How to Change the World

Why You Need Empathy to Be an Innovator

Over at the American Express Open Forum, I posted an article called “Customer-Centric Design: Got Empathy?” by Matthew E. May (@matthewemay). This articles explains why walking a few miles in the shoes of your customers is important when designing products and services for them. Check it out by clicking here.

Design's Deadly Duo

Over at the American Express Open Forum, I posted an article called “Design’s Deadly Duo” by Matthew E. May (@matthewemay). This articles how companies mistake invention for innovation by making two big mistakes: confusing an unarticulated need with a non-existent one and confusing long lead times with future needs. Check it out by clicking here.

How to Achieve Elegance

I interviewed Matt May, author of In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing, about the topic of elegance. He says that the four qualities of elegance are: symmetry, seduction, subtraction, and sustainability. If you’re interested in creating elegant products and services, you’ll find it very interesting. Check out the interview here. Please mark it “found useful” if you did.

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More on elegance and design at Design.alltop.

Macintosh 25th Anniversary Reunion: Where Did Time Go?

On January 24, 1984 Apple introduced Macintosh. Many of us who worked in the Macintosh division are now asking, “Where did the time go?” The Division had a reunion at the home of Alain Rossman (software evangelist) and Joanna Hoffman (the division’s conscience and first marketing person) to celebrate this occasion, and these are pictures from the event.

Let me take you back to 1984 and show you two videos. This is the unveiling of Macintosh by Steve Jobs. It was one of the most magical moments in our lives.

This the “1984” commercial that ran during the Super Bowl on January 24th, 1984.

Leotard then.

Leotard twenty five years later--Barbara Koalkin (Macintosh marketing manager) is holding it.

This is Barbara again. This time in a photo with Bill Gates (Microsoft), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), and Fred Gibbons (Software Publishing Corporation).

We gave this glass decoration to Apple dealers.

Macintosh 128K with a MacPaint box. MacPaint was truly a mind-bending application that showed how different Macintosh was other computer operating systems.

Macintosh Division tshirt. We were very big into tshirts.

Chris Espinosa (end-user and technical documentation of Macintosh) with the tshirt of the software group.

Another tshirt.

Steve Scheier (ran the test-drive-a-Mac program), me, and John Rizzo (Macintosh product manager).

Dan’l Lewin. He ran the Apple University Consortium. His efforts got Macs into the hands of students and faculty at schools like Stanford and Carnegie Mellon.

Chris Espinosa with Scott Knaster (developer tech support).

Four software evangelists: Mike Boich, Alain Rossman, me, and Jim Armstrong.

Steve Capps (wrote Alice and worked on the Finder and ROM).

Jane Anderson (then of Regis McKenna, Inc), Lynn Takahashi (Steve’s admin), Debi Coleman (CFO), and Bill Fernandez (hardware design).

Randy Wigginton (author of MacWrite). He sure does look like the guy in the painting behind him.

Jerome Coonen (software team manager and worked on the math routines in the ROM) and his wife, Sue (worked on Lisa documentation).

Steve Capps, Bruce Horn (worked on the Finder and Resource Manager), Susan Kare (she was responsible for much of the Macintosh graphic design and created the Macintosh icons), Patty Kenyon (software team), Andy Hertzfeld (main contributor to ROM), and Rony Seebok (software team).

Bud Colligan (handled international and educational marketing) and James Higa (spearheaded Apple’s effort in Japan and several years ago he’s The Man who convinced the major record labels to sell through iTunes)

Bill Wathen, Debi Coleman, and me. Funny story: I once purchased about $1 million worth of software to give to the Apple salesforce and dealers to convince them that Macintosh had software. This was a mere $995,000 over my spending authority so Debi (then CFO of the division) told Bill (who was the controller) that she was going to get me fired!

David Beaver (Steve’s assistant), Larry Kenyon (driver-level software), and Dan Kottke (hardware design).

Three evangelists again. Mike Boich started evangelism and hired me, and Alain Rossman worked with me as a software evangelist. Essentially, Mike started evangelism, Alain did the work, and I took the credit.

The Macintosh Division, circa 1984.

The Macintosh Division, circa 2009. I hope that everyone gets at least one chance to work on such a great project with such great people as the Macintosh Division.

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Thanks to my buddies at Fixmyphotos for doing the photo editing so fast. By the way, I’m still using a Macintosh and aggregate Macintosh news at Mac.Alltop.

The Growth Mindset

"If You're Open to Growth, You Tend to Grow" should be required reading for managers and parents. It summarizes the work of Carol Dweck from Stanford. Key passage:

Those who believe they were born with all the smarts and gifts they’re ever going to have approach life with what she calls a “fixed mind-set.” Those who believe that their own abilities can expand over time, however, live with a “growth mind-set.”

If you're interested in her work, I wrote about her twice before. Click here for a video and here for a review of her book.

Cool Stuff Monday

A buddy of mine found three cool inventions to share with readers of my blog. These inventions can change the world and illustrate how much can be done with innovative thinking.

• Pot-in-pot. This is the invention of Mohammed Bah Abba of Nigeria. He is from a family of pot makers and discovered a way to preserve food despite in the country's high temperatures. One earthenware pot is place within another, and the space between the two is filled with sand. Users add water to the sand, and when this water evaporates, the inside pot is cooled.



• Q-Drum. Hans Hendrikse invented this apparatus to enable people in Africa to transport fifty liters of water in a safer, easier, and more hygienic way. Rather than carrying water on their heads, now they roll it along in a drum made of low-density linear polyethylene.



• Eco-nightclub. An eco-nightclub opened in London near King's Cross. It contains a dance floor that converts the up and down motion of dancers to electricity. The process is called piezoelectricity.

I hope that these ideas inspire you to create inventions like this too. Thanks to Thomas Kang for the idea to do this blog entry.

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Kathy Kruse also pointed out the "Lessons of the Square Watermelon." You'd probably find this interesting too.

The Art of Change

Over at the Sun Microsystems blog I published an interview about the art of change. It features Ariane de Bonvoisin, the founder and CEO of The First Thirty Days, Inc. She recently published a book called The First 30 Days: Your Guide to Any Change (and Loving Your Life More). Learn about the crucial first thirty days of making a change, "change muscle, and "change quotient" by clicking here.

Launch: Silicon Valley Discount

Launch: Silicon Valley is coming up in less than a week. The regular price is $199, but you can get a discount by clicking here. The event is on June 10th at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View, California. Thirty companies will be launching their products and services to an audience of venture capitalists, press, and analysts. More news for entrepreneurs here.

Q and A with Roger von Oech

Roger von Oech is the author a classic book about innovation called A Whack on the Side of the Head. Believe it or not, this is the twenty-fifth anniversay of the book. When I was young(er), this book was the rage for the personal-computer generation in Silicon Valley. Join me on Sun's site for an interview of Roger. In it he discusses twenty-five years of innovation and provides advice to today's newfangled Web 2.0 companies. Click here for the interview.

A Tour of PARC

PARC was the center of the universe for the development of many personal computer and Internet technologies. For example: Ethernet, laser printing, personal computer (Alto), graphical user interface, and object-oriented programming. Maybe “center of the universe” is an exageration, but at the very least, it’s one of the main trees as you can see by downloading this diagram or looking at this timeline. I recently got a tour of the company, and these are my photos.

The architect designed the outside of the building to blend into the foothills because Palo Alto residents didn’t want see buildings.

There are many large patios for employees to hang out on.

A solar connector that PARC researchers designed.

This is the “typical” desk of a PARC researcher: six monitors, three for a Macintosh and three for a Windows machine.

The “typical” keyboard of PARC researcher.

This little patch of orange paint is the original color of the walls. The theory was that orange fosters innovative thinking.

Almost every office has a window. There are also several garden areas like this one to provide a Zen-ish atmosphere.

This is the robotics lab.

I had the impression that PARC was all about software and design, but there’s a lot of power tools for fabrication.

This is the PARC gym which includes an on-site nurse.

This is the cafeteria.

Herman Miller furniture, pre Dotcom days.

The friendly staff of the corporate libary.

Looking for any of my books. They told me they were checked out. :-)

The library did have Founders at Work—because it wasn’t checked out. :-)

The first Kindle?

The first labtop?

The first PDA?

The first iPod?

The first LAN?

This is what it looks like to speak at PARC.