The puncture in Cameron’s inflated society

Even if David Cameron manages to bargain his way to the top of a coalition government, the Tories have floundered in their attempts to convince the British public that an unwieldy state should be replaced by community power. In a referendum for Cameron’s Big Society, the Tory leader has failed pretty convincingly. As Tim Montgomerie concludes on ConservativeHome:

"Unforgivably, the big society message favoured by the Tory head of strategy, Steve Hilton, was never poll-tested, and failed to cut through with most voters–and even frightened some."

Labour has dismissed the Big Society as an election gimmick, but there are signs in the private sector that the decentralisation of command is gaining currency. ROWE, which stands for Results Only Work Environment, is an attempt to rebalance the working environment, replacing so-called presenteeism with extreme flexibility. In lieu of command and control, employees get to dictate when and how much they work, the only stipulation being that they meet their individual targets. In a ROWE, it doesn’t matter what hours you work as long as the job gets done.

ROWE is a trade-off that rewards productivity with work-life autonomy. According to ROWE’s architects, former Best Buy employees Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, eighty per cent of lost productivity can be attributed to presenteeism, an all too common attitude in which employees believe simply turning up to work is enough to warrant their monthly pay slips. ROWE decentralises workplace decision-making, so that employees set their own schedules. The goal is to empower through increased responsibility. Says Ressler:

"People at all levels stop doing any activity that is a waste of their time, the customer's time, or the company's money. This promotes a more engaged workforce motivated to not only produce something, but to produce something meaningful."

There are of course clear disadvantages to such a distinct redistribution of rights, not least of which is the fact that most organisations require more than a skeleton staff present during normal working hours to deal with that inconvenient thing known as the customer. It’s also argued that focusing too heavily on results dilutes team spirit, turning workers into selfish, unilateral robots—empowered, but inconsiderate to the needs of the company as a whole.

It’s a fine balance. Gain motivated, productive employees; risk creating disparate self-interest. Now consider the way local government decisions are made. Would Cameron’s Big Society have followed a similar path?

Cameron's ideological handicap

This is the best description I've come across of the ideological hurdle David Cameron must leap to win the election. DC is hamstrung by a blanket mistrust of free market capitalism and his party's historical bond with that system, writes Larry Elliott in the Guardian. You might think that the biggest loser after a recession of this size would be the government that presided over it. But the polls show that voters are still a little nervous of a return to small state politics.

"Cameron is in the diametrically opposite position to Margaret Thatcher in 1979: she was helped by the crisis of Keynesian social democracy in 1976; he is hampered by the crisis of laissez-faire. The events of the past three years have made it much harder to argue for a small state, market-knows-best approach to economic management, and the Conservatives have not yet found a plausible alternative.

"They have tried substituting the Big Society for the Big State, but it doesn't really address the fundamental weakness for the right: the ideological advantage is with those supporting more state intervention to tame the market."

Why art should be compulsory for CEOs

In Tim Brown's book, Change by Design, the author calls for design thinking to "move upstream", closer to the boardroom, where strategic decisions are made. But there are a couple of good reasons why this is harder to execute than it sounds. Roger Martin, who with the help of Brown first coined the phrase "design thinking", says that most CEOs are completely devoid of artistic capability while many designers seem overly keen to keep it that way. "CEOs aren't nurturing their artistic sensibilities," says Martin. "Art is a little foreign to them."

"In Canada, virtually everyone who can drop art drops it. Maths and English are required subjects to the bitter end at high school. Hardly anyone takes anything that would cause any development of their artistic sensibilities at university. Some take history of art, but the numbers are minuscule in total."

If you combine that with the fact that many designers want to keep design "pure" and away from the grasp of CEOs, says Martin, you have a recipe for disintegrated organisations, in which design is wholly detached from the process of innovation. Leaders should "care about lines and form", adds Martin. It's the only way to ensure design thinking pervades the entire organisation.

"Why are iPhones so pretty? It's because when the guy who green lights them is shown an iPhone that looks pretty good and one that looks awesome, he says I'll take the awesome one".

Social media for business: five tips for neutralising negativity

1. You will be judged on the tone of your response. Be humorous, but not flippant. Be polite, not argumentative. Consider every contact individually. Does this person require assistance, or are they simply letting off steam?

2. Don’t hide behind a logo, be human. Make one employee your single point of contact for social media. This should be a senior marketer with a good grasp of frontline customer services, not an intern with plenty of Facebook skills but little idea of how your business really works.

3. Deal in facts. If your company is being attacked for something that isn’t true, politely offer a link to a source that backs up your side of the story. Treat every comment in the same way you might in a retail environment: other customers will be listening.

4. Show that you care. Emphasise that the reason your company has a social media channel is to listen to customers’ problems and act on that information. Promise to investigate the problem and keep that promise. Social media happens in real time, so be quick.

5. You may need to move the discussion away from a social media platform to email, or even telephone. This has two benefits: first, it removes the oxygen of publicity. Second, it permits you to be much clearer and more precise than you can ever be in 140 characters.

Innovation lessons from Richard Noble

Richard Noble is defined by his multiple land speed records, and also by the attempts that didn’t go quite as well as expected. His first effort, for instance, back in 1977 in a car he built himself, finished upside down in a field after a death-defying, mid-air triple-roll. Noble, somewhat dispassionately, describes the order of events as: crash, pub, scrap yard. He says back then he hadn’t a clue about engineering, let alone any motor racing experience. He was obsessed by speed, and invigorated by the desire to break records, and that seemed enough.

It’s impressive, this insouciant ambition, which drives Noble to achieve things that to others seem inconceivable. Innovation has never seemed so natural. His latest record attempt is called BloodhoundSSC. The car, which Noble hopes will destroy his own land speed record, becoming the world’s first 1,000mph vehicle, is currently being built in Bristol. He’s set firmly on that record, but goal number two is more altruistic: to inspire a new generation of engineers.

Young scientists may well be enthused by Bloodhound’s potential. Provided the team can keep it on the road, the car will be able to travel the length of four football pitches every second. Although it would be too dangerous to try, should the driver be of the mind to swivel in his seat and fire a gun back towards the car’s origin, the car’s sheer velocity would render the bullet impotent. It would exit the chamber and fall straight to the ground.

Noble retired from the cockpit soon after breaking the record with Thrust2 in 1983. These days he looks after the business side of things. You might think such an experienced campaigner would rule his project teams with an iron fist. Actually, the reverse is true. “Every employee should have enough authority to fail the company,” he tells me. Why? Because to inject a workforce, any workforce, with passion, commitment and ingenuity, you need to forget about the concept of natural leadership.

Noble's project teams are almost completely flat. Noble is the sole director, looking after planning, finance and company culture. On everything else, his teams answer to no one. "I only want to know when things go wrong," he says. With no manager to go through, people are forced to collaborate. Teamwork prospers. In a flat organisation, says Noble, "you see people develop like you've never seen them develop before".

Here’s an interesting lesson: if you want innovation to thrive, take your hand off the tiller.

Why the world needs fewer handbags

One of the marketing department’s cleverest tricks is product life extension. With a “new improved formula” here, and a version 2.0 there, the marketer can reignite interest in a fading brand with minimal investment. For the purveyors of FMCGs, such as toothpaste and shampoo, marketing sheen is administered in lieu of real research and development, no matter what those white-coated boffins in the ads lead us to believe. And this is considered good business. Money for old rope is every finance director’s dream.

But while extending the life of a brand of detergent isn’t necessarily all that harmful (we’ve all got to wash our clothes occasionally) pull that same trick with electronics and the downside is more pronounced. How many iPods have you bought in your lifetime? How many DVD players? How many TVs? These faux product upgrades provide something for nothing, but it’s what we do with all the somethings that causes alarm. Continuous flogging of the product life cycle is a serious environmental threat, packing landfills to the brim with materials that nobody really knows how to dispose of safely.

Acclaimed minimalist designer Dieter Rams spoke out recently against our throwaway culture. He told the Times:

“There’s such a lot of things. Such a lot of unusable things. Most things are unnecessary and overdone. Look around: we cannot send to the third world all the garbage we don’t need any more. We have to go back to more simplicity, longevity.”

Longevity is anathema to marketers, of course. But perhaps if consumers were trained to see that Rams’s philosophy of “Weniger, aber besser” (less, but better) is both practical and desirable, marketers would begin decorating their brands with more sustainable messages.

Sustainable doesn’t have to mean green. According to IDEO UK managing director Sue Siddall, obsession with product life cycle is dissipating, partly because endless replenishment isn’t always commercially desirable.

“Look at the handbag business: high-end, luxury handbags. These brands taught their consumers to be promiscuous around brands, they taught them to buy the “it” bag every season, four bags a year. They now have a bunch of consumers that are brand disloyal. They don’t care which brand, it just has to be the one Sienna Miller is wearing. They have driven a behaviour that has shot them in the foot.”

Why we should leave design thinking to designers

Design thinking is the business buzz-phrase of the year. This I judge not on its novelty (it originated in the 90s*), but on the sheer weight of design thinking books now littering my desk. This is not to belittle its worth. Design thinking’s growing prominence is a welcome shot in the arm for both innovation and customer value.

In essence, design thinking is a process that allows businesses to match their boring analytical sides with creativity and intuition. It sprinkles old, dysfunctional products with designer dust, creating “user experiences” that fundamentally define brands. It's about using creativity to change behaviour.

I spent most of last week talking to a variety of design luminaries, most of whom displayed a messianic reverence for Apple designer Jonathan Ive. Those iPods are pretty, right? But Apple’s nod to design thinking goes way beyond white earphones. As Stewart Emery and Robert Brunner write in their book, Design Matters,

“Close your eyes and imagine you are holding an iPod. Now take away iTunes, take away the ability to buy the song you like for 79p without having to pay £100 for a dozen more that you don’t want, lose the ability to create playlists, cut out the packaging, take out the ads, delete the Apple logo and close all the stores. The remaining question is: do you still have an iPod?”

To a designer, that iPod in the palm of your hand has its own form of communication. Design language is the term designers use to describe how a product makes the customer feel. It is what happens when a product’s form and function fuse to elicit an emotional response.

According to Brunner and Emery, design language “is the consciously orchestrated work of a designer”, the way your product speaks to its target market.

BMW is one company fluent in design language. That’s largely thanks to the efforts of the Dutch designer Adrian Van Hooydonk, who assumed responsibility for all the company’s car designs in 2004.

Back in 2004, BMW was expanding its range, producing more cars for more markets. But was there a central message BMW could hang on to? A consistent product vision for all BMW cars? Van Hooydonk decided he wanted all BMW cars to appeal to the type of consumer that wanted to own “a drivers’ car”.

His strategy perfectly illustrates the inherent balance of design language, where form is just as vital as function. The design team had to produce beautiful cars, but looks had to be supported by performance, otherwise the customer experience would be compromised. “A car shouldn’t look like it can corner well if it can’t.”

How a BMW car speaks to its owner, in the way the leather interior smells, in the soft thunk of the door as it closes, in the way the wheel feels as it turns, its solidity at high speed, its reliability, these are all elements of its design language. They elicit an emotional response in the driver, but more important, they are inextricably linked to BMW’s marketing strategy, to build “a driver’s car”.

Design thinking, which puts the user at the heart of a product’s development, is partly about the transmission of design language. What message is your product sending to the customer? What does that message say about your brand? What does it say about your strategy?

Design thinking is also credited with the creation of innovation and discovery. Design tools such as networking, brainstorming and fast prototyping are all essential components of the creative process. But discovery also comes from an ability to pose new questions while others revel in predictability. If you walked a designer around the shop floor of a customer services call centre, his or her first question would not be to do with operational efficiency, it would be about why the product creates so many customer questions in the first place.

Companies such as BMW and Apple didn’t break the mold. It’s eminently possible to build businesses that balance creativity with predictability and efficiency, but most chief executives just aren’t very good at asking tough questions. As design consultant Lydia Thornley puts it:

“There is an element of otherness that design thinking can sometimes bring in... It’s that level of questioning, slightly outside of the comfort zone, that can unearth an issue that nobody had thought about, and suggest ideas that might not otherwise emerge.”


* According to Roger Martin, the phrase is actually a little bit newer than that. Martin told me Design Thinking first emerged as a concept during a series of conversations he had with Tim Brown in 2002.