Blog All Dog-eared Pages: The Designful Company by Marty Neumeier
It wasn’t an amazing read, a bit of an “airport book” - some useful stuff in their, but a fairly light and quick read. My notes follow…
Page 40
Fear of failure, aversion to unpredictability, preoccupation with status - these are the prime assassins of innovation. The ruthless elimination of error is one of the givens of the 20th-century management. Yet error should be embraced as a necessary component of the messy, iterative, creative process.
Page 44
In the meantime, we’re seeing the breakdown of a management model so bereft of ideas that it has resorted to “unlocking” wealth through financial manipulation rather than “creating” wealth through designful innovation.
Page 69
Roughly translated, [13th-century philosopher Thomas Aquinas] was saying beauty requires three qualities: integrity, harmony and radiance. INTEGRITY is the quality of standing out clearly from the background. HARMONY is how the parts relate to the whole. RADIANCE refers to the pleasure we feel when we experience it. And the language of beauty, according to Aristotle, is AESTHETICS.
Page 73
Buckminster Fuller once said, “When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” In mathematics, Poincare could judge the quality of a solution solely on its aesthetic elegance.
Page 78
Good design exhibits virtues. What virtues? You know, good old-fashioned virtues like generosity, courage, diligence, honesty, substance, clarity, curiosity, thriftiness, and wit. By contrast, bad design exhibits human vices like selfishness, fear, laziness, deceit, pettiness, confusion, apathy, wastefulness, and stupidity.
Page 87
Starbucks founder Howard Schultz put it this way: “Who wants a dream that’s near-fetched?” If your goal is to out-perform the competition from day one, dream large.
Page 151
What wicked problems exist at your company? How can you turn hairy obstacles into high-status rewards? Who out there looks hungry for a challenge?