Shipulski On Design

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If you’re trying to innovate within a successful company, I have one word for you: Don’t. You can’t compete with the successful business teams that pay the bills because paying the bills is too important.  No one in their right mind should get in the way of paying them.  And if you do put yourself […]

Here are some important questions for innovation. What’s the Distinctive Value Proposition? The new offering must help the customer make progress. How does the customer benefit? How is their life made easier? How does this compare to the existing offerings? Summarize the difference on one page. If the innovation doesn’t help the customer make progress, […]

When you’re looking to make progress, the single most important skill is to see waiting as waiting. The first place to look for waiting is the queue in front of a shared resource.  Like taking a number at the deli, you queue up behind the work that got there first and your work waits its […]

When you push, you make it easy for people resist. When you break trail, you make it easy for them to follow. Efficiency is overrated, especially when it interferes with effectiveness.  Make it easy for effectiveness to carry the day. You can push people off a cliff or build them a bridge to the other […]

To create future success, you’ve got to outlaw the very thing responsible for your past success. Sometimes slower is faster and sometimes slower is slower. But it’s always a judgement call. We bite the bullet and run expensive experiments because they’re valuable, but we neglect to run the least expensive thought experiments because they’re too […]

It’s not the tools. Innovation is not hampered by a lack of tools (See The Innovator’s Toolkit for 50 great ones.), it’s hampered because people don’t know how to start.  And it’s hampered because people don’t know how to choose the right tool for the job. How to start? It depends. If you have a […]

What if you’re asked to do something you know isn’t right? Not from an ethical perspective, but from a well-read, well-practiced, world-thought-leader perspective? What if you know it’s a waste of time? What if you know it sets a dangerous precedent for doing the wrong work for the right reason? What if the person asking […]

There’s a huge amount of energy required to help an organization do new work. At every turn the antibodies of the organization reject new ideas.  And it’s no surprise.  The organization was created to do more of what it did last time.  Once there’s success the organization forms structures to make sure it happens again.  […]

One of the biggest mistakes I know is to get too little done by trying to do too much. In high school we got too comfortable with partial credit. Start the problem the right way, make a few little mistakes and don’t actually finish the problem – 50% credit.  With product development, and other real life […]

There always far more tasks than there is time.  Same for vacations and laundry.  And that’s why it’s important to learn when-and how-to say no.  No isn’t a cop-out.  No is ownership of the reality we can’t do everything.  The opposite of no isn’t maybe; the opposite of no is yes while knowing full well […]

All innovation projects take longer than expected and take more resources than expected.  It’s time to change our expectations. With regard to time and resources, innovation’s biggest enemy is waiting.  There.  I said it. There are books and articles that say innovation is too complex to do quickly, but complexity isn’t the culprit. It’s true […]