Yesterday, I had the great pleasure of speaking at the Internet Summit in the Raleigh Convention Center downtown. I participated in the session on Content, Design, and Usability, which brought out some very useful perspectives. Sherry Bastion of Lenovo set the stage with Digital Experiences that Build Brand, Loyalty and Sales, followed by Todd Moy of Viget Labs, who illuminatated The Secret World of Usability. I went next, discussing Web Design as a Strategic Tool, and Michael Gowan wrapped up with Maximizing the Impact of Content. Thanks to everyone for the feedback — tons of smart people there! 

I posted my presentation on SlideShare if you’re interested. I focused on shifting from designer as website maker to designer as catalyst, who can solve technical problems as well as act as facilitator through the adaptive challenges (or the messy problems) that organizations face these days. I illustrate four areas where catalysts can approach these challenges and 14 principles that will help:

1. Clarify complicated things to create meaning.
2. Align self interest with shared purpose to ensure motivation.
3. Inspire action through openness to inspire contributions.
4. Form with intent to find answers.

There’s also an opportunity to shift — building on the knowledge of user-centric design — towards a community-centric design model which focuses on designing conditions and opportunities for relationships.

My hope is that these thoughts highlight an evolving role the design-minded individual can play in building brands, solving tough problems, and finding opportunities in the coming years.

The article pits two experts who debate the issues involved. Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain defends the classic ubiquity argument—“with open systems, a company can court far more usage and mind share.”

Frog Design’s Mark Vandenbrink, in his best “Jane, you ignorant slut” voice, retorts that Apple’s closed system gives the company a competitive advantage by creating “a more perfect experience” for its customers.

Who’s right? They both are. Apple proves closed systems work. Red Hat proves that open systems work. Both can drive competitive advantage. The idea that one strategy is right and therefore one strategy is wrong is flawed.

Instead of falling for that argument, let’s note that these systems are ‘creative/innovation’ systems—not software ‘development’ systems. This is a more self aware mode of comparison and from this perspective we can choose to make trade offs based on which design system will align better for our specific strategy.

Apple’s closed system worked because the company embraced a high-level commitment to design thinking and design-as-form. The systems and artifacts they designed were created to be beautiful and highly ‘human’ (as opposed to engineered technology). Frog Design is an expert in this form of design. But this ‘closed’ system is very expensive, highly dependent upon one powerful, ‘visionary’ design leader. Few businesses possess such committed leadership.

On the other hand, design has always been a competitive strategy chosen by desperate players. It’s easy to forget now, but as recently as six years ago Apple was anything but a lock to survive. Much less thrive. With Microsoft enjoying 96% of the market, Apple was a desperate company.

Thankfully for Apple shareholders and fans alike, Jobs was the man for the job. His early exposure to design, coupled with finding his design soul mate, created the opportunity to succeed. But it was a highly risky strategy. And one that could have easily failed.

Red Hat shareholders and fans know that open systems also drive a competitive advantage. Indeed, Red Hat is proof positive that a small company with nothing to lose can use open strategies to great success. With competitors like Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and Novell (remember them), this small player has become a billion dollar company…selling ‘free’ software. That’s a pretty compelling story on the competitiveness of openness.

It’s only fair to note that Apple has utilized more open strategies with its open iPhone application creative process. Less known is the fact that Apple operating systems have, for years, been based on the same open development community-driven processes that Red Hat’s enterprise software uses—even Apple didn’t start from scratch.

In the end, both companies succeeded because of the disciplined and courageous leadership of two non-conformist business leaders who shared an inherent (though differing) belief in ‘design’—Steve Jobs and Matthew Szulik. Fortunately for me, I had the opportunity to work directly with one of these men. And every day I enjoy the products and services the other helped create.

Open or closed? Yes.

One of the case studies we were assigned was Apple Computers, and during the review the professor asked how many of us thought Apple would still be around in 10 years.

This was 2005. Apple stock was trading at about $35 a share. It’s most recent product success was a strangely shaped desktop model available in tangerine and teal. Their laptops were incredibly overpriced, we were told. The iPod was just beginning to go mainstream and iTunes was still competing against “free.” The iPhone was just a gleam in Jobs’ eye. The iPad? All we knew was the Newton had been a colossal failure.

But this was an audience of 50 designers. Those of us who were old enough had purchased an SE. We loved the 1984 commercial. And we had been wearing black long before Steve Jobs adopted our look. Every hand was raised. Quickly. Confidently. No hesitation.

The HBS professor, who resembled Bill Gates younger, geekier brother, chuckled. Actually, I think it might be more accurate to say he giggled. Clearly he was amused at this congregation of misfits and their silliness. “I have to tell you” he confessed, “I teach this case study quite often and I always ask this question. Never do I get more than one of two people to raise their hand. I really can’t imagine Apple will be around in ten years.”

I suspect he doesn’t ask that question anymore.

Thank you, Steve. Thank you for reminding us that wealth can be created by creating value, not simply capturing and pocketing the value others have created while injuring or killing the very ecosystem that lead to its creation.

Thank you, Steve, for showing that CEOs don’t have to play the ‘next quarter/uncertainty’ Wall Street game. That building a sustainable business demands you take a longer perspective than next quarter’s bonus and stock options.

Thank you, Steve, for proving, once and for all, that a CEO who has the courage to commit—nay, insist—on employing design as strategy can not only succeed, but kick ass.

New Kind is currently seeking someone interested in gaining on-the-job experience learning how to build brands and communities in a non-traditional way.

Did your marketing, advertising, or public relations classes in college leave you feeling like you were studying history? Do you sense that there is a big shift underway that most companies you’ve interviewed with don’t quite understand?

About New Kind

We are a new kind of agency guiding organizations on a journey toward more effective ways of operating in a changing world. Some might call us a communications agency, a design studio, even a management consulting or innovation strategy firm. We embrace those labels. But we prefer to think of ourselves as community catalysts, helping organizations solve 21st century problems and create 21st century opportunities.

Our mission is to inspire communities of passion—whether outside or inside organizations. 
When people collaborate as a community with a shared vision and purpose, amazing things can happen.

Read more about us in this recent story from the Raleigh News & Observer.

About the Internship

This is a paid temporary position, located in our office in Raleigh, North Carolina. It will begin as soon as we find the right candidate. We are looking for folks that meet the following criteria:

• strong writing skills (we’ll want to see examples of your work)
• active in 21st century communication channels (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)
• college graduate with degree in a related field (like communications, marketing, business, and journalism) or a degree in a totally unrelated field (but with an awesome story for why you’d be a good fit anyway)
• natural curiosity and willingness to take on anything from important proposals and complex brand positioning projects to administrivia like scheduling meetings or cleaning whiteboards (if it’s good enough for our CEO, it’s good enough for you:)
• a strong design sensibility and appreciation for what good design can do
• experience building presentations in Keynote or Powerpoint
• previous experience leading or participating in online or real world communities (personal or professional are both valuable)

In this position, you’ll have the opportunity to work on a broad spectrum of projects, with a particular focus on helping our Director of Operations and Director of Poetics. Typical projects may include research, scheduling/coordination, writing, editing, proposal development, presentations, and general office work. But we’ll also be eager to work with people who can stretch the limits—you may be able to help us in ways we haven’t even figured out yet. We are excited about that.

How to Apply

If you are interested in being considered for this internship, please send an email to chris(at)newkind.com or connect with me via Twitter.

Please attach your resume and some samples of your writing work (or send links to where we can find them on the web). Also include some thoughts in your email about why you are an ideal candidate.

We look forward to hearing from you.

We were very excited that New Kind was featured in Sunday’s News & Observer. The article profiled New Kind’s non-traditional approach to branding and strategy.

We were especially proud of the very kind words from some wonderful people and organizations we work with: Kevin Trapani, CEO of Redwoods, Denise Gonzales Crisp, co-chair of the identity committee for the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh, and Madhu Beriwal, CEO of IEM. And of course, a special thank you to Matthew Szulik, former Chairman and CEO of Red Hat.

You can read the article here.

I moderated the first panel on behalf of my friends at the Management Innovation Exchange. This panel featured the winners of the first Human Capital M-Prize: Lisa Haneberg of MPI, Joris Luijke of Atlassian, and Doug Solomon of IDEO. The Human Capital M-Prize competition, run jointly by HCI and the MIX, was designed to find bold ideas, stories, and innovations highlighting ways to unleash the passion of people within our organizations.

Lisa began by presenting her winning hack, entitled Start with a better question to create a better talent management system: the Talent Management Cloud. She made the case that the “old kind” model where engagement and retention are owned within the HR function is fundamentally broken. Because there are so many factors well beyond the control and influence of HR alone, responsibility for talent management must be the responsibility of the whole organization. I’d encourage you to go take a look at Lisa’s winning hack if you are interested in learning how to put her more holistic model into practice.

Next, Joris, who came in all the way from Sydney for the conference, took on the performance review– something he described (accurately in my book) as universally hated by both employees and HR people around the world. Joris shared his story of how Atlassian designed a kinder, gentler, more humane performance review system and rolled it out within the organization. You can read Joris’s original story Atlassian’s Big Experiment with Performance Reviews on the MIX.

Finally, since I make no secret of being an IDEO fanboy, I was excited to share the stage with Doug Solomon, CTO of IDEO. Doug shared his winning story, entitled The Tube: IDEO Builds a Collaboration System That Inspires Through Passion. Frustrated by so-called collaboration systems that IDEO found desperately lacking, they took on the challenge of designing their own, using a model based on facilitating person-to-person interaction more akin to Facebook than your typical knowledgebase or database-driven collaboration system. Doug also shared that a company called Moxiesoft has taken The Tube and turned it into a product, which I can’t wait to go check out.

At the end of the session HCI announced a new M-Prize, which will run from now through December 9th. This M-Prize is called “Encouraging the Gift of Leadership” and will be an effort to discover innovative ideas for how we can stimulate and support the development of “natural” hierarchies, where influence comes from the ability to lead, rather than from positional power within organizations. Have a great idea? You should go enter it on the MIX.

Later that afternoon, I participated in another panel where Katie Ratkiewicz of HCI shared the results of a recent survey regarding the relationship between career development efforts within organizations and overall employee engagement. I was joined on the panel by Stuart Crabb, Head of Learning and Development at Facebook, Russell Lobsenz, Director of Talent Development at Orbitz, and Cathy Welsh, SVP of Leadership Consulting at Lee Hecht Harrison.

I was particularly interested to hear Stuart’s comments regarding Facebook’s approach to career development. Basically, his thinking is that career development is primarily the employee’s responsibility (not the company’s) to drive, something that I expect was fairly controversial to many in the room (judging from the data shared in the survey), but which I couldn’t agree with more fully.

While I was excited to hear him say it out loud (because I wasn’t sure whether I’d be driven from the room tarred and feathered if I’d done it on my own), I did acknowledge that there were prerequisites for an approach where employees are accountable for their own career development to work. In my view, there has to be an entrepreneurial culture in place in the organization where employees have the freedom to explore new opportunities. I certainly felt we had those sort of opportunities while I was at Red Hat and it sounds like there is a culture based on freedom and personal accountability at Facebook as well.

I want to thank my new friends at the Human Capital Institute for a great day and some wonderful hospitality. Also thanks to my friends in the MIX community and especially Lisa, Joris, and Doug for participating on the panel. I’ll see all of you again soon!

Iwas the very early 1960s and I was about five years old when I went

Mickey from the mid 20th century

to see the movie Pinocchio—the classic Carlo Collodi story of the wooden puppet who dreams of being a real boy. It may have been my first movie seen in a theater; I’m not sure.

What I am sure of is how I was gripped by the tale. I cried when Pinocchio tied a stone to his donkey tail and dove into the ocean in an attempt to find Geppetto, his maker and Father-to-be. It all seemed so hopeless and freightening. Of course I was delighted when the little puppet saved Geppetto and was eventually granted his wish. Happy ever after.

Pinocchio, released originally in 1940, was Disney’s second full-length movie. The company’s success is well documented and it’s hard to imagine that anyone reading this isn’t familiar with Disney—the man or the brand he created. A tradition that was still in its early stages when Pinnochio was first released was in full swing as I watched two decades later. Today, it is one of the great brand stories of the 20th century.

Indeed, it’s hard to think of a contemporary company where tradition plays a more significant role in their competitive capability than Disney. So when the current CEO Robert Iger warns today’s business leaders that “You can’t allow tradition to get in the way innovation” it is cause to stop and think.

In a recent Harvard Business Review interview, Iger comes across as a no-nonsense CEO who sees clearly that the competitive environment has changed, and whose determination to truly compete fuels an equal determination to do those things which truly drive innovation.

Earlier this week I wrote about IBM CEO Sam Palmisano’s focus on long-term, sustainable success. So I’m delighted to see that Iger is also building a company focused for long-term success. He goes so far as to confess that today’s executives are “overcompensated for what they deliver short-term.” He goes on to say “we’re really trying not to run the company on the basis of short-term analysis.”

But what really caught my eye was this pull-quote:

“There’s a whole set of mommy bloggers who write about Disney. We’ve started to engage with them. We invite them to events. I sat with a group of them on our new cruise ship. The world has changed a lot.”

A CEO who makes $28 million a year sitting and, hopefully, listening to a group of mommy bloggers. Indeed, that is a new kind of world.

We can’t say that Orwell didn’t warn us. He did. And today “doublespeak” has created a world where it is often the most “conservative” businesses, industries and business leaders who act with the least concern for long-term business success—risking their reputations and brands today for the potential payoff of enormous short-term personal rewards.

That’s why it is so refreshing to see IBM’s recent communications centered on their 100th year anniversary. From their advertisement that appeared in the June 16th edition of the Wall Street Journal, to their recent Report of Social Responsibility, IBM is engaging in communications that fly in the face of typical corporate, marketing-driven babble over the past too many decades.

I’ve been a fan of IBM’s CEO surveys and their own cultural transformation efforts over the past decade. But I was still delightfully surprised when reading their 4-page advertisement at how candidly they spoke about their history and some of the major mistakes they’ve made, and how well their story illustrates the business advantage of a operating against a strategy that is focused on far more than simply maximizing shareholder value and quarterly returns.

When Sam Palmisano writes, “to achieve long-term success, you have to manage for the long term,” you might think he’s hired Yogi Berra to head up his Communications team. What it is, really, is an admonition to other business executives who fail to acknowledge such a simple business truth.

Palmisano acknowledges that businesses today must embrace a new kind of approach where individual players recognize they are dependent upon one another and where effective action is “necessarily collaborative.” And he warns us that we “cannot optimize complex systems like food, water, energy, education and cities without simultaneously expanding access to underserved populations, increasing their transparency and architecting their environmental sustainability.”

With this Palmisano creates a 21st century mission and purpose for IBM—one that will attract and help retain the best and brightest minds in the 21st century. As he states it: “In this work, and in what we do every day, my colleagues and I know that we are only scratching the surface of what is possible on a smarter planet. And that is why we also know that our first century, for all its remarkable milestones, was just a harbinger of our second.”

Congratulations, IBM, on a century of success. I hope you live up to the promises you’re making today and that’ll you’ll continue to focus more on helping create a better, smarter world rather than just being the smartest company exploiting the world. The business sector needs a strong, authentic leader who can help us understand that enormous greed isn’t really a true conservative value.

Don’t screw it up.

Companies need talented, creative people to compete. And more than ever, companies need the right culture, mission, and meaningful work to attract and retain that talent.

On Tuesday local business leaders met at the North Carolina Museum of History for a panel titled, “The Great Talent Search: Creating a Culture to Attract the Creative Class.” The event was presented by the Raleigh Chamber of Commerce in partnership with Wake County Economic Development and EDGE4. It featured local companies that value people as their most important investment and reflect that in their cultures.

The Triangle is among the most vibrant areas of the country. The area consistently ranks among the best places to live and work and has also been one of the fastest-growing regions in the last decade. In fact, today’s Triangle Business Journal reported on a new study that ranked Raleigh as the no. 4 city in the country for young adults to start their careers.

So how can we ensure our area continues to be a magnet for smart talent? How can local companies attract the talent they need? And how can they use their cultures to attract creative people and inspire growth? These are the questions the panel set out to answer.

The panel was moderated by our own David Burney, CEO and partner of New Kind. He talked about the role that culture and creativity play in attracting talent and driving innovation. Yet today’s mobile, meaning-driven workforce and our ability to openly share information create an environment we didn’t have a generation ago.

“Today’s creatives, and that’s all of us—if you’re human, you’re creative—we have options. The smart, talented creatives can go somewhere else if they’re not happy,” he said. “You need the creatives to innovate.”

Burney introduced the panelists: Zach Clayton, founder and CEO of Three Ships Media, Heather Hesketh, CEO of hesketh.com, and David Morken, co-founder and CEO of Bandwidth. “Their cultures have proven that they understand the difference in how one recruits, hires, retains, and trains creative talent,” Burney said.

Bandwidth has achieved recognition both for rapid growth and as a great place to work. While for many people these concepts may seem at odds, they aren’t for Morken. He talked about their focus on health, family, and play in addition to focusing on growing their business. In fact, Bandwidth made play a key part of their culture. Exercising during the day, going on ski trips—being competitive against each other at play while they competed as a company. “It isn’t just about work,” he said. “It’s about life.”

Culture also plays a key role in the growth of Three Ships Media. Clayton talked about the discussions they’ve had as an organization concerning their values and how each person on the team shapes their culture.

His goal was to “create the type of environment that extreme talent is looking for.” Those people who have a lot of drive, are achievement-oriented, and are approaching their jobs as entrepreneurs. Three Ships Media’s culture is driven by Clayton’s understanding that “A-players want to be with other A-players.”

Another important element of the culture at Three Ships Media is failing fast and failing often. Which is also one of the core principles of the open source model. For Clayton, growing as a startup has meant “doing one bad thing less each day.” As a result, embracing failure and self-learning became an important part of their culture.

Openness, transparency, and collaboration—which are also key open source principles—have played an important role in the culture of hesketh.com.

Hesketh shared the story of redesigning their decade-old 360 review process, which was created by management and solely measured their expectations. She decided to open up the conversation. As a team they reviewed the entire process and every question.

“It was wonderful to get input from the office managers, consultants, programmers. Everyone agreed on a shared language and what they expected of each other and the leaders,” she said. “It was amazing to see a cultural turnaround. I have leadership throughout my team now.”

She agreed that creativity is not limited to creative functions and everyone can lead and contribute. “Creativity is any time the human brain is engaged in solving a problem,” she said. “Acknowledging that is what has allowed us to create more value.”

Clayton adds: “The reason I started Three Ships was because I was convinced that the nature of the way people communicate is changing. That two-way, interactive, real-time communication that’s occurring on social networks and in a more open web, it’s actually going to change the way every single organization functions. The old hierarchical command and control structure just won’t make sense in a world where everyone has access to information and in a company where you’re trying to hire the best people and are going to be creative and free-thinking and articulate.”

Which begged the question from Burney—how does focusing on empowerment and doing meaningful work translate into being more competitive? How do we get over the fear we’ve been taught to operate as a machine? After all, companies that are focusing on being the most efficient and productive don’t have values like play and fun.

“The people I hire, what they do for a living is fun to them.” Hesketh said. “A term I hate is life-work balance because it assumes when you’re at work you’re not living.”

“How can you keep great people if you don’t do this?” Clayton responded. “Ultimately you cannot have a healthy organization. You cannot focus on real innovation. You can’t get great people—and you can’t get great performance from people—if you treat them like a machine.”

We hear common themes:

Creating an open, transparent environment.
Empowering people across the organization.
Inspiring creativity from every role.
Giving work meaning.

And I would agree they are critical to not only growing organizations around great talent, but also in establishing an area that can attract the best talent to work and live.

It’s simple really. At New Kind, we believe that when competitive environments change, then strategy has to change too. And we know from Peter Drucker, when strategy changes then structure must change. That’s the math.

The business world is currently experiencing a change. In the recent past, industrial age competitive strategies—being the better machine, overpowering competitors, exploiting vendors and workforces, manipulating customers—created competitive advantage. Michael Porter captured this all so well in his Five Competitive Forces theory published in the late 1970s.

But today Porter writes of Creating Shared Value and in a recent Harvard Business Review article he described today’s companies this way:

They continue to view value creation narrowly, optimizing short-term financial performance in a bubble while missing the most important customer needs and ignoring the broader influences that determine their longer-term success.

In this land where customer needs and broader influences represent competitive opportunity, innovation and creativity become genuinely strategic. Where innovation and creativity are strategic, culturally-driven ‘flat’ organizational models, transparency, networked communities, and customer-driven innovation—drive competitive advantage.

In such an environment traditional thinking may be the riskiest strategy of all.

So really, it’s all about finding new kinds of ways to compete. When creativity is strategic, then purpose-driven organizations have an advantage. In this world culture trumps structure. And innovation—not marketing or advertising—builds brand. When everything is a commodity, it is brand that drives valuations. Gray hair or not, that’s New Kind math.

But only if you genuinely want to compete.

If, on the other hand, you’re more interested in securing your position or advancing your personal agenda, or if you’re afraid of diversity of opinion, or just particularly enjoy thwarting innovation, then by all means, old kind should still work just fine.