“Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they’re more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: “Move fast and break things.” The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.”
As long as you can weed through the drastically over-written, buzzword oozing writing style, this is a fantastic article mapping out some broad trends in business for 2012. Trend number seven should be of note for any designers or design focused brands:
Strategic differentiation begins with great design. Strategic differentiation provides a desired reputation, creates a defensible competitive advantage, and influences preferential behaviors in the value chain. In a market of rapid commoditization of products, shrinking product cycle times, and global delivery of services, organizations can barely create and sustain market differentiation. […] Differentiation tools include positioning strategy, design thinking, and innovation program that drive next generation customer experience.
My translation without all the buzzword bullshit - Design matters. A lot. If you can provide an experience for you customers that delightfully surprises them, your brand will sit head and shoulders above the competition.
PROTECT-IP is dangerous bill that is up for discussion in congress today, and it has the power to cripple internet startups and vastly change the open nature of the internet. PROTECT IP essentially gives the entertainment industry to censor, enforce, and sue any person, company or ISP that allows access to copyrighted material. With the way that the bill is written this will put people singing an acapella rendition of their favorite pop song in the legal cross hairs of the entertainment industry in the same way that it would for a file sharing site.
Protecting copyrights and piracy are important issues that need to be dealt with, but PROTECT-IP and SOPA will drastically change the was we enjoy and do business on the internet for the negative.
Thanks to Tumblr’s efforts to get people to call congress, I had a great conversation with my local representative Gary Miller’s office. Take the two minutes it takes to voice your opinion. Simply fill out your phone number, address and zip code and Tumblr will call your phone connecting you directly to your representative’s office.
Read more about what you can do at AmercianCensorship.org. From a business perspective read Fred Wilson’s (venture capitalist and Tumblr’s investor) post on the architecture of the internet.
Please reblog this and take action!
Any bank that values design at this level has my business. In an industry that desperately needs innovation and creativity, Simple is clear at the right time and the right place.
In short they are not a bank, rather partnering with charter-banks to store you money freeing them up to focus on technology, tools and customer service that will hopefully blow away the personal banking services of our parents era.
“It’s easy to “design” when you’re unencumbered by things like metrics, creative direction, business acumen, sales experience, actual functionality, enterprise scale, or any thought about how a site with millions of page views and users has to function.”
Again, if you build an application that solves a problem you are having chances are that it will also help other people. You are the customer, you are the person with the problem and you know exactly what is needed to solve it or make your life less painful using technology. One of the main reasons I see people wanting to become entrepreneurs is to be able to make their own decisions and to be in control, my advice is do what you want, do what your gut tells you!
Fantastic advice! Following this reasoning we started ‘scratching our own itch’ a few weeks ago and are just now kicking our new project into high gear. When you’re building it for yourself there’s no question whether or not your product meets a specific need.
Jason Fried talks Basecamp, 37signals, and taking a product to the next level at @Chicago_CM.
This growing desire among designers to bring their user focus, strategic vision, iterative methodologies, and propositional thinking to the still-geeky, tech/engineering-centric world of startups promises to be transformative and explosive.
This is exactly why I left the ad agency world and ditched all clients after an amazing 11 year run. The future is incredibly bright.
“Newsflash: Your idea probably sucks, and it doesn’t matter because your business will probably turn out to be something completely different.”
Paypal started out as a way to beam money from one Palm Pilot to another, of course after you connected your Palm Pilot to your computer and dialed into the internet. Flickr was born from a photo sharing feature inside a pointless online-game called “Game Neverending”
Just start the process of turning your idea into action and you’ll usually find your way along the journey.
IDEO looks at the ways that the Chinese culture and business environment is redefining 服务 or service. This article provides great examples of reassurance, abundance, measured and adaptive service that any western business can learn from.
Ben Pieratt, designer and founder of Svpply:
The market is handing you steak and you’re choosing the gristle. The market is handing you gold bullion and you’re taking the nickel.
As a designer, you enjoy building things for other people’s use. Your value is determined by the degree to which you can empathize with groups of people around a given topic. Historically, this relationship has required a large(r) company to act as mediator for the emotional mass-transaction. Companies provide you with an audience inasmuch as they have customers, and that’s enough for you because you just want to design stuff that solves stuff.
The internet kills all middlemen.
You now have direct access to the raw vein of popular attention. The pixels you’re pushing have a higher exchange rate than you’re giving yourself credit for*. No hounding client payroll, no selling other people’s stuff, no building other people’s wealth, no nephew’s cousins stepping in with the authority to change everything you’ve been working on.
There has never been a greater opportunity for designers, makers and doers. Well said!
“The goal is not to fix your weaknesses. The goal is to amplify your strengths and surround yourself with the people who can do what you can’t do.”
Simon Sinek
If you Don’t Understand People You Don’t Understand Business
Sinek argues that as individuals and companies, everything that we say and do is a symbol of who we are. And it is only when we communicate our beliefs authentically that we can attract others to our cause, and form the bonds that will empower us to achieve truly great things.
We had been writing a plan and basing decisions on what investors told us they wanted to see.
All that chasing left them living off credit card debt and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. So the team made a decision: Stop chasing a funding event and figure out how to make money.
Armed with a working prototype, the team kept hustling. But now they were hustling for customers instead of investors.
**Note to self. Re-read this article.
You know the trouble with many agencies [designer, startups, entrepreneurs, studios] is that they don’t really think in terms of selling. They’ve never written direct response. They’ve never tasted blood.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I envy you. For forty years, I’ve been a voice crying in the wilderness. Today, my first love is coming to its own. You face a golden future.
Forty years ago the advertising and marketing visionary, David Ogilvy, talked about the new “secret weapon” of direct response with it’s specific and measurable results. If he were alive today during the internet age, I’m certain his message would remain the same.
Don’t let creativity take over your ability to sell on the behalf of a client, account, product or business.
Via Copyblogger
Don’t get ahead of yourself. Companies need time to figure out what they want to be.
- Bart Decrem
I agree 100%
