David Pogue reviews some new phone in Lovely Phone; Ugly Software. I’m mostly interested in the headline, though.

I’m so sick of this as the status quo. Aren’t you?

Award-winning, or attractive industrial design is achievable. Usable, joyous, lovely software is achievable. Why is the combination so damn hard? When will companies figure out how to do better? As advanced as we think we are in these fields, it seems big companies are still launching stuff that wrecks your life while making you look hip. We can blame it on organizational silos, or increasingly complex design problems as screen sizes gets smaller and usage gets more advanced, but I think there’s a cultural problem (of course) in organizations, as they still don’t get it. They aren’t figuring out how to work together and they aren’t setting high enough standards for what’s good enough to launch.

Sure, this is Motorola in this article, but the story seems so familiar, this could be anyone. I don’t propose simple solutions here, but I do feel so very tired of the problem.

The Overlap Blog has launched, hoping to start a bit of dialog in advance of the event.

I found inspiration in this quote from the introduction to Story-Wallah: Short Fiction from South Asian Writers by Shyam Selvadurai

“What kind of writer do you consider yourself to be? Are you a Canadian writer or a Sri Lankan writer?”

It is perplexing, this matter of cultural identity, and I am tempted, like some other writers of multiple identities, to reply grumpily, “I’m just a bloody writer. Period.”

Yet this response would be disingenuous. I suppose I could answer, “Sri Lankan-Canadian writer,” or “Canadian-Sri-Lankan writer.” But this also does not get to the heart of what i consider my identity to be as a writer (and we are talking of my writing identity here). For in terms of being a writer, my creativity comes not from “Sri Lankan” or “Canadian” but precisely from the space between, that marvelous open space represented by the hyphen, in which the two parts of my identity jostle and rub up against each other like tectonic plates, pushing upwards the eruption that is my work. It is from this space between that the novels come.

Faced with growth that they aren’t prepared to handle, the company that makes Moleskine notebooks is planning on selling itself. An atypical (idealistic? honorable?) response in these days of leveraging brand equity, extensions, cross-marketing, product placement, and the like.
Via Kottke.

I’ve been involved with some other folks in the planning of a neat little professional meeting – Overlap (subtitled Exploring new methods for business and innovation)

Overlap offers a unique opportunity to join other curious, deep thinking professionals in a spirited discourse on the relationship between business and design and the implications both that may have on our companies and careers.

It’ll be in Asilomar (near Monterey) in May. It should be an interesting event.

AutoWeek takes a look at corporate culture, management structures, and the resulting impact on getting good stuff made and into customer’s hands. They focus on Honda’s flat organization and support for product development initiatives that come from staffers.

No big committees. No bureaucracies. No layers of decision makers reviewing the decisions of the previous layer of decision makers, who in turn, reviewed the decisions handed up from the previous layer.

“We empower people to make good decisions,” says Flint, who was chief engineer on the Ridgeline pickup. “If you can build the business case for something, you can pretty much run with it here.”

Days after blogging about the dramatic impact of Latino culture, there’s a front page story in the SF Chron about Latino-owned businesses.

Theirs is one of a increasing number of Latino-owned businesses in California and across the country that reflect the nation’s growing Latino population. The number of Latino-owned businesses in the United States grew by 31 percent between 1997 and 2002, more than three times the rate for all businesses. In California, Latino businesses grew 27 percent, more than twice as much as businesses overall, according to a report released Tuesday by the U.S. Census Bureau.

“It illustrates that the contribution they make to the economy is growing rapidly,” said Lee Wentela, chief of the bureau’s economic census branch. He said 15 percent of all California businesses are owned by Latinos.
…
Indeed, the vast majority of Latino entrepreneurs nationally have only themselves on the payroll — 87 percent versus 75 percent for all businesses.

The impact of Latinos on California and its economy is deepening. In 1997, 336,405 Latino-owned businesses took in $51.7 billion in California. In 2002, the 427,727 Latino-owned businesses in California had $57.2 billion in sales and other receipts, a 27 percent rise in the number of businesses and an 11 percent increase in their economic impact.

In 1997, Latinos accounted for 9.8 million or 30 percent of Californians. By 2002, their number had risen 21 percent to 11.9 million, and they made up 34 percent of California’s population. Nationwide, the Latino population grew 33 percent, from 29.2 million to 38.8 million, or 13 percent of the total population.

Tracing the roots of a Canadian icon

Wendy’s International Inc. is expected to spin -off a 15-per-cent stake in Tim Hortons this week, and curious observers are watching to see how many of the shares will land in Canadian hands.

The stock will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange and the Toronto Stock Exchange, but the vast bulk of Tim Hortons’s coffee sales still occur north of the border, where the chain has strong roots.
…
Tim Hortons now has about 2,597 outlets north of the border and 288 in the U.S.

Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan cheered when they learned that Tim Hortons is opening an outlet in Kandahar.

Hmm. Eating Timbits in Afghanistan? A new book idea!

I was intrigued by this NYT piece about the cultural changes at Fannie Mae (slightly edited here).

Among the mortgage giant’s new house rules:
1. Demonstrate humility.
2. Communicate openly.
3. Make the company a no-spin zone.
4. Respect the views of others.
5. Minimize internal politics.
6. Apologize and quickly fix mistakes.

The company was criticized by investors and lawmakers for making arrogance an art form. It relied on an army of professional lobbyists and powerful strategic alliances in the housing and finance industries to silence critics. And when federal investigators found almost $11 billion worth of accounting errors in 2004, Fannie denied it had any problems, choosing to attack its regulator instead.

Now, Fannie’s chief executive, is trying to change the company’s old ways. But even he acknowledges that it will take far more than a new mission statement to prepare the company for the political and business challenges ahead.

I’ve seen a lot of different company cultures in my work (although I’ve got no experience or opinion about Fannie Mae specifically) and dealing with company culture is a huge part of the gig. I know some folks make an explicit offer to change company culture as part of their explicit outcome; for me, I’ve more looked at ways of influencing individuals within a culture in smaller ways through experiences. The indirect approach. And that seems to be a natural offshoot of trying to succeed as a consultant in a new culture anyway.

I think it’s enormously challenging (and the article makes that case as well) to effect cultural change inside an organization. In many ways its like trying to encourage a certain demographic of the public to adopt a product or service, and in many ways it’s much harder since the outcomes are not so tangible (number of burgers served, number of new subscribers, profit) and since the thing you are looking at is all around you. For most companies – the customers are “out there” but the culture is “in here” with them, and obviously harder to see.

I am intrigued and encouraged to see corporate culture being part of the mainstream business conversation; it’s very important. I don’t have many of the answers, certainly nothing that makes a pithy blog entry, but I know the terrain and I respect those who travel it.

Here’s my laugh of the day, from Maslow and Branding

Remember back in your Psych 101 class when you learned about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs? Bet you never expected to see it again in the business world

WHAT? Maslow is an overwhelmingly cliched and over-used structure in the business world. I wish I had a nickel for every variation and reapplication of Maslow that I’ve seen. I don’t take issue with Jennifer’s points specific to branding (frankly it was hard to really get to them, with that intro), but to claim some sort of clever uniqueness for bringing this into branding (or anything) is really silly.

Cliche aside, I did present a basic version of the hierarchy to my Design Research students this week, showing them that they can (and should) design for all sorts of needs, and as they do research, they’ll see interesting ways that the needs are related. One group is looking at nutrition, and obviously food is an amazing category for physical, emotional, and other types of needs all occurring at once. I’ll note that I went through a whole thing about how it is indeed cliched and once I had shown it to them they were guaranteed to see it a dozen other times in short order, and that it was absolutely over-used in business.

Funny, then, to see it presented this way so soon after.

Rob Walker’s latest Consumed piece looks at the strategic approach of Haier, one of the few Chinese brands making inroads in the US.

Instead of a “technology push” approach (a Bell Labs cranking out wonderful inventions that are then pushed into the marketplace), [Sull] says, they are adept at using a “consumer pull” strategy, studying and responding to their customers’ needs.
…
Sull, the business-school professor, says that U.S. companies operating in China already know that the fiercest competitors there are the domestic ones. “The thing that should really make them nervous,” he says of U.S. companies, is the ability of Chinese manufacturers to export “their ability for rapid consumer-pull innovation” to the United States. Which is exactly what Haier is trying to do.