Shipulski On Design

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“Here – I made this.”  Those are courageous words.  When you make something no one has made and you show people you are saying to yourself – “I know my work will be judged, but that’s the price of putting myself out there.  I will show my work anyway.”  I think the fear of being […]

If I was CEO of a company that wanted to do innovation, the one thing I’d strive for is clarity. For clarity on the innovative new product, here’s what the CEO needs. Valuable Customer Outcomes – how the new product will be used.  This is done with a one page, hand sketched document that shows […]

If you want to run a brainstorming session to generate a long list of ideas, I’m out. Brainstorming takes the edge off, rounds off the interesting corners and rubs off any texture. If you want me to go away for a while and come back with an idea that can dismantle our business model, I’m […]

Innovation results in things that are novel, useful, and successful. These things can be products, services, data, information, or business models, but regardless of the flavor, they’re all different from what’s been done before. And when things are different, they’re new; and that means we don’t know how to do them. We don’t know how […]

If you were given a choice – for the same number of hours worked you get 20% more money, or for 20% fewer hours worked you get the same money – which would you choose? In real life it would not go that way, but set that aside for a moment. It’s a thought experiment, […]

We spend too much time on the mundane. Every day people come to work, turn on their PCs, and the mundane magically happens on its own accord. Email gets sent, phones get answered, mail gets delivered, and processes get followed. And after lunch, the hamster wheel spins back up and the mundane consumes the rest […]

There are many flavors of innovation – incremental, disruptive, and seven flavors in between. And there is lots of argument about the level of innovation – mine’s radical and yours isn’t; that’s just improving what we already have; that’s too new – no one will ever buy it. We want to label the work in […]

When you want to recognize people for their wonderful work, dollar-for-dollar, the best value on the planet is pizza. Research shows monetary rewards aren’t all that rewarding, and the thinking carries with pizza – you can buy bargain brand, wood-fired, free-range, vegan, or designer, the power of pizza is independent of pedigree. The power of […]

Doing the impossible doesn’t take a long time, starting does. More precisely, what takes a long time is getting ready to start.  Getting ready is the gating item.  So what’s in the way? The big deal about starting is other people will see you do it and they’ll judge you.  Your brain tells stories about […]

What’s a new market worth without a new technology to capture it? The same as a new technology without a new market – not much. Technology and market are a matched set, but not like peanut butter and jelly, (With enough milk, a peanut butter sandwich isn’t bad.) rather, more like H2 and O: whether […]

Everything is about speed – speed through process reengineering, waste elimination, standardization, modularity, design reuse. All valid, but not all that powerful. Real speed comes from avoiding rapid progress in the wrong direction, from avoiding a blistering pace on the wrong stuff. Real speed comes from saying no to the work that creates drag in […]