eicolab: design thinking for business innovation

Ethics

Nudie lies

See this article on the Sydney Morning Herald: Nudie’s labels bare-faced cheek.

As I see it, Nudie HAD two key differentiators going for it:
1. A personable brand that projected realness.
2. A product that is made from real fruit as opposed to reconstituted or filler juices.

It is common for fruit juice or fruit drink* manufacturers to pad out their products with apple or pear juice as these …

I am an accidental “web identity”

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I Googled my phone number recently and found two of my selves on ZoomInfo.

The pages were apparently assembled from details harvested off the net with their “patented semantic search technology”. Pretty neat, and pretty spooky:

Eidesign / Prussia.Net Zern
Vermillion Consulting Zern

It is interesting that they have identified me as two identities – a consultant and a designer. Self-analysis opportunities aside, …

What is your ethical impact?

Actics has an online ethical feedback tool.

Thanks to Justin McMurray for the heads up.

I’ll set up a profile when I get a moment to breathe…

And that’s what we call “market sentiment”

John Fortune and John Bird on the subprime hoo-hah:

And here are my thoughts on this:

Business decisions made by a relative few affects the lives of many.
Much irrational emotions and “sentiments” underlie these decisions. These are unquantifiable. And yet much of the overt discussions are still based around tables of numbers. And many know the power of a …

Rationality is an illusion

Businesses and certain “experienced business people” like to pretend that rationality is the only way to make “real” business decisions.

Here are some irrational decisions I see many businesses make:

Penny-wise and pound foolish. Buying under-powered equipment, not having maintenance and backup plans, reacting to repeated and avoidable emergencies. Because thinking and planning is too hard.

The boss gets the fastest/best/most powerful computer to surf the web with, while the workers …

Bigger is not always better

Thoughts sparked by Stilgherrian’s post of the same title:

Much conventional business practice is simply incompatible with humanity. The less human we can be, the more successful we will be in business.

For too long now there is only one way to do business, and one definition of success, and one goal. The domain of business has long been dominated by the uncreative, the greedy, the exploitative, the …

The Power Paradox

These are my highlights from Dacher Keltner’s article The Power Paradox which takes a more humane and positive look at the idea of power, contrary to the Machiavellian views of Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power.

[The belief] that attaining power requires force, deception, manipulation, and coercion … [is] dead wrong.

Instead, a new science of power has revealed that power is wielded most effectively when it’s …

Mis-informative graphs

A 3D graph can be deliberately subverted to skew the perception of the information it contains. By simply increasing the perspective, you can give artificial emphasis to a particular slice of the chart, to make that slice appear larger as it were.

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Note how very different the perception of the size of the green slice is relative to the other slices on each of the charts …

When “sellers” think they are more important

This cartoon from Hugh MacLeod’s Gaping Void was timely spotted just now.

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Comments here.

Only last week I was reminded of a less-than-satisfactory collaborative project I was involved with many years ago.

There were two of us: I was the “maker”, and the other person was the “seller”. We recognised the need for each other’s roles, and came together to develop a …

An iPong of an idea

ipond.thumbnail.jpgIn the mad dash to make yet-more-money before Christmas, the pet shop chain Pets Paradise and Pet Goods Direct are selling the latest in throwaway crass pet torture chambers in the form of the iPond (no relation to Apple).

Essentially it is a little speaker with a fish “cup” stuck on top of it. You fill the “cup” with just over two cups of water, …

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