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Harvard Business Review editor responds to critique

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

My post last week on the Harvard Business Review redesign drew a thoughtful response from Scott Berinato, Senior Associate Editor of the magazine. He was kind enough to allow us to repost it here.

Hi, John,

I’m Scott Berinato, senior associate editor at Harvard Business Review. We of course are watching out for reaction to our redesign and your thoughtful critique has been discussed among the editors here. We thought it was appropriate we provide a loyal reader with some (almost) real-time feedback.

I’m the editor in charge of Idea Watch, so I was particularly interested in your comments. Rest assured I’m not trying to give you a headache and I understand your initial reaction to the color and use of bold visuals. Indeed, it was startling to most of us as we started living into the new design. I think the color especially surprised me. I hope and believe some of that will wear off for you, as it has for me.

I’ll try to explain some of the thinking that went into our visual approach in Idea Watch. As this section opens the magazine, we were seeking to distinguish it from other sections of the magazine and make the magazine less daunting. I won’t get too nerdy about magazine architecture, but very short, very visual elements here help readers make that distinction, which our research said they weren’t making before and thus they were feeling daunted by prospect of starting to read the magazine. Thus by changing the pacing we help carry the reader into and through the magazine, the same way a meal changes from one course to the next. Idea Watch is bacon-wrapped scallops to the middle of the magazine’s steak dinner.

My section is devoted to showing off new and interesting business research, so we knew it would be heavy on data. Data lends itself to a visual approach. Without going this way, few of the stories in that first issue could have been told in the space they were told. I would argue they’re told more effectively using visuals as well (and when text works best, as with the piece on brain science, we didn’t force the issue). Especially in my section, where we have such limited space, visual representations of data and information is not just a style choice, but an important tool.

One good example is the trust piece you cited. The author submitted that as an 1,800-word text essay. It was a ‘tweener, too short (and not a big enough topic) for a full feature but too long for an Idea Watch piece. After taking the visual approach, the author was more pleased with the outcome than he was with his draft. He said that we lost none of the important information while making it a more attractive, readable piece of content.

Did we get all the charts right? Probably not. As first efforts go, and for a design staff not used to producing visual information, I’m proud of the results and looking forward to watching as they improve in coming issues.

The first Idea Watch isn’t perfect; as with most magazine redesigns, it really takes place in two phases. First the new design debuts, then it’s tweaked over the coming issues as we learn. I think you were right about questioning the use of those top spaces and whether or not that content is and/or should be related to the rest of the content on the page. That’s a question we’re still working out the answer to. One change we’ve already made in March is to eliminate bylines and bios from those top spaces entirely, instead making them staff-written, uncredited data shots. This change alone, I believe, removes some of that frenetic energy you felt in the section. We will continue to tweak the section as we learn and process feedback like yours.

Finally, on the information graphic about bailout and stimulus monies, the Vision Statement. This is a format we’re committed to (we’ve received positive feedback on this as well). Even more than information graphics contained within article, such as those in the pricing story, creating these large-form graphics is a unique skill, practically an art form in itself. We learned quite a bit from this one (which I happen to love) and I’m hoping you continue to give them a chance as we approach different topics and improve our visual storytelling. (The next one I’m equally excited about, it’s on new ways of thinking about markets in China).

Once again I’d like to thank you for your thoughtful critique. We love to hear from readers like yourself and take any and all constructive criticism seriously. Happy to hear your reaction to this email as well. Write any time.

Cheers,
Scott Berinato
Senior Associate Editor
Harvard Business Review

Tags: design, graphics, Harvard Business Review, magazines, publishing
Posted in design | Comments

Why I don’t like the Harvard Business Review redesign

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

I feel a bit like those folks who complained about the new Tropicana orange juice carton.

The editors of my favorite magazine, Harvard Business Review, have completely redesigned the look of the magazine. Editor-in-chief Adi Ignatius writes in his editor’s note, “we are excited to bring you a more modern, accessible magazine.”

He may want to hold off on the “accessible” comment. For me, the magazine has gotten busier – much busier. Bolder text, more graphics, more color. Everywhere from letters to the editor (now called “Interaction”) up front to the recommended reading list in back. I actually put the magazine down the first two times I started to read it. My eyes were boggling from all the colors and graphics.

In particular, the upfront IdeaWatch section (formerly Forethought) is a mess. Longer articles weave among sidebars – some relevant to the article at hand, others completely separate. And I had trouble differentiating. Is “Faith In Firms – as Low as You’d Expect,” on p. 22, part of the article “Can Technology Really Save Us”? No, it’s not. But the sidebar on p. 23, “Gauging the Impact of New Energy Technologies,” is.

This picture with its brilliant coloration and large, cartoonish numbers seems like what Edward Tufte calls “chart junk.” With four pie graphs, two outsized percentage numbers, the picture was utterly confusing to me. It took me a minute or more just trying to figure out what the graphs are trying to say.

And what of this?

(Full-size version here.)

If you can make heads or tails of this without referring to “How to Read this Chart” two or three times, I admire you.

Unfortunately, these examples are emblematic of the whole redesign. It’s far too busy for my taste. The great content is still there, it just takes more time and energy to wade through the clutter to reach it.

Perhaps I will grow used to the redesign. For certain my comfort level with the old design hasn’t helped me adapt to the changes. But I won’t ever love it, and I would be surprised if too much time passed before a “re-redesign” to improve readability and reduce the noise level.

Tags: design, graphics, Harvard Business Review, magazines, publishing
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The Best Business Books of 2009

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

In the wake of the worst US economic catastrophe since the Great Depression, everybody realized this: Making money is harder than we thought. So, this year, books on innovation had special resonance. Luckily, there were some great ones out there. So many, in fact, that this year’s best-of list includes two “companion volumes”–other good books from this year that cover similar material from another perspective.

These are the best books I read this year:

1. Design-Driven Innovation – Roberto Verganti. A fascinating book that looks at companies that don’t merely create new products, but develop products and services that create new meaning for customers. Is that important? Well, companies that do it well avoid commoditization and generate outsized profits for long periods of time. Think Apple.

(companion volume: The Design of Business by Roger Martin)

2. Discovery-Driven Growth – Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian MacMillan. Verganti’s book covers the more creative side of innovation, while McGrath and MacMillan discuss the process that established companies should use to improve their innovation efficiency–that is, bringing more successful products to market and spending less on the failures. The central lesson: do more work on paper, and scrupulously document & validate assumptions as you go.

(companion volume: Innovation Tournaments by Christian Terweisch and Karl Ulrich)

3. Enterprise 2.0 – Andrew McAfee. A clear description for the general business audience of how web 2.0 products, like social network software, wikis, messaging services, and the like, can be deployed to help corporations work more effectively. Excellent combination of case studies, theoretical models, and a clear-eyed assessment of the obstacles in the way of wide adoption.

4. Think Again: Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How to Keep it From Happening to You – Sydney Finkelstein, Jo Whitehead and Andrew Campbell. A timely book that shows how smart, experienced people can make terrible decisions, and what safeguards companies can use to improve their decisionmaking. Illuminates the many cognitive biases at work during the decision process, which helps the reader to understand why so many decisions that look atrocious in hindsight were considered reasonable and logical at the time.

5. Collaboration – Morten Hansen. Discusses how collaboration in business works, and when it doesn’t work, then provides a map for companies to improve their collaborative behavior – including unifying your workforce, nurturing “T-shaped” management and using networks intelligently. Key message: collaboration has a cost, and you need to make sure the payoff of collaboration outweighs it.

—

Tags: collaboration, decisionmaking, design, innovation, reading list, social media
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My reading journal: Roger Martin’s “The Design of Business”

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

“The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage,” by Roger Martin. 2009: Harvard Business Press, 190pp.

When did you read it? November 2009.

Subject: Hot on the heels of Tim Brown’s “Change by Design,” Rotman School dean Roger Martin, author of “The Opposable Mind” discusses how design thinking can help businesses balance exploration (the search for new solutions) and exploitation (extracting value from existing solutions) to improve their innovative capability.

Did you like it? How many stars would you give it (1-5)? 4

Summary: Martin describes the process of innovation in three steps, something he calls the “knowledge funnel”: (1) staring into a mystery; (2) coming up with a heuristic, or rule of thumb, that allows you to address the mystery; (3) systematizing your solution – in Martin’s words, turning the heuristic into an algorithm. This process, to Martin, is design thinking.

He spends time discussing the preference business has for reliability (i.e., consistency and repeatability) over validity (meeting a desired objective). Validity is the starting point for innovation – the discovery of something new that helps illuminate a mystery. Since validity is not predictable or repeatable, and tends to rely on qualitative, intuitive assessments (i.e., pattern matching), companies that rely on quantitative measurement struggle with it. It was easiest for me to understand validity, as Martin uses it, as a synonym for “right-brained” or “artistic.” Successful businesses balance the desire for reliability with a relentless search for new validity.

As Martin described this process – taking mysteries, developing heuristics and then refining algorithms from it, it seemed quite simple. Why doesn’t every company do this? But I also thought that there are lots of mysteries that don’t lend themselves to heuristics, and lots of heuristics that can’t turn into algorithms. There are lots of failures on the way to the next great business algorithm. Not only that, there are lots of successful businesses built on heuristics alone [for example, your favorite restaurant, assuming it's not part of a chain]. Martin’s point, which is not stated explicitly, is that you can’t build large businesses without this transition to algorithms. You can’t have McDonald’s without a cooking and serving system. You couldn’t have Wal-mart without its distribution model.

There’s not a discussion of the cost of algorithmized businesses to society. On my last trip to downtown Boston I was hard pressed to find a business that was not part of a national chain; much different from when I Iived there in the 1990’s. But I digress – Martin isn’t writing as a social critic; he’s a business professor.

Favorite quotes:

“Vice President of Marketing” denotes a permanent position with a set of ongoing tasks…. As well suited as that construct is for running known heuristics and algorithms, it is not an effective way to move along the knowledge funnel. That activity is by definition a project; it is a finite effort to move something from mystery to heuristic or from heuristic to algorithm. pp.118-119

Designers produce prototypes for feedback, but managers are accustomed to delivering final products. p.121

Status comes from running large, high-revenue business units whose operations have been reduced to reasonably reliable algorithms that product results on time and on budget. Those are the highest goals, that is, the ones that command the highest compensation. That is why most executives prefer the known to the unknown. p.125

Was it similar to anything you have read before? Of course, there are echoes of “Change by Design” (Brown’s earlier HBR article is referenced). And the idea of “staring into mysteries” reminds me somewhat of “changing the inherent meaning of a product” from Roberto Verganti’s “Design Driven Innovation.” 2009 is definitely the year of design thinking in business!

Martin’s book is less ambitious than Verganti’s, but broader (in a good way) than Brown’s. And his ability to create a powerful, memorable metaphor remains intact (I think I’ll be using “knowledge funnel” and maybe even “validity vs. reliability” in the future).

Will this book end up on your bookshelf or in the library donation pile? The bookshelf.

Tags: creativity, design, innovation, management, reading list
Posted in innovation | Comments

My reading journal: Tim Brown’s “Change By Design”

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

“Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation,” by Tim Brown with Barry Katz. 2009: Harper Business, 264pp.

When did you read it? October 2009.

Subject: A presentation of the idea of “design thinking” – the use of close observation, imagination, and consideration of constraints to conceive and implement innovative solutions to problems in business and society.

Did you like it? How many stars would you give it (1-5)? 3.5

Summary: Brown is the CEO of IDEO, the acclaimed design consultancy that helped Apple create the iPod, designed the MyBook external hard drive for Western Digital and the Palm V, along with countless other products. The first part of the book, “What Is Design Thinking?” reviews the approach that IDEO uses to attack problems and come up with innovative solutions. To Brown, design is far more than putting an attractive package around an existing product – instead, it is a way to start from a ground-level assessment of a customer need and design a total solution to the problem. Emphasis is on going out in the field to observe potential users of products to see what they do (or don’t do), the value of divergent (idea-generating) vs. convergent (integrative) thinking and early and ongoing prototyping.

The second part of the book takes up questions for the future of design thinking, such as: can companies learn to do this themselves? can it improve our broken experiences, such as the dreaded airport security line? and can it help in some of our intractable problems, such as building a sustainable future?

Favorite quote: “Rarely will the everyday people who are the consumers of our products, the customers for our services, the occupants of our buildings, or the users of our digital interfaces be able to tell us what to do. Their actual behaviors, however, can provide us with invaluable clues about their range of unmet needs.” p.41

Did anything surprise you? I was surprised, and frankly a bit disappointed, that the book is focused almost solely on work done by IDEO. While there are occasional references to other thinkers like Peter Drucker, Gary Hamel and William Whyte, they are cursory. There is no bibliography or end notes (instead, there’s a list of IDEO projects referenced, along with people who worked on the projects, for each chapter). The only book discussed at any length is Roger Martin’s “The Opposable Mind.” [Interestingly, Martin has just published his own book on design thinking, called "The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage." I'm reading that now.]

Skating over people (other than a few brief anecdotes) who influenced design thinking and overwhelmingly referring to IDEO projects lends the book the air of a memoir as opposed to a work of scholarship. And given that Brown is IDEO’s CEO, it makes the book feel a bit like public relations. Which is a shame, because the topic is important and timely and Brown’s description of design thinking and case studies are excellent.

Will this book end up on your bookshelf or in the library donation pile? The bookshelf. While it doesn’t reach greatness, it’s a good book on an important topic.

Tags: design, innovation, reading list
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We have an innovation problem, and it is miles and miles of indistinguishable stuff

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

Video 6 0 00 09-27 I learned today that Axe Body Spray for Men is running an ad in Uruguay where readers sending an SMS to their address receive on their phone the missing bits of a picture of a beautiful woman. (Those bits are clothed, BTW.)

This tells me there’s nothing about Axe the product that is distinctive, and the ad, despite being fun and engaging (especially for teenaged and 20-something males), won’t do much to make people select Axe over one of the thirty other male scent products out there. Video 6 0 00 17-27

I started thinking about this after listening to Jonathan Salem Baskin’s neat Listrak webinar last week, entitled, “Marketing Ideas for the First Post-Brand Decade.” Baskin did a nice job of showing that while customers and markets have moved beyond the days of “Mad Men” – where a well-crafted, creative advertisement could influence us to buy the latest dish detergent or safety razor – marketers, by and large, have not. Even “social media marketing,” like, say, the Axe campaign, is taking the same old ideas and porting them to new technology. Video 6 0 00 22-12 Video 6 0 00 26-07 Houston, we have a problem. Marketers are pushing the same old buttons to sell more variations of the same old products. It’s a negative-sum game. Variations increase cost without enlarging the overall market. Redundancy pushes down prices, invites private label competitors and overloads consumers’ minds.

Clearly, we’ve got to do something different. Marketing needs to pull back from its focus on distribution, packaging, and communication, and refocus on helping create great new products, that deliver distinctive value and make people’s lives better. Then it will be easy to communicate that to prospective customers.

Gary Hamel writes in “The Future of Management” that product & service innovation are near the bottom of the innovation hierarchy, and the pinnacle is “management innovation.” To Hamel, products are easily duplicated, quickly eliminating their added value. But as Roberto Verganti pointed out in “Design-Driven Innovation,” companies that create truly visionary products enjoy long periods of competitive advantage and profits.

Life is too difficult for many and too complex for everyone else. Everyone would like to have more fun. Therefore, there’s lots of need for products & services that allow us to manage our lives better or have diverting or engrossing experiences.

I’ve been reading “Change by Design,” by Tim Brown, and he asserts that companies need to adopt “design thinking” to create great new products and services. I can’t disagree with him, but also feel that design thinking is not that different from what great product managers and developers have been doing and should be doing. So, if your new-product group wants to hand over the reins to design thinkers, that’s their prerogative. For me, that’s the fun part of the job and I’d rather not outsource that.

Tags: design, innovation, new products, product development, product management
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“Design-Driven Innovation”–the powerful advantage that comes from changing the meaning of a product

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

One of the best books of the year is undoubtedly “Design-Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean,” by Roberto Verganti. In it Verganti, a favorite of this blog, attacks one of the central mysteries of innovation–how can a company successfully create a product that is a radical break from the past, and which shows the way to a new future?

We’ve seen these products at work. The mobile phone is one. The personal computer is another. We know that you can’t survey users to determine what these products will look like or what they should do. So how to create them (apart from cloning Steve Jobs, who seems to have a knack for the radical innovation)?

Most companies punt on this question and are satisfied to extend existing products into adjacent spaces, fix latent customer pain points, etc. These are fine tactics, but with the ease of imitating product features and the speed with which information and intelligence flows, extension is a less and less stable platform for growth (arguably, it is an unhealthy and unproductive basis for business – in Umair Haque’s term, “thin value“).

Besides, as Verganti points out, radical changes in meaning yield longer product life cycles and more profitability.

So what’s the key to achieving this sort of innovation? Verganti writes that it is changing the meaning inherent in the product. The Wii changed the meaning of gaming from “passive immersion in a virtual world for young adults” to “active physical entertainment for everyone” (p.65). iPod/iTunes changed the meaning of a digital music player from a storage medium to a seamless platform for finding, buying, organizing, transporting and listening to music. The iPhone (not specifically discussed in the book) changed the meaning of a mobile phone from a voice device, with a few data applications attached, to a platform where data applications are the central focus of the product. The phone part is almost an afterthought! (I’ve noticed that iPhone customers are very tolerant of poor voice quality and dropped calls–deficiencies that would doom a plain mobile phone.)

In all the above cases, the changes of meaning opened up entire new markets, created hard-to-duplicate ecosystems and caused competitors to spend time and resources figuring out what the changes meant and how/whether to follow.

So how would a company create a new meaning for a product or market segment? That will have to wait for another post.

Tags: creativity, design, innovation, marketing, product development
Posted in innovation | Comments