Author: mpullen

Forbes article: Why Fit Beats Best Practice PwC’s study: 77 % of fast growth companies show high alignment between their innovation and business strategies vs. only 32 % of slow growth companies. 71 % of fast growth companies show high alignment between their company culture and innovation strategy vs. only 33.3 % of slow growth… Continue reading Finding consultants who make your company better

Saying thank you is a small way to show your colleagues that you appreciate them. So why do people not say thank you? They are uncomfortable They are distracted They don’t realize your effort There is unresolved conflict Why Is ‘Thank You’ Difficult for Some People to Say? – Huffington Post

The Power of Appreciation by Mike Robbins When people feel valued or cared for they were 43% more productive and only 23% more productive if only recognized for their work. The lesson is to focus on who people are not what they do. (Appreciation does not mean like, agree with, or let’s be best friends… Continue reading Appreciated employees are more productive

We all need feedback to learn what we need to improve on. Some of us need feedback in a positive fashion to give us an extra boost. On most of the teams I have been on we have been so focused on getting the work done that we have not focused on the small wins.… Continue reading Some people need positive feedback to feel affirmed

A fantastic way to reuse plastic containers. Tiles are created that can be used for your bathroom or kitchen backsplash. https://avc.com/2019/03/funding-friday-renewable-plastic-tiles/

Giving and receiving feedback is not easy but it is necessary. Feedback is the way individuals and teams learn and improve. But how should feedback be done. I was looking around for some inspiration and I found this article written on giving feedback to your colleagues. How to Give Effective Feedback to Your Colleagues Some… Continue reading Feedback is required for team agility

The structure of your organization limits or enables your ability to deliver and meet your customer needs. If you are siloed across the organization and the products are built within the silos then that is what your customer encounters. The customer will feel the walls and boundaries as they interact with your company. This stilted… Continue reading Your organizational structure defines your project deliveries

The structure of your organization limits or enables your ability to deliver and meet your customer needs. If you are siloed across the organization and the products are built within the silos then that is what your customer encounters. The customer will feel the walls and boundaries as they interact with your company. This stilted… Continue reading Your organizational structure defines your project deliveries

I have no good solutions for plastic. We have a lot of plastic. There is a little reuse of the containers but not enough to matter. I have yet to see a good version of something useful. I once saw the ability to cut bottles into long strings of plastic but it was too labor… Continue reading Design for less plastic going to the transfer station

I have been fascinated by the idea of how to have a minimum impact outside of my property. I am far from net zero but I have been exploring basic things I can do. My transfer station splits things into: garbage, paper, card board, 1-2 plastics, 3-7 plastics, metal, and glass. There are others but… Continue reading Design for less at the transfer station (aka the dump)

25 years ago I studied about the designs of planes that made the state of the plane opaque to pilots. The user interface was so bad that the pilots fought with the autopilot and the plane would flip over. Here we are 25 years later and I am reading articles where people are blaming pilots… Continue reading Human error in plane crash was the designers’

Ignorance breeds confidence in all of us. Research was done on many college students. It was found that the more ignorant you were on a topic the less ability you have in comparing your abilities with others. So much so that typically people who score in the bottom 25% will say that they believe that… Continue reading When we ask people to estimate their performance …

“designers have an invisible language about what good design looks like based on a history and experience that they tend to privilege” John Maeda: “In reality, design is not that important” Good design does NOT equal pretty aesthetics in product design. Several times through the article he references design in this fashion. How a product… Continue reading I am surprised that John Maeda has such a narrow definition of design

Design is stuck in marketing. Architecture is hidden in development. Product management is also in product marketing or is nominally independent within engineering. None of this works very well. The goals of engineering and marketing are very different from product. Sticking the product people, product managers, user experience designers and system architects, in the engineering… Continue reading Organizational design is essential for product delivery

Customer service? Professional services? Sales? Marketing? Customer research? At this point I am thinking, why isn’t it the product and services team. The product and services team are responsible for creating what the customers are buying and using. They should be the customer experts. They should be gathering customer data from all the other parts… Continue reading Who knows the most about your customer?

As I reach 25 years of doing design for enterprise software, I am wondering where all the designers are redesigning the way to do design. I have seen many approaches come and go but lately there seems to be a groupthink seeping in. I see a lot of motion, doing UX and using the same… Continue reading Designers doing redesigns of how to design

The numbers of educated entrepreneurs has dropped significantly. “1992 4.0 percent of 25- to 54-year-olds with an advanced degree (beyond a bachelor’s) were entrepreneurs. By 2017 this rate had fallen to 2.2 percent” – http://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/the_entrepreneurship_rate_has_fallen_by_almost_half_for_workers_with_a_bach I am fascinated because in my world it seems like there are so many startups. I had no idea that… Continue reading Educated entrepreneurs in the US down by almost half

Are you listening to their complaints? Perhaps you are doing questionnaires and interviews? How much do you believe what people say? If you are writing an article or a story, what people say it’s very important. What people say is less important if you are creating a solution for their problems? I exercise a lot… Continue reading What do you know about your customers?

Working memory is fairly small. If you do not have something to connect it with, you can remember 7 +/- 2 chunks of information. Think about a number like 3425936547546. Remembert that number. Now if I took that number and put it into smaller chunks it would be much easier to remember: 342- 593 -654… Continue reading Why is hard to remember that number you were given?

SVT just had a successful event to raise money to help conserve and provide stewardship to local land. “Sudbury Valley Trustees works to protect natural areas and farmland for wildlife and people in the 36 communities that surround the Sudbury, Assabet, and Concord Rivers.” Private land conservation is an excellent way to keep beautiful land… Continue reading Put your land into a trust, private conservation

From the Greek pathos … Sympathy is “commiseration, pity, or feelings of sorrow for someone else who is experiencing misfortune. ” Empathy is “the capacity or ability to imagine oneself in the situation of another, experiencing the emotions, ideas, or opinions of that person.” – dictionary.com There is a lot of talk about empathy these… Continue reading Binary opposition: sympathy vs empathy

Wow. That sure sounds obvious. If you have more to decide from it takes longer to make a decision. Specifically Hick’s law determined that with a list of equal choices that are ordered logically, the time to search and find the item of interest increased logarithmically (not linearly). So if you want a person to… Continue reading Choice: Hick’s law: the more options you have, the longer it takes to make a decision

While listening to a fireside chat by Ken Exner the GM of builder tools at Amazon, he was taking about bringing his teams up to speed. While there does exist some basic, standard training classes, Ken mentions a better way. The best way to teach is to do and review. Give a person an assignment.… Continue reading Best way to teach is to do and review.

In hell I’ll be in good company – The Dead South I love how he plays the cello strapped over his shoulder. This is the kind of tune that gets stuck in your head.

If we ask do you want this option, we will spend a lot of time convincing you or changing the option to match. Or you will just say no. If we give you 2 or 3 choices, you will more likely choose an option. The corollary is: With three options in the following manner, you… Continue reading Architecting a decision