Matching Opportunity and Execution with Chris Conley
by Brandon Schauer
Chris Conley, CEO of Gravity Tank always surprises me with some of the most straight-forward and accessible thinking about the connections between design and business.
At an Institute of Design event earlier today Chris drew from Peter Drucker’s The Practice of Management: “Business has only two functions — marketing and innovation.” From this perspective, financial profit is only a measure of the business’s effectiveness at these two functions.
Chris frames design’s role in marketing and innovation as finding good opportunities and matching them with good execution. This combination can be deceptively simple; see cases like the Segway (good execution, poor opportunity) and the Pontiac Atzec (good opportunity, poor execution) for how easily it can be screwed up.
Part of Chris’s academic focus (he also heads Product Design at ID) is on how to improve the process of moving from opportunity to execution. Looking high and low for organizations that do it better, he pointed out that Pixar has an impeccable record having created 7 hit movies in 7 attempts. There are many interesting practices that can be extracted from Pixar, but my favorite is the ‘dailies‘ — the best animators in the world being critiqued daily from their work the day before. Imagine the quantity of iterations and the incremental improvement that are built into the dailies.
Some other favorite comments from the evening:
- “…it’s easier to do something formulaic — like go from an 8 to a 12 megapixel camera — than actually shape an experience.”
- “…a spreadsheet is just another modeling medium…”
Chris Conley also recently shared some great observations about changing the criteria for the BusinessWeek IDEA Awards (which he chaired this year) in this podcast. We’re excited to have Chris joining us at UX Week this year.
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on Wednesday, August 9th, 2006 at 10:20 pm and is filed under Design leaders, Management, Product Design.
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