“We Had to Own the Mistakes” from HBR

By the time Howard Schultz stepped down as chief executive of Starbucks, in 2000, the coffee chain was one of the world’s most recognizable brands—and on a steady trajectory of growth. Eight years later Starbucks was suffering from a rough economy and its own strategic missteps, and Schultz felt compelled to return to the CEO seat. His previous tenure had seen promising growth, but now he faced a challenging mission: to lead a turnaround of the company he had built

via The HBR Interview: “We Had to Own the Mistakes” – Harvard Business Review.

Interesting reflections from Howard Schultz… Words to the effect that most of their first experiments just worked, and saw little competition at first. As competition stiffened Starbuck’s needed to face up to their own ‘hubris’ – in order to overcome it.

But I wore the juice!

Even if you are just the most honest, impartial person that you could be, you would still have a problem — namely, when your knowledge or expertise is imperfect, you really don’t know it.  Left to your own devices, you just don’t know it.   We’re not very good at knowing what we don’t know.

via The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is (Part 1) – Opinionator Blog – NYTimes.com.

Errol Morris writes this lovely series on a topic that is common to those who work in design thinking. Unconscious incompetence.

I have noticed friends referring to this article increasingly in conversation. It promises to make the phrase ‘but i wore the juice’ shorthand for folly in the face of good intentions. This article is plenty interesting, if not laugh out-loud omg that-makes-me-squirm funny. 

So for all would-be innovators, game-changers, change agents, provocateurs and disruptive innovators alike, when asking ‘where does one start any Design project?’ find some ways to address and resolve what you don’t know… about what you don’t know.

Major Newspaper Chain Goes Open Source

…Newspapers have seen a sustained drop in readership, and therefore in revenues, over the last half-decade. The ability to cut cost on something as elemental as production, by dropping expensive proprietary software, is exciting. But so is watching a company in an allegedly change-resistant sector see the light bulb go off over its head…

via Major Newspaper Chain Goes Open Source.

It is hard to know what the future for journalism holds… Paywalls? Or not. But this seems like genuinely interesting development.Interesting to note: 1) a short period of experimentation. 2) a deeper dive after some positive surprises. 

This plus the latest moves from the Guardian, WSJ and Bonnier suggest a rich period of re-design and transformation will alter our very ideas of news validity, and the dominant form-factor of news design.