what’s in it already. But if you leave the door slightly ajar, you create intrigue and interest and they want to go into the room. People actually enjoy doing a bit of work now and again.”

Exactly right!

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

I’m fortunate enough to count car designer Kevin Hunter, president of Toyota’s CALTY Design Research, among my board of muses. CALTY (California+Toyota) is one of Toyota’s most influential design centers, located in Newport Beach, CA.

CALTY is involved in nearly all of Toyota’s major vehicle design programs. According to Kevin, Toyota wants constant movement forward, and design plays an enormous role in that effort. Design is the face of innovation. He has a few rules for the road warriors in his company that have now become mantra.

Rule #1: Balance Today and Tomorrow. “People can’t tell you what they want in the future,” says Kevin. “But they know what they want now. You have to balance creativity with market acceptability. You have to push the envelope and be progressive, but you can’t get too far out there, because customers won’t understand. Your design has to evoke something familiar or emotional while at the same time offering something new and unfamiliar.” He adds, “You have to avoid a strict design bias and remember who you’re designing for. You can’t be selfish, you must focus outward, and on the problem you’re trying to solve for customers.”

Rule #2: Keep it Real and Resonant. Kevin will tell you that “there’s a sense of urgency to make design count, to resonate with the buyer.” He believes you can never stand still. The customer is always moving, changing, and if you’re not out there all the time trying to understand the functional and emotional needs of consumers, your design will simply fall flat.

Rule #3: Blend Creativity and Competition. “We take creative contribution very seriously,” Kevin notes. “It’s part of every performance review and looked at closely from an evaluation perspective. We work as team, but it’s always overlaid with intense competition for the winning ideas. For every design, we have a number of smaller teams in the hunt. To make creativity flow and give people the freedom to think, we’ve removed much of the layering that other organizations have. Hierarchy stifles innovation, and we need open and honest disagreement about every idea. Every idea counts!” In fact, all of Toyota’s studios compete against each other to win the business; in other words, complacency is minimized by treating internal design centers as arms-length vendor-partners.

Here’s a thought: send a link to this blog to the folks at the United States of General Motors. I think they need the insight.

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

Executives at GE, 3M, Google, Bloomberg Media, and Salesforce.com do it.

Ford chairman William Ford does it, as do former corporate chiefs Bill George of Medtronic and Bob Shapiro of Monsanto.

Phil Jackson, Tiger Woods, and Italy’s 2006 World Cup champion soccer team all do it.

The “it” is designating daily time to calm and quiet the mind using techniques like meditation and neurofeedback.

The question of course, is why? The short answer is that ‘break’ is a big part of breakthrough – literally, figuratively, and scientifically.

Researchers looking into how the human brain actually solves problems now confirm what many artists and scientists have instinctively known about the process of idea incubation: that seemingly unproductive times are a key ingredient of immensely productive and creative ones.

We’ve all heard of apparently serendipitous occurrences – Archimedes’ (“Eureka!”) flash of insight regarding displacement occurring during a bath, and Einstein’s theory of relativity coming to him in a daydream.

Neuroscientists now believe that the ability to engineer creative breakthroughs hinges on the capacity to synthesize and make connections between seemingly disparate things, and a key ingredient is time away from the problem. Experiments show that creative revelations come when the mind is engaged in an activity unrelated to the issue being addressed, and that pressure is not conducive to creative thought. Recent research demonstrates that the ultimate break – sleep – actually changes our mind’s perspective unconsciously. Information is consolidated by a process taking place in the hippocampus during sleep, enabling the brain to effectively clear itself and reboot, all the while forming new connections and associations. The result is new insight and the aha! feeling of the Eureka moment.

The catch is obvious: if the neural workings of the brain are hidden from our awareness, we can’t speed them up or artificially influence them to work harder or more intensely. We can only let go. Ironically, when we do – when we stop thinking and escape either physically or mentally, we actually speed up the transformational processes.

But here’s the thing: we’re reticent to take those breaks. Certainly we don’t include them or build them in as a formal part of our problem-solving efforts. The question is why we don’t, when without the break, there may just be no breakthrough.

Enter the irrational fear of failure.

Backing off is counterintuitive. It somehow feels wrong, like preemptive surrender. It’s scary to ease up, because we may lose our steam, or we may abandon hope. We get anxious when the answers aren’t so forthcoming, and we begin to doubt our creativity, abilities and intelligence, fearing that if we take our eye off the problem even for a moment, we may lose the energy we’ve invested.

The key is a quiet mind. We need to learn to rid ourselves from the potentially destructive negative self-talk: inevitable thoughts of failure, inner voices of self-criticism and judgment, and the ever-present temptations to compare ourselves to others whose circumstances have little to do with ours.

High performers know that the line between failure and success is very often drawn on the mental field of play. The good news is that turning down the chatterbox brain is something that can be learned.

Some prefer simply taking downtime to reflect and think, (or not think as the case may be). ‘Think Week’ is the now-legendary solitary sabbatical taken twice yearly by Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates. In his tiny lakeside cottage hideaway, he ponders the past, present and future of his company, of technology, and of his industry. He takes long walks along the lake shore in contemplation to quiet his mind.

Others take a more technological approach. Neurofeedback training is becoming popular with athletes and executives. The aforementioned Italian soccer team regularly unwound before matches in the ultra-secretive Mind Room, a facility wired for the technique, which involves zero-gravity recliners, stereo headphones, and tiny electrodes placed on the player’s scalp that are linked to computers displaying various types of brainwave activity. Trainers monitor feedback and response to various stimuli, searching for unique triggers that improve the level of sensorimotor response (SMR) brainwaves that create the feeling of suspended focus athletes refer to as “the zone.” Neurofeedback centers are popping up everywhere.

Finally, meditation may be the most powerful tool known.

Neuroscientists have since the 1990s been studying Tibetan monks in the hills above Dharamsala to understand how meditation affects brain activity. In the most experienced Buddhist practitioners, researchers using electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have discovered abnormally high levels of gamma brainwaves, which are believed to be associated with the brain’s ability to synthesize disparate bits of data, solve problems, heighten perception, and boost consciousness.

Scientists have now concluded that mental training of this sort can create an enduring brain trait. That means we may actually be able to rewire our brains to adopt different thinking circuits. In fact, in a reversal of conventional medical wisdom, which holds that mental experiences result from physical goings-on in the brain, startling new evidence suggests the reverse may also be true – that our mental machinations may actually alter the physical structure of our grey matter. Neuroscientists call the phenomenon neuroplasticity.

In other words, when you quiet your mind, you change your brain, thereby setting the stage for breakthrough ideas. And that leaves a whole new world of opportunity for the innovator.

Excerpt of Matthew E May’s portion of an article originally featured on CNBC (excerpt re-printed with author permission).

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

You may or may not know this: Art has its foundations in utility.

Great works of earlier centuries were never meant to hang in museums and adorn private collections any more than elegant Egyptian hieroglyphics were meant to simply beautify crypts, wooden totem poles to garnish the forest, or coarse images of the hunter’s kill to decorate the walls of a cave. Rather, they were intended for a very specific purpose or to signify a specific event, judged first and foremost by function and usefulness, and by the ability to meet the requirements of the commissioner. They were made by people, for people.

Deborah Adler knows it, though. She was a design student when her grandma Helen took grandpa Herman’s prescription medication Amoxicillin by mistake in 2001, and it was a clarion call for Deborah to apply her skills and make sure such a thing never happened again. Coming from a family of doctors, the world of medicine was a familiar one. When the unfortunate accident occurred, it became clear to Deborah that she had an opportunity to develop an idea that both hit close to home and satisfied her need to help others.

A single question drove her pursuit of a new design: How can I make medicine bottles more safe and user-friendly?

She immersed herself in the problem, exploiting her own need for an MFA thesis project at New York’s School of Visual Arts. She discovered that people take medication incorrectly 60% of the time. Grandma Helen’s problem was almost universal.

Medication bottles hadn’t changed much in 60 years. Sure, there was child-proofing in the 1970s. But simple observation told a story of deadly complexity: Inconsistent labeling, confusing numbers, poor color combinations, hard-to-read shape, and tiny type, (except for the drugstore’s name and logo).

Her goals? Clarity. Visibility. Intuitiveness. Personalization.

The new design included turning the bottle upside down and flattening it, so the label doesn’t wrap out of view. The prescription information is delivered in a hierarchy of priority, starting with the medication in big bold letters. Back label directions (e.g. “Take with food”) are standardized and icon-based. Information cards tuck neatly into the back of the bottle label. Color-coded rings make it hard to take the wrong medication, because every family member has their own designated color.

Target liked it so much that they bought up her patent rights and fast-tracked the design to all 1000-plus Target pharmacies nationwide, dubbing it Clear Rx.

The Clear Rx design is a true work of art. So much so that the New York Museum of Modern Art put it on display in the autumn of 2005.

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

Lots of bad stuff happening in China right now. So let’s talk about some good stuff. Like the design coming out of Shanghai.

Innovation, no matter where it occurs, always begins with a burning question (or questions), centered around “Is there a better way?” Artist-turned-designer Lu Kun has almost single-handedly put Shanghai on the international fashion map by pursuing three such questions:

Why doesn’t China’s clothing industry pay attention to detail? Why is it so cheap and uninspired? Why can’t we do it differently?

Tired of his country being perceived as one big factory, Kun is on a mission to demonstrate that creativity and innovation are alive and well in China. His bold designs are doing just that. Drawing his inspiration from what he knows best – the streets of Shanghai – Kun’s original creations are being hailed as elegant and imaginative, yet at the same time distinctly Shanghainese.

Undaunted by China’s lack of a financial backing system for developing promising fashion designers, Kun has broken new ground. Until the arrival of Mr. Lu, no Chinese designer had achieved a presence on the international catwalk.

Kun did it in less than five years. How?

It’s as if Mr. Lu took the advice of Sakichi Toyoda, who said: “Never try to design something without first gaining at least three years hands-on experience.”

Kun’s six-step path to innovation:

1. Learning the basics of fashion design in a vocational high school.
2. One year of cutting and sewing at a Shanghai tailor shop.
3. One year at a startup Hong Kong label.
4. One year teaching sewing technique and production design at LaSalle International Fashion School in Shanghai.
5. Then out on his own as a personal fashion designer for wealthy individuals.
6. And finally the design of an entire line of special occasion and upscale casual wear.

As with all great innovators, it’s the power of the question that drives Kun’s artistry.

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

I am constantly asked how to best structure a financial reward system in an effort to motivate people to contribute ideas and improvements. My answer: Just say no.

Combined research from the Employee Involvement Association and Japan Human Relations Association reveals that the average number of ideas submitted per employee annually is 100 times greater in Japanese companies than in U.S. companies. Why? For one thing, we reward the wrong thing in the wrong way. The average reward in Japanese companies is 100 times less than the average U.S. reward of nearly $500. We have it backwards!

In a nutshell: payment for ideas can defeat the purpose.

The situation brings to mind one of my favorite parables:

An old woman lived alone on a street where boys played noisily every afternoon. One day, the din became too much, and she called the boys into her house. She told them she liked to listen to them play, but her hearing was failing and she could no longer hear their games. She asked them to come around each day and play noisily in front of her house. If they did, she would give them each a quarter. The youngsters raced back the following day, and they made a tremendous racket playing happily in front of the house. The old woman paid and asked them to return the next day. Again they played and made noise, and again she paid them for it. But this time she gave each boy only 20 cents, explaining that she was running out of money. On the following day, they got only 15 cents each. Furthermore, the old woman told them she would have to reduce the fee to a nickel on the fourth day. The boys then became angry and said they would not be back. It was not worth the effort, they said, to play for only a nickel a day.

Sound familiar? The old woman’s scheme effectively stole from the boys the very thing they loved most to do, what they were in fact doing for free. The moral of the story is pretty clear. If we’re not careful, we can replace a natural motivation with a synthetic one. We can rob creative power from people by attaching a financial reward to ideas.

The story repeats itself all the time. Companies treat employees like a rat in a maze after cheese, by paying for approved ideas and accepted suggestions. They then wonder why they get such low participation. They give no thought to the notion that in order to get a good idea, you need a lot of ideas.

Teachers at my daughter’s school are notorious for the practice, and I take them to task regularly. They want students to read more books, so they reward the completion of books. Maybe with a homework exemption. Or extra credit. Or even vouchers to the local Taco Bell. So the quick and easy books get read. The superficial books get read. Even the good readers, the ones who love to read, get swept up in the program. They stop reading the classics, turning to the quick reads to score points. Then the program is discontinued, and everyone stops reading. Even the best readers lose their love of words. And that’s a true shame.

Is there a solution? I think so: mandatory kaizen, aka continuous improvement. Yep, good old Yankee born and bred incremental innovation, circa World War II, courtesy of Training Within Industry under the auspices of Roosevelt’s Emergency Services. Make it part of the daily work. Make it the daily work. Kaizen aims to draw out the natural curiosity and creativity within people and guide it toward adding value for customers.

Kaizen does not attempt to light a fire under people. It lights the fire within them.

Related Article: Importance of Recognition to Innovation Success

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