Wednesday, July 25, 2018

Company Culture through Prof Sutton's Lens

Professor Bob Sutton is one of the most colorful business researchers on the Stanford campus, a Professor of Management Science at the Stanford Engineering School with more than 30 years of organizational research under his belt. These snippets from an interview with Melody Stone on Stride provide a toolbox full of insights from his work with companies such as McKinsey, Netflix, McDonald's, JetBlue and more: + Find out what the cultural norms at McKinsey are all about + What drove IBM's most famous change in the company's history + What are the underlying cultural differences between JetBlue and United ...and more... What 30 years of Stanford research tells us about company culture https://www.stride.com/blog/what-30-years-of-stanford-research-tells-us-about-company-culture

Friday, July 20, 2018

Thoughts on Product Design and the Hotel Bathroom Puzzle

One of the most error-prone challenges we encounter in business is product design. How often have you walked into a bathroom at a hotel you'd never been at before, stepped into the shower...and had no idea how to work the darn thing?? Personally I am not ashamed to admit it's happened more times than I care to remember. Yeah, you fiddle with the faucets, or dials, or levers - or whatever tortuous device the manufacturer had come up with and managed to convince the hotel architect to recommend and purchase - but shouldn't showers, and thousands of other products, be designed so intuitively we in our consumers' shoes shouldn't have to think about how to operate them? The "Hotel Bathroom Puzzle" is a classic. Read Alec Nevala-Lee's excellent short treatise on the subject and learn, learn, learn. #failure #learningfromfailure #productdesign #design #Productmanagement