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. …

Not surprising. Via tweet by Bob Jacobson.

http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2009/08/the-best-board-meetings.html

Boards need to be forward looking. Surely this is obvious. The people who steer the fleet must look forward.

But it is so much easier to look backwards. The majority of the way business operates is looking backwards. Most board members were trained as administrators, or worked themselves not visionaries

And because uncertainty is scary. And visionaries could be wrong.

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 …

When faced with change, there are three big-picture strategies an organisation (or indeed an individual) can adopt:

Continue to do the same thing; or look to historically proven paths.
Ignore the change; or walk the safest, best-trodden path.
This is the path of least resistance, and least cost. It is the most crowded path. And you walk it at most risk of irrelevance.

Emulate others’ breakthroughs.
This is the …

Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the founders of 37signals, is a must read for anyone running a business or looking to start one.

Especially if you don’t identify as an entrepreneur, or don’t like many of the unquestioned beliefs about conventional business practice.

This is one of those books I am reading through in one sitting. And going back to …

“[In service design] the only one to see the big picture is the client.” said John Holager, Senior Service Designer, live|work at the Innovation and Service Design conference, 29 Jan 2010, Malmö, Sweden.

This is a wonderfully simple and revelatory observation that made so much immediate sense!

Most businesses are divided into specialised departments and divisions, each focused on their own little specialisation. Service design is an activity …

“If society values customers and employees, service will be valued.” says Eva-Karin Anderman, head of research, Almega.

She said this in response to a question from the floor on how government and other agencies can introduce policies or mandates to encourage society to value service. The understanding is that a lot of time, service is not valued, especially when the service is attendant (and thus seen as …

Conventional businesses are designed from the ground up to run gravy trains. Research and development is kept as short as possible. It’s primary intention is to quickly developing a gravy train to run.

Once a train is up and running, all new thinking stops. The default behaviour is keep things running as smoothly and consistently as possible. Occasional incremental improvements aside, changes are kept to a minimum. “All aboard…” …

In Wired to Care (ISBN 978-0-13-714234-7) author Dev Patnaik wrote: “Bringing people face to face triggers a caring response. … Putting consumers and producers together can do much of the regulation for you. When producers can see the impact that their business decisions have on their customers, they instinctively change their behaviour to generate more positive effects.”

Our laws and regulations are essentially a set of agreed and …

Summarised from Working for Happiness by Alex Frankel.

Over two years, journalist Alex Frenkel worked a diverse range of jobs to explore the connection between corporate culture and happiness at work – UPS, Starbucks, Gap, Enterprise and an Apple Store. He discovered three secrets to a happy workplace:

Go for flow

Autonomy to manage one’s own tasks and timelines.
Measure on what was done (outcomes); not micro-managing the how.
Enable pride …