Shipulski On Design

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Is it disruptive? Is it innovative? Two meaningless questions. Two questions to stop asking. More strongly, stop using the words “disruptive” and “innovative” altogether. Strike them from your vocabulary and replace them with novel, useful, and successful. Argument is unskillful but analysis is skillful. And what’s needed for analysis is a framework and some good […]

Successful commercialization of products and services is fueled by one fundamental – making the new one better than the old one.  If the new one is better the customer experience is better, the marketing is better, the sales are better and the profits are better. It’s not enough to know in your heart that the […]

There are countless books and articles on innovation.  You can read how others have done it, what worked and what didn’t, how best to organize the company and how to define it.  But I have not read much about how it feels to do innovation. Before anything meaningful can happen, there must be discontent or […]

Doing something new is harder than it looks. The first step to doing new is to realize you have no interest in doing what was done last time.  Profitable or not, the same old recipe just doesn’t do it for you.  You don’t have to know why you don’t want to replay the tape, you […]

If you know what to do, do it.  But if you always know what to do, do something else.  There’s no excitement in turning the crank every-day-all-day, and there’s no personal growth.  You may be getting glowing reviews now, but when your process is documented and becomes standard work, you’ll become one of the trivial […]

If you’re all sad or anxious, you’re not operating at full potential. If you’re sad, you’re thinking about the past.  You’re remembering what happened and wishing it went differently.  You’re compromising the present by spending emotional energy on something that cannot change.  The past is gone, never to return.  Can’t unwind it, can’t undo it. […]

At every meeting you have a chance to move things forward or hold them back.  When a new idea is first introduced it’s bare-naked.  In its prenatal state, it’s wobbly and can’t stand on its own and is vulnerable to attack. But since it’s not yet developed, it’s impressionable and willing to evolve into what […]

Supply and demand have been joined at the hip since the beginning.  When demand is high, the deck is shuffled so supply seems low.  The fabricated scarcity drives up prices and shareholders are happy.  When demand is low, the competition pushes each other on price.  The abundance creates a commodity, and it’s a race to […]

Podcasts are short bursts of learning curated to please your ear.  And with training budgets slashed, podcasts can be a wonderful and cost effective (free) way to learn. The only way to battle uncertainty is to increase diversity.  Bringing together people with diverse experiences lets us see things from multiple perspectives so we can better […]

Companies don’t need more ideas, they need ideas that are more meaningful.  Companies have plenty ideas because they measure and track the number of new ideas generated.  Enter your idea on the company’s open innovation web portal, and you’re done. Let the record show that a new idea was added to the hopper.  Increment the […]

Hands-on versus hands-off – as a leader it’s a fundamental choice.  And for me the single most important guiding principle is – do what it takes to maintain or strengthen the team’s personal ownership of the work. If things are going well, keep your hands off.  This reinforces the team’s ownership and your trust in […]