Hey, happy Monday!
There is one thing that definitely needs to be redesigned. Pawpaw. This thing that two come out of the envelope jammed into each other is out of any principle of usability-although it makes sense from an industrial point of view because it saves space and time, which always equates to cost reduction.
But there are other problems. Not only do you have to touch with your hands an object that has every appearance of being poisonous-at least to mosquitoes-but to use it you have to untangle the two spirals with a good chance of breaking one of them, thus creating waste as well as danger. Not to mention how many times we have tried to burn bits of broken spirals on makeshift supports that could, at best, go off in a saucer or scorch a piece of furniture, at worst cause a fire.
Yet with all these “design errors,” or as I call them “one-sided optimizations”-that is, made with only one side of the equation, the business, in mind, sacrificing the user experience-it is one of the most common objects in our homes.
Some problems simply do not seem to have the right economics to merit resolution.
Until someone sees an opportunity there.
“Design is too important to be left to designers alone!” – Federico Ferretti
Of course! It should be practiced by the whole company!
That’s a phrase I read in the LinkedIn post of Federico Ferretti, Head of Experience Design at Haier Europe, who will be the guest speaker at the STRTGY Meeting to be held this afternoon — Monday, July 18 at 6:30 p.m. — the last of the season.
Today, Design with a capital D, is the most valuable department in any organization, and not only in the area of product design but also in the design of relationships with people inside and outside the company itself.
Thomas J. Watson Jr., son of the founder of IBM, in a 1966 memo gave a really simple and effective definition of Design: “good design is good business.”
Some types of design have strategic value, a multiplier effect.
I am talking about Behavior Design.
Today perhaps we should update that definition and say “good behavior is good business.”
Revolutionary products-which of course coincide with bestsellers-have changed our behaviors by making previous ones ridiculous, obsolete, and inefficient and profoundly shaping entire industries. Just think of the disappearance of burners since streaming made them useless. The same thing will soon happen with gas pumps being replaced by charging stations for electric cars that will force companies to radically rethink the travel stop experience.
But product innovation is always the easiest to observe because it is visible and tangible in the marketplace.
True Design innovation starts from inside companies.
The organizations we admire as innovative design their ways of working first-which are constantly evolving-because this has enormously greater leverage than focusing on intercepting sporadic flashes of genius from a creative team.
Matteo Carini, Head of Category Strategy at Prontopro, first designed the organization of his team and then evolved the product. He thus invented a new department to overcome the obstacles to growth he was encountering. Find his interview here
Meeting the Qonto team at WMF, the fintech startup that offers financial services for businesses and freelancers, I found out that the founder has come up with The Qonto Way as an operational way to scale their business. You can find an explanatory video here (starts at 0:56) while on Medium the team shares their way of working.
Then there is Haier, which is the largest expression on a global scale of the effectiveness of these organizational design practices. CEO Zhang Ruimin, invented and implemented the RenDanHeyi model. Here you will find anintroduction to its principles directly from the № 120 note while this beautiful video from the Corporate Rebels Academy explains in detail how it works.
RenDanHeyi puts the user’s needs first. Employees must have the user in front of them, provide value to them, and keep them in the forefront at all times. Without users, there are no employees.
In this model “everyone is an entrepreneur” and employees are given an extraordinary amount of freedom. Decision-making is democratized, moving from a traditional pyramid structure to a flat structure. Small microenterprises have full decision-making autonomy. Including decisions on overall strategy, hiring, and compensation.
Even in difficult times, the company has achieved incredible success. Haier consistently outperforms industry averages thanks to this model founded on organizational innovation practices that solve by-design problems that all companies encounter sooner or later: waste, over-bureaucracy, lack of motivation and ambition.
During today’s meeting you can ask as many questions as you like, but judging by the number of registrations the room will be “pleasantly” crowded. If you want you can anticipate your questions using this form, they will be the first to be answered.
Advance your questions for Federico Ferretti here
See you later.
ALWAYS MAKE PROGRESS⤴
Antonio
