I promised a write up of this excellent book. In short it’s a great book.
Unfortunately I don’t have it anymore. But it’s for a good cause. I gave it away to the Asia Europe Institute in Kuala Lumpur.
I was there in the beginning of March as a visiting professor, teaching “Designing for User Experience”. I also lectured about the importance of design thinking. It was a great opportunity to interact with post grad students from all over Asia. It was good to be back after an absence, I was there in 2003 and 2004.
I will write more about it when my course module for next year reaches completion. Anyway, I have to find myself a new copy of Designing interactions…
I haven’t read anything of this author, yet. But the promise of his latest work is very good.
Gary Hamel has apparently written other best selling books on new management styles, but I don’t read a lot of those.
Some quotes in his upcoming work The future of management captured my interest however, because it resonates very much with what we propose with the innvire concept.
His key message to leaders is to shift from a culture of control to one that embraces personal creativity, posturing that this is the only path to future innovation, growth and prosperity.
Some choice quotes:
“You can buy obedience and diligence and even intellect almost anywhere in the world for next to nothing.”
“We’re going to have to get people to bring to work their initiative, their creativity, their passion, and those are human capabilities that cannot be commanded. Those are gifts that people either choose to bring to work or not.”
“The existing management model was built to drive alignment, enforcement and control. What management tried to do over the last 100 years was to regularise the irregular, to drive the variety out of processes…we happen to live in a world today where it’s irregular people with irregular ideas who create all the new economic value and the wealth.”
“Organisations are less human than the people who work there. [people are inherently creative and innovative] but somehow when we get to work that adaptability, that innovation literally gets bleached out of people between 9 and 5.”
“The ability to aggregate human capability via the web, that’s not going to go away.”
This is exactly the stuff we are fighting against with the innvire product. We want to bring creativity, adaptivity and innitiative back to the work floor. We want to help managers give employability a new meaning, by facilitating knowledge workers in their information transformation work. Exchanging ideas, explaining concepts by sketching, stoking each other again.
Let me know if you read the book, what did you learn from it? Should I read it? What do you do to bring creativity back to the workplace?
My company, innvire participated in a competition: the most innovative workspace.
This is really exciting because it will give us a lot of visibility. I also think we stand a good chance to do good. That may sound cocky, but if you read about the competition and what the jury is looking for it is almost as if the competition was created around the innvire products.
Go ahead, see for yourself on the competitions page. Be sure to vote and check out the others, and let me know what you think.
This is the movie we linked to, Eelco made the images, I did the editing. Together we choose the music, and worked on the concept. It was great fun preparing our entry:
A good SL friend of mine talked to me about this quote. And it is such a great one.
Guess whom it is from. I said guess, not google.
So you googled right, Charles, or, Ray Eames. The beautiful furniture and house designs of this couple always fulfilled me with a sense of simplicity, happiness, beauty and joy. In short, happiness.
And now they also gave me a great quote.
It will go right along with Walt Disney’s: “You can’t put a price tag on creativity”.
Charles and ray, being happy, getting inspired by having fun, and for a change not linking to wikipedia.
As i am head of interaction and service design at my company, innberg I just had to get this book, designing interactions.
I just started reading it and have so far only flipped through it, but I already like it very much… I will update this article soon once i read it, and will let you know my thoughts on it.
for now I will say it looks magnificent, and a lot of my heroes are featured in it….
