Category Archives: Design

Why Great Teams Embrace Failure

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And How to Do Failure Properly

Why Great Teams Embrace Failure

GUEST POST from David Burkus

Failure is feedback. And that maxim is nowhere more true than on teams. When individual team members or the whole team experiences a failure, how they respond can be the difference between a team that continuously improves and enhances performance, and a team that falls apart.

And research backs this up. One of the first studies of psychological safety focused on how teams responded to failure. Amy Edmondson examined the teams of nurses on various wards of a hospital and found that the teams with the highest rated leaders had a higher than average rate of reported medical errors. It wasn’t until looking further that she found the medical error rates were actually the same as other wards…but lower rated leaders who punished failures scared nurses away from reporting them. In other words, the great teams with great leaders embraced failure. And in doing so, they made it easier for everyone on the team to learn from mistakes and get better.

In this article, we’ll review three ways many teams embrace failure on individual, team, and system-wide levels in order to learn, grow, and better perform.

Learning Moments

The first way great teams embrace failure is through learning moments. A learning moment is a positive or negative outcome of any situation that is openly and freely shared to benefit all. And learning moments aren’t strictly a euphemism for failures. A learning moment happens whenever a team member experiences a personal failure and shares that failure with the team along with what they’re learned as a result. The idea is to grant amnesty over the occasional screw-up so long as the person brings a lesson as well. Over time, learning moments become opportunities to discuss how to change one’s approach or put systems in place to reduce failures in the future. But most importantly, learning moments destigmatize failures and move them from being something to be denied at all costs to something that increases performance. Failure is a great teacher—and when team member’s share learning moments they’re reducing the tuition for everyone else on the team by saving them from their own failures.

Post-Mortems

The second way great teams embrace failure is through post-mortems. A post-mortem is exactly what it sounds like…it’s a meeting to discuss a project after it has died. It’s meant to diagnosis teamwide failures (though many high performing teams also conduct post-mortems after the completion of successful projects as well). The purpose of the meeting is not to find someone to blame, or someone to give all the credit. The goal is to extract lessons from the project about where the team is strong and where they need improvement. When people are open and honest about their weaknesses and contributions to failure, teams celebrate the vulnerability that was just signaled.

Many teams can conduct an effective post-mortem with just five simple questions:

  1. What was our intended result?
  2. What was the actual result?
  3. Why were they different?
  4. What will we do the same next time?
  5. What will we do differently next time?

These five answers help identify the parts of the project that teams need to improve, while keeping them focused on the future and not on blaming people for actions in the past.

Failure Funerals

The third way great teams embrace failure is through failure funerals. As if a post-mortem didn’t sound morbid enough, failure funerals are useful rituals to reflect on failures that happened due to situations outside of the team’s control. Sometimes failures just happen. The environment changes, unforeseen regulations are created, or clients inexplicably decide to part ways. When that happens, it’s important to create moments for teams mourn the loss—but also extract some learning. This can be a short as a 15- or 30-minute meeting where team members share their feelings about the project that failed—and pivot toward what they appreciated about serving on the project and what they learned. Some teams even observe a moment of silence or a toast to the project gone wrong. These types of celebrations not only focus the team on lessons learned, but they encourage future risk-taking and keep teams motivated even when those chances of failure are high. Failure is inevitable—learning is a choice. And the purpose of a failure funeral is to make the deliberate choice to learn.

In fact, each of these three rituals represent a deliberate choice toward learning. Great teams embrace failure because doing so embraces learning. Those extra lessons help them improve over time—and trust each other more over time—and eventually become a team where everyone feels they can do their best work ever.

Image credit: David Burkus

Originally published at https://davidburkus.com on May 1, 2023.

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How to Determine if Your Problem is Worth Solving

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How to Determine if Your Problem is Worth Solving

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

How do you decide if a problem is worth solving?

If it’s a new problem, try to solve it.

If it’s a problem that’s already been solved, it can’t be a new problem. Let someone else re-solve it.

If a new problem is big, solve it in a small way. If that doesn’t work, try to solve it in a smaller way.

If there’s a consensus that the problem is worth solving, don’t bother. Nothing great comes from consensus.

If the Status Quo tells you not to solve it, you’ve hit paydirt!

If when you tell people about solving the problem they laugh, you’re onto something.

If solving the problem threatens the experts, double down.

If solving the problem obsoletes your most valuable product, solve it before your competition does.

If solving the problem blows up your value proposition, light the match.

If solving the problem replaces your product with a service, that’s a recipe for recurring revenue.

If solving the problem frees up a factory, well, now you have a free factory to make other things.

If solving the problem makes others look bad, that’s why they’re trying to block you from solving it.

If you want to know if you’re doing it right, make a list of the new problems you’ve tried to solve.

If your list is short, make it longer.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Braden Kelley’s Problem Finding Canvas can be a super useful starting point for doing design thinking or human-centered design.

“The Problem Finding Canvas should help you investigate a handful of areas to explore, choose the one most important to you, extract all of the potential challenges and opportunities and choose one to prioritize.”

Image credit: Pixabay

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Questions Asked But Not Always Answered

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Questions Asked But Not Always Answered

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

This seems like a repeat of the last time we set a project launch date without regard for the work content. Do you see it that way?

This person certainly looks the part and went to the right school, but they have not done this work before. Why do you think we should hire them even though they don’t have the experience?

The last time we ran a project like this it took two years to complete. Why do you think this one will take six months?

If it didn’t work last time, why do you think it will work this time?

Why do you think we can do twice the work we did last year while reducing our headcount?

The work content, timeline, and budget are intimately linked. Why do you think it’s possible to increase the work content, pull in the timeline, and reduce the budget?

Seven out of thirteen people have left the team. How many people have to leave before you think we have a problem?

Yes, we’ve had great success with that approach over the last decade, but our most recent effort demonstrated that our returns are diminishing. Why do you want to do that again?

If you think it’s such a good idea, why don’t you do it?

Why do you think it’s okay to add another project when we’re behind on all our existing projects?

Customers are buying the competitive technology. Why don’t you believe that they’re now better than we are?

This work is critical to our success, yet we don’t have the skills sets, capacity, or budget to hire it out. Why are you telling us you will get it done?

This problem seems to fit squarely within your span of responsibility. Why do you expect other teams to fix it for you?

I know a resource gap of this magnitude seems unbelievable but is what the capacity model shows. Why don’t you believe the capacity model?

We have no one to do that work. Why do you think it’s okay to ask the team to sign up for something they can’t pull off?

Based on the survey results, the culture is declining. Why don’t you want to acknowledge that?

Image credit: Pixabay

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Instant Revenue

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Instant Revenue

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If you want to grow the top line right now, create a hard constraint – the product cannot change – and force the team to look for growth outside the product. Since all the easy changes to the product have been made, without a breakthrough the small improvements bring diminishing returns. There’s nothing left here. Make them look elsewhere.

If you want to grow the top line without changing the product, make it easier for customers to buy the products you already have.

If you want to make it easier for customers to buy what you have, eliminate all things that make buying difficult. Though this sounds obvious and trivial, it’s neither. It’s exceptionally difficult to see the waste in your processes from the customers’ perspective. The blackbelts know how to eliminate waste from the company’s perspective, but they’ve not been taught to see waste from the customers’ perspective. Don’t believe me? Look at the last three improvements you made to the customers’ buying process and ask yourself who benefitted from those changes. Odds are, the changes you made reduced the number of people you need to process the transactions by pushing the work back into the customers’ laps. This is the opposite of making it easier for your customers to buy.

Have you ever run a project to make it easier for customers to buy from you?

If you want to make it easier for customers to buy the products you have, pretend you are a customer and map their buying process. What you’ll likely learn is that it’s not easy to buy from you.

1. How can you make it easier for the customer to choose the right product to buy?

Please don’t confuse this with eliminating the knowledgeable people who talk on the phone with customers. And, fight the urge to display all your products all at once. Minimize their choices, don’t maximize them.

2. How can you make it easier for customers to buy what they bought last time?

A hint: when an existing customer hits your website, the first thing they should see is what they bought last time. Or, maybe, a big button that says – click here to buy [whatever they bought last time]. This, of course, assumes you can recognize them and can quickly match them to their buying history.

3. How can you make it easier for customers to pay for your product?

Here’s a rule to live by: if they don’t pay, you don’t sell. And here’s another: you get no partial credit when a customer almost pays.

As you make these improvements, customers will buy more. You can use the incremental profits to fund the breakthrough work to obsolete your best products.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Design Thinking Facilitator Guide

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A Crash Course in the Basics

Design Thinking Facilitator Guide

GUEST POST from Douglas Ferguson

Are you interested in facilitating a design thinking session at your workplace or for another organization? Have you learned about design thinking and want to get started or deepen your skills? If you are a newbie to design thinking facilitation, this is the guide for you. We’ve highlighted the basics you need to know to lead a design thinking or innovation workshop. Facilitation skills are essential to navigating complex business problems, and a skilled facilitator can supercharge the team’s performance. We encourage you to attend our Facilitation Lab, a weekly virtual meetup to support effective implementation.

Read this design thinking facilitator guide, and you’ll have solid tools to be successful from start to finish.

What is Design Thinking?

To start, let’s define some key terms. First, design thinking. Design thinking is a process used for creative problem-solving; a methodology that puts the end-user or customer at the center of decision-making. Design thinking is also characterized by an emphasis on prototyping and testing ideas and working in a highly collaborative manner with a cross-disciplinary team. Design thinking isn’t a passing business trend. It’s a powerful and widely-implemented approach to strategic work adopted by both startups and major corporations to tackle business challenges. Here are a few of our favorite design thinking books we recommend adding to your library for an in-depth background.

A design thinking facilitator leads collaborative working sessions that utilize design thinking practices to reinvigorate creative growth. The gatherings include brainstorms, innovation workshops, executive summits, design springs, multi-day workshops, and long-term projects.

A design thinking facilitator is a coach to innovative, productive group think and work.

Design thinking facilitators help teams focus on the customer throughout the process and uncover new insights and ideas typically aren’t revealed during business as usual (ex. the boss has an epiphany in the shower and tells the team to execute). In a nutshell, a design thinking facilitator is a conduit to innovative productive group discovery and creation. Facilitation skills are key to maximizing these outcomes.

Want to learn the basics of how to facilitate a design thinking workshop? Read our 7-step guide below, then consider our Workshop Design Course to help you get started.

Step 1: Get Focused

Your first task as a design thinking facilitator is to clarify and define what you need to accomplish through your workshop or meeting. You want to determine the focus based on team needs or challenges. Record the primary goal and high-level questions to answer, and make sure participants are aligned on defined objectives.

Pro-tip: Before planning the workshop, consider 30-60-minute conversations with each stakeholder before the design thinking session to make sure objectives are clear.

Step 2: Make the Guest List

Now that you’ve defined objectives, you and the key stakeholder(s) need to determine fitting participants. Who’s taking part in the workshop? Your client will likely have a strong hand in building the guest list. As the design thinking facilitator, it’s crucial that you advise here.

Too many people leads to chaos. Too few people means too few ideas.

Diversity in skillset, expertise, attitude, tenure, etc. is essential to an informed perspective. The more points-of-view that are represented, the more applicable your solutions. In terms of number of participants, somewhere between 7 to 15 is ideal. Too many people leads to chaos. Too few people means too few ideas.

Step 3: Make Your Agenda

With the objective and participants determined, the next step of facilitating a design thinking workshop is the agenda. A wise way to plan your agenda is to start at the end: With what tools do you need to leave the design thinking session? Are you prioritizing alignment? A system or process in place? A collection of novel ideas? Are you looking for a prioritized roadmap or a paper prototype of a new experience? When you clearly define your goals, you can plan the design thinking activities to build toward the conclusion.

The individual activities you will implement varies greatly based on the challenge. Need inspiration to kick off your Design Thinking activities? There are many free resources to help guide you and your team on your journey. We’ve also outlined exercises for virtual workshops here.) No matter your timeline, prioritize time for introductions, icebreakers, and short breaks to check inboxes.

Pro tip: Be generous when time-boxing your design thinking activities. Everything will take longer than you think. A good rule of thumb is to double the time you imagine an individual activity will take.

Step 4: Get Your Space

Next up: Where are you going to host your design thinking workshop? While it might sound like a minor detail, the space affects the day’s success.

We recommend getting participants out of their workspace(s) to inspire fresh thinking and distance from day-to-day work. Whether you need to offer a hybrid option, have the budget for an offsite space, or need to use the office, consider the following to enhance the experience:

  • Look for good natural light and character. (A windowless hotel conference room is not ideal.)
  • Provide comfortable seating for all. (Simple, but we’ve seen it happen.)
  • Guarantee wall space or boards for pinning materials and capturing ideas.
  • Don’t forget AV needs: a projector for presenting, a screen if someone needs to collaborate remotely, etc.

Want more information on choosing a space? Check out 7 Things to Consider When Choosing a Workshop Venue here.

Step 5: Gather Supplies

With space, participants, and a solid agenda, you now need supplies to execute your workshop. Your exact supplies will be driven by your activities, agenda, and chosen space. Here are some basics to get you started:

If you want to dive deeper into the specific supplies that are recommended for a design sprint (which are helpful for any workshop), read here.

Pro-Tip: If possible, bring a filling breakfast and lunch so you don’t have to leave to eat. Also, healthy snacks, water, and coffee will keep people engaged as the day goes on.

Step 6: Be the Leader

It’s the big day! It’s time for you to lead the group through the agenda and activities you worked so hard on. The more you facilitate, the more skilled you become. 

Make sure to be yourself and keep the following things in mind as you lead the team in design thinking:

  • You’re the boss: People are looking for you to guide them. You’re prepared and are the expert. Establish your authority early and feel confident making decisions and telling the group when it’s time to move forward in the agenda.
  • Establish rules: Let the group know the rules of the day. Encourage people to stay off their phones and to fully participate in the session. Let them know that there are designated breaks.

Give everyone a voice: As the facilitator, you are responsible for making sure everyone is heard. If you notice someone being quiet, pull them into the conversation. You designed the guest list with their contribution in mind.

Step 7: Wrap It Up & Play It Back

After the workshop has come to a close, recognize your role as a design thinking facilitator to equip the group with tools for long-term success. Consider these in the days afterward:

  • Photograph and document: Make sure you photograph important output from the meeting: Post-its, diagrams, or worksheets that may have been created.
  • Synthesize the learnings: Take time to reflect on the session and the ideas that came of it. Create a MURAL board or a short presentation to share with participants and their teammates.

Get the group back together: Schedule time to share back your learnings with the participants and make plans together for how to implement thinking and learnings into daily work.

Looking to become a Design Thinking Facilitator?

What’s the importance of bringing in a professional to lead the session? A design thinking facilitator positively disrupts the team dynamic. Read up on why professional facilitation can make a difference.

We hope you’re excited to become a Design Thinking facilitator. Voltage Control has design thinking facilitator training will maximize your facilitation skills. Our Facilitation Certification programs will guide you through key facilitation skills and provide you with ample opportunities to practice.

Article originally published at VoltageControl.com

Image credit: Pexels

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Rethinking Customer Journeys

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Rethinking Customer Journeys

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

Customer journeys are a mainstay of modern marketing programs. Unfortunately, for most companies, they are pointed in the wrong direction!

Most customer journey diagrams I see map the customer’s journey through the vendor’s marketing and sales process. That’s not a customer journey. That is a vendor journey. Customers could not care less about it.

What customers do care about is any journey that leads to value realization in their enterprise. That means true customer journey mapping must work backward from the customer’s value goals and objectives, not forward from the vendor’s sales goals and objectives.

But to do that, the customer-facing team in the vendor organization has to have good intelligence about what value realization the customer is seeking. That means that sales teams must diagnose before they prescribe. They must interrogate before they present. They must listen before they demo.

That is not what the typical sales enablement program teaches. Instead, it instructs salespeople on how to give the standard presentation, how to highlight the product’s competitive advantages, how to counter the competition’s claims—anything and everything except the only thing that really matters—how do you get good customer intelligence from whatever level of management you are able to converse with?

The SaaS business model with its emphasis on subscription and consumption creates a natural occasion for reforming these practices. Net Revenue Retention is the name of the game. Adoption, extension, and expansion of product usage are core to the customer’s Health Score. This only happens when value is truly being realized.

All this is casting the post-sales customer-facing functions of Customer Success and Customer Support in a new light. These relationships are signaling outposts for current customer status. Vendors still need to connect with the top management, for they are the ones who set the value realization goals and provide the budgets to fund the vendor’s offerings, but for day-to-day reality checks on whether the value is actually getting realized, nothing beats feet on the ground.

So, note to vendors. You can still use your vendor-centric customer journey maps to manage your marketing and sales productivity. Just realize these maps are about you, not the customer. You cannot simply assign the customer a mindset that serves your interests. You have to genuinely engage with them to get to actionable truth.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Pexels

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Your Core Business – Greatest Strength, Greatest Weakness

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Your Core Business - Greatest Strength and Greatest Weakness

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Your core business, the long-standing business that has made you what you are, is both your greatest strength and your greatest weakness.

The Core generates the revenue, but it also starves fledgling businesses, so they never make it off the ground.

There’s a certainty with the Core because it builds on success, but its success sets the certainty threshold too high for new businesses. And due to the relatively high level of uncertainty of the new business (as compared to the Core) the company can’t find the gumption to make the critical investments needed to reach orbit.

The Core has generated profits over the decades and those profits have been used to create the critical infrastructure that makes its success easier to achieve. The internal startup can’t use the Core’s infrastructure because the Core doesn’t share. And the Core has the power to block all others from taking advantage of the infrastructure it created.

The Core has grown revenue year-on-year and has used that revenue to build out specialized support teams that keep the flywheel moving. And because the Core paid for and shaped the teams, their support fits the Core like a glove. A new offering with a new value proposition and new business model cannot use the specialized support teams effectively because the new offering needs otherly-specialized support and because the Core doesn’t share.

The Core pays the bills, and new ventures create bills that the Core doesn’t like to pay.

If the internal startup has to compete with the Core for funding, the internal startup will fail.

If the new venture has to generate profits similar to the Core, the venture will be a misadventure.

If the new offering has to compete with the Core for sales and marketing support, don’t bother.

If the fledgling business’s metrics are assessed like the Core’s metrics, it won’t fly, it will flounder.

If you try to run a new business from within the Core, the Core will eat it.

To work effectively with the Core, borrow its resources, forget how it does the work, and run away.

To protect your new ventures from the Core, physically separate them from the Core.

To protect your new businesses from the Core, create a separate budget that the Core cannot reach.

To protect your internal startup from the Core, make sure it needs nothing from the Core.

To accelerate the growth of the fledgling business, make it safe to violate the Core’s first principles.

To bolster the capability of your new business, move resources from the Core to the new business.

To de-risk the internal startup, move functional support resources from the Core to the startup.

To fund your new ventures, tax the Core. It’s the only way.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Understanding Novelty is the Key to Innovation

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Understanding Novelty is the Key to Innovation

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If you want to get innovation right, focus on novelty.

Novelty is the difference between how things are today and how they might be tomorrow. And that comparison calibrates tomorrow’s idea within the context of how things are today. And that makes all the difference. When you can define how something is novel, you have an objective measure of things.

How is it different than what you did last time? If you don’t know, either you don’t know what you did last time or you don’t know the grounding principle of your new idea. Usually, it’s a little of the former and a whole lot of the latter. And if you don’t know how it’s different, you can’t learn how potential customers will react to the novelty. In fact, if you don’t know how it’s different, you can’t even decide who are the right potential customers.

A new idea can be novel in unique ways to different customer segments and it can be novel in opposite ways to intermediaries or other partners in the business model. A customer can see the novelty as something that will make them more profitable and an intermediary can see that same novelty as something that will reduce their influence with the customer and lead to their irrelevance. And, they’ll both be right.

Novelty is in the eye of the beholder, so you better look at it from their perspective.

Like with hot sauce, novelty comes in a range of flavors and heat levels. Some novelty adds a gentle smokey flavor to your favorite meal and makes you smile while the ghost pepper variety singes your palate and causes you to lose interest in the very meal you grew up on. With novelty, there is no singular level of Scoville Heat Unit (SHU) that is best. You’ve got to match the heat with the situation. Is it time to improve things a bit with a smokey, yet subtle, chipotle? Or, is it time to submerge things in pure capsaicin and blow the roof off? The good news is the bad news – it’s your choice.

With novelty, you can choose subtle or spicy. Choose wisely.

And like with hot sauce, novelty doesn’t always mix well with everything else on the plate. At the picnic, when you load your plate with chicken wings, pork ribs, and apple pie, it’s best to keep the hot sauce away from the apple pie. Said more strongly, with novelty, it’s best to use separate plates. Separate the teams – one team to do heavy novelty work, the disruptive work, to obsolete the status quo, and a separate team to the lighter novelty work, the continuous improvement work, to enhance the existing offering.

Like with hot sauce, different people have different tolerance levels for novelty. For a given novelty level, one person can be excited while another can be scared. And both are right. There’s no sense in trying to change a person’s tolerance for novelty, they either like it or they don’t. Instead of trying to teach them to how to enjoy the hottest hot sauce, it’s far more effective to choose people for the project whose tolerance for novelty is in line with the level of novelty required by the project.

Some people like habanero hot sauce, and some don’t. And it’s the same with novelty.

Image credit: Pexels

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How To Create Novelty

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How To Create Novelty

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

By definition, the approach that made you successful will become less successful over time and, eventually, will run out of gas. This fundamental is not about you or your approach, rather it’s about the nature of competition and evolution. There’s an energy that causes everything to change, grow and improve and your success attracts that energy. The environment changes, the people change, the law changes and companies come into existence that solve problems in better and more efficient ways. Left unchanged, every successful business endeavor (even yours) has a half-life.

If you want to extend the life of your business endeavor, you’ve got to be novel.

By definition, if you want to grow, you’ve got to raise your game. You’ve got to do something different. You can’t change everything, because that’s inefficient and takes too long. So, you’ve got to figure out what you can reuse and what you’ve got to reinvent.

If you want to grow, you’ve got to be novel.

Being novel is necessary, but expensive. And risky. And scary. And that’s why you want to add just a pinch of novelty and reuse the rest. And that’s why you want to try new things in the smallest way possible. And that’s why you want to try things in a time-limited way. And that’s why you want to define what success looks like before you test your novelty.

Some questions and answers about being novel:

Is it easy to be novel? No. It’s scary as hell and takes great emotional strength.

Can anyone be novel? Yes. But you need a good reason or you’ll do what you did last time.

How can I tell if I’m being novel? If you’re not scared, you’re not being novel. If you know how it will turn out, you’re not being novel. If everyone agrees with you, you’re not being novel.

How do I know if I’m being novel in the right way? You cannot. Because it’s novel, it hasn’t been done before, and because it hasn’t been done before there’s no way to predict how it will go.

So, you’re saying I can’t predict the outcome of being novel? Yes.

If I can’t predict the outcome of being novel, why should I even try it? Because if you don’t, your business will go away.

Okay. That last one got my attention. So, how do I go about being novel? It depends.

That’s not a satisfying answer. Can you do better than that? Well, we could meet and talk for an hour. We’d start with understanding your situation as it is, how this current situation came to be, and talk through the constraints you see. Then, we’d talk about why you think things must change. I’d then go away for a couple of days and think about things. We’d then get back together and I’d share my perspective on how I see your situation. Because I’m not a subject matter expert in your field, I would not give you answers, but, rather, I’d share my perspective that you could use to inform your choice on how to be novel.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Apple Watch Must Die

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At least temporarily, because it’s proven bad for innovation

Apple Watch Must Die

by Braden Kelley

I came across an article in The Hill, titled ‘Apple flexes lobbying power as Apple Watch ban comes before Biden next week‘ that highlighted how Apple has been found guilty by the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) of infringing upon the intellectual property of startup AliveCor to provide its wearable electrocardiogram features in its Apple Watch.

Apple is now trying to get President Biden to veto the ruling (I didn’t know that was a thing) so that they can keep selling Apple Watches. In my opinion this is a matter for the courts and yet another example of how big tech (and big companies in general) far too often brazenly misappropriate the intellectual property of the little guys. So much so in Apple’s case that over the last 30+ years a popular term has emerged for it called ‘Sherlocking’.

According to the new Microsoft Bing (with ChatGPT):

Sherlocking is a term that refers to Apple’s practice of copying features from third-party apps and integrating them into its own software¹². The term originated from a search tool named Sherlock that Apple developed in the late 90s and later updated to include features from a similar app named Watson²³.

President Biden must let the courts do their job and not intervene if innovation is to thrive in America.

Apple has been found guilty by the ITC and should be forced to stop selling Apple Watches if that is what the court has decided. They should pay damages and redesign their product to design out the intellectual property theft. And, if they feel they are innocent, then they have an avenue of appeal and should exercise it.

But, bottom line, turning a blind eye to intellectual property theft is bad for innovation. We must encourage and protect entrepreneurship for innovation to thrive.

I’ll leave you with this clip from the movie Tucker to ponder on the way out:

And a trailer from probably the best movie on the subject of the struggle of the innovator against big business, based on the real life story of the inventor of the intermittent wiper – Dr. Robert Kearns, it’s called ‘Flash of Genius’:

Hopefully President Biden will stay out of it and let the courts decide based on the evidence.

Keep innovating!

SPECIAL UPDATE: On February 21, 2023 the Biden Administration elected NOT to veto the ITC ruling, leaving the courts to decide whether Apple is innocent or guilty.

Source: Conversation with Bing, 2/18/2023
(1) Apple ‘Sherlocking’ Highlighted in Antitrust Probe—Google Also …. https://www.itechpost.com/articles/105413/20210422/apple-sherlocking-highlighted-antitrust-probe-google-questioned-over-firewall.htm Accessed 2/18/2023.
(2) What Does It Mean When Apple “Sherlocks” an App? – How-To Geek. https://www.howtogeek.com/297651/what-does-it-mean-when-a-company-sherlocks-an-app/ Accessed 2/18/2023.
(3) Sherlock (software) – Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software) Accessed 2/18/2023.
(4) All the things Apple Sherlocked at WWDC 2022 – TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/13/all-the-things-apple-sherlocked-at-wwdc-2022/ Accessed 2/18/2023.

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