From The Incompetence of American Airlines & The Fate of Mr X.

When I first learned about this, I was horrified. Mr. X is actually a good UX designer, and his email had me thinking there was hope for American Airlines. The guy clearly cared about his work and about the user experience at the company as a whole. But AA fired Mr. X because he cared. …

This is a follow-on thought from my post on Daniel Pink’s TED talk.

Research has shown that the Carrots & Sticks approach to motivating people actually destroys their creativity.

What does this say about jobs where the issue of money, of being paid a decent salary, is very much based on such an approach? Such as in sales – the commission-based remuneration model is clearly a Carrots & …

This is a follow-on post from China the Ikea of businesses.

Differentiation by service: make a same-same product but pair it with specialised and targeted services that becomes the core differentiator.

To follow on from the previous examples – we could be looking at same-same laptops paired with a 1-hour global replacement service and automated remote backup.

You too can now become a manufacturer overnight!

The availability of components and white label parts, as well as the expertise to assembe these into just about anything at attractive price points.

Or just buy and rebadge complete goods!

What are the implications?

Zero differentiation.
Hollow brands.
Minimal actual choice for consumers.
Lots of busy-ness in the short term.
Lots of unsustainable businesses to fail. Resources to waste.
More demand for easy-fix shallow marketing.
More spam.

What are the …

Intelligence is open, multidisciplinary and inherently collaborative…

Are you cultivating these values in your organisation? Or in your own personal growth?

Nurturing creativity is a form of individual empowerment. It requires first and foremost the removal of fear. And fear-based controls and limits on curiosity, expression and thinking.

Individually – the fear of being wrong, loosing face, not fitting in. not belonging, and of ego damage.

Collectively – the fear of challenges to the status quo, change, growth and evolution, non-conformity, and the (imagined) possibility of chaos.

It’s ok to colour …

The amount of fear and worry in our daily lives directly affect our ability to be creative. No one has time and energy to play “what if” games when there are threats (real or imagined) to fight off.

To enable a more innovative society, we thus need to remove or reduce the amount of daily fear and worry. From the background stuff like safe sidewalks to bigger things …

“Good taste is the most obvious resource of the insecure … Good taste is the anesthetic of the public.” Harley Parker

What is good taste anyway? Is it primarily personal? Or is it by necessity a form of groupthink – so that we can judge relatively the idea of “good”?

One example of mass good taste (group taste?) is the Asian obsession with brand name goods. The brand name …

The Singapore government has a long history of running social improvement campaigns: be gracious, be kind, smile more, don’t forget to flush the toilets, and it’s cool to speak Mandarin.

This made me wonder: how would one go about inducing an entire nation to start thinking outside the box? Or for that matter to appreciate, value and desire quality over quantity? (These are challenges that are by no …

Rules make life easier. But they also impede the awareness and development of alternatives and new perspectives.

We love rules, routine and “norms” because we can just do what everyone else does/expects us to do and not think about things too much.

But rules, routine and “norms” also lull us into unquestioning complacency – a dangerous state of being in the age of constant disruptive change.

There is a constant …