The Exchanges

Q wasn't sitting there like, At an architect's table with drafts of, of, you know, buildings. He knew what he liked, and he actually knew how to sell it. So when you, what do you remember about those early days designing that mouse? Would he call you and say, no, I don't like that, or I need to be like this, or what, was he already that intense at that time?

A You betcha. Both of us were single, and I'd get a call three o'clock in the morning, and he'd say to me, you know, I think those screws on the inside should be CAD-plated rather than copper-plated. I mean, he's very intense, but I have to say everyone would tell you who was a designer of any kind that in their career they did their best work for Steve. He was the world's best client because he cared so much. I mean, most of the time you're delivering something, a prototype or a product, and everybody's excited about the thing they're doing, but they're not so sensitive to the kind of nuance that we've just been wrestling with. And so it's, it was really fulfilling to have somebody who cared to the level. He might've cared that much about the software and the hardware and the everything else, but certainly with respect to the design and sometimes, you know, it wasn't that fun that he didn't like what you did, but he cared so much and you went back and iterated and did it better. And you and he both knew it was better by the time that we were done with the product and ready for release.

AI assessment note: “You betcha. Both of us were single, and I'd get a call three o'clock”

Q project. And this would have been your life as an engineer working for big companies. But there was a decision you made in the late seventies to go to Stanford, to go back to school and to study product design, which was really, I guess it was a turning point for you. I mean, this was a huge pivotal change in your career trajectory. Why did you make that decision?

A Oh man, that's an understatement. What a change for me. So I'm an engineer, and I don't really know what's going to happen. Am I just going to be in corporate America for the rest of my life and, you know, use my big personality to move up through management? Or, you know, is that what I'm going to do? But a friend in a carpool convinced me to go to Stanford. He said, you are perfect for the Stanford career, and he kept bugging me. My grades weren't that good, so I didn't know that I could get into Stanford. So anyway, he convinced me to apply to Stanford. Um, I have to tell you, since that moment, um, I feel like I'm the luckiest guy on earth. You know, I'm doing, it sounds weird, but I'm doing exactly what I was put on earth to do, which is this brand of design that Stanford taught then and that I continue to teach now around being sensitive to humans and caring about business and caring about technology all at the same time.

AI assessment note: “a friend in a carpool convinced me to go to Stanford.”

Q Yeah. David, how important is conflict to designing a better process, or a better product, or a better culture? Does conflict have to be part of that process?

A Yeah, I'm afraid it does. I mean, it's not, I wouldn't call it conflict, but A meritocracy of critiquing each other, meaning that when I say I think that this idea doesn't work because of this and this and this, the person receiving that critique has to think, oh, he cares about me, that's why he's saying that, rather than to be mad that I'm saying their idea's bad. So there's a way to do constructive critique in In a meritocracy kind of organization, but the conflict has to be there. I mean, if the conflict's not there, you're not working at the edge. We're working at the edge of what's going to be the best possible solution to things, and you just can't come up with that off the top of one person's head. There has to be a bunch of different brains and minds and diverse thinkers working on that, and so By definition, they're going to butt heads. They're going to have some, you know, conflict, but it's more a question of, does the conflict feel like it's on the direction of having the best possible outcome, or is it just a personal thing? You're actually in conflict with the person, not in conflict with their ideas. So as long as it's about idea meritocracy, then, uh, conflict is Helpful, useful, and inevitable.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, I'm afraid it does. I mean, it's not, I wouldn't call it conflict”

Q Yeah. So David, I want to ask you about what, what is a typical, like, challenge or pain point that a company comes to you with and says, hey, we're, we're stuck. Help us fix it. What is that pain point or problem that you find more often than others?

A You know, you give me a chance to talk about my favorites, but one of the best examples, I think, to answer your question is, um, there's a company in Peru called, uh, Intercorp. And Intercorp is run by a really lovely man named Carlos Rodriguez Pasteur, who's very, you know, he's a very successful businessman, and early on in working with him, in order to transform his company, which he asked us to do, that was his ask, was to make him a more innovative company. We built a thing called La Victoria Labs, which was his people and our people together in a facility in Peru, and In there, Carlos and them came up with the notion to make Peru the very best place in Latin America to raise a family. So, if you can get to the point where you've got an innovation engine, and you've got people who care, and you can, you have, um, you have a, a, a driving force, like, I want to make this country the best place in Latin America of a family, then the projects just kind of fall out of that, right? So, The one that, um, I'm most, uh, involved with is the school system. So Peru, sadly, is consistently rated one of the worst educational systems in the world, unfortunately. And so Carlos gave us, and this innovation facility that we built together, staffed by both of us, to design a new school system. And so we designed every aspect of the school system, the curriculum, the physical buildings, th…

AI assessment note: “that was his ask, was to make him a more innovative company.”

Q Yeah. How do you, I mean, you've said that you believe that everybody is creative, and I agree with you on that, that creativity isn't some, like, magical thing that you're touched by the hand of the gods or whatever, that only some people have. I agree with you that everybody can access it, but, but how? How do you believe that people can access creativity?

A It's really interesting that the world has tried to put people in those categories. Ad agencies in particular have like a creative group and an administrative group, you know, which I think does us a disservice. And so what we tend to do, which we try to convince companies to do, this management of companies and ourselves, is to convince people that they have that inherent creativity is what we call guided mastery. If you can take the people in your group and And lead them through a series of small successes. That's the only way we've seen it happen. So that people who doubt their creativity or the team in general has some small successes. You just set it up that way. It's easy to do. And they start to say, oh my God, my team is creative or, oh, I am creative. And you just see such a transformation where they just have more stick-to-itiveness. They work harder. Everything seems to happen. Now, the best thing that can happen, of course, is if senior management buys into this. So we do a lot of leadership transformation projects in order to get people to the point that they'll allow this kind of guided mastery stuff to happen. But it's just the way it's done, is all I can say, is letting them feel what it feels like to be a little bit successful, and then you keep going. And eventually, You know, people get to the point where they think of themselves creative, and then they build…

AI assessment note: “what we call guided mastery. If you can take the people... lead them through a series of small successes”

Q ask you about the process of how you kind of solved Problems for clients. So you have a client, and they come to you and they say, we want to design a new, let's say, traveler coffee mug. Help us understand how you would organize the teams to tackle that problem. You would assign what, like five people or 10 people on that project, a project manager, and then what?

A Yeah, so at the beginning of a project, you have to kind of understand the roles that are going to be played. I mean, we design alongside of the client and alongside of the potential user. It's not like IDEO comes up with a big idea and then kind of jams it down your throat or expects that it's going to be the right thing the first time. So we work with the internal people, the manufacturing people, but the team is made up of people that are going to Make the whole thing tangible. The people who can build the prototypes, the people who can take it to manufacture, the people who can be really insightful about showing ideas for the prototype to many different people and many different kinds of people, and from that can glean what's meaningful to them. Like, in the start, I don't want to put my two cents on it. What's the most important thing? Maybe keeping the thing warm is the most important thing in a coffee mug, Fit somewhere. Or maybe that I can rinse it out and use it for something else later in the day. Or, you know, I got no idea what's going to be the big idea that we're going to come up with. And so you need a diverse team of people who can both get to the place of a real innovation and the people who can make it tangible and manufacturable and real.

AI assessment note: “the team is made up of people that are going to Make the whole thing tangible.”

Q That's the nicest way of saying he was a pain in the ass, which you just said. It was the nicest way of saying that. How, how did he know he was right? This is interesting, because I, you are a designer, you would study design, you would go on to design this mouse with him. How did he know when he was right, and when you were right?

A He was a pain in the ass, yes, but I mean, he was an exceptional human, uh, and he had a sixth sense of, What people really wanted. So he would do things like, you know, we don't need a disc drive in this product, or we don't need a fan in this product, and he got those from really understanding people, and we didn't have to do as much, uh, work at, uh, digging deep because Steve had a sense of it, and he turned out to be right so often that we were more than willing to follow him, but in 2007, the iPhone was announced, and, um, I had cancer. I had throat cancer at the time, and I was home.

AI assessment note: “he had a sixth sense of, What people really wanted”

Q all kinds of, you know, just levels and layers of processes, but you've got a leader, and they really want to cut through that. Um, it strikes me that part of that is, People need permission to fail. So how do you help companies develop a culture where they do allow people to spend a lot of time on something that may not actually ever see the light of day?

A You're absolutely right. That's a real insight in what's going on in our lives every day as we try to engage with companies. And the real answer is that you just have to have cultural change. And our way of doing that is to first try to get as much leadership buy-in as possible, but then just start doing tangible things. But you have to have a place where people feel like when they walk across the threshold, they can act differently. So how do you make it feel like you're allowed to be a little different? And so these, the kind of projects, these strategy projects, or whatever you want to call them, you allow people to, you know, experiment with those, and you end up with some kind of prototype, whether it's a service or a, or a system, and it's just, you Intoxicating on some level that this thing could exist in the world that, you know, it makes you feel positive about the future when you see somebody, uh, paint that picture in a certain way, and so we win people over by making them excited about the future with our ideas, and then they want to be a part of the team, and pretty soon people say, oh, how did that group do that so fast? I want to be a part of that group.

AI assessment note: “our way of doing that is to first try to get as much leadership buy-in”