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Showing posts from December, 2005

Visualizing Complexity

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Humans have a number of ways of coping with complexity: We pretend it doesn't exist, and are surprised when our simple "cause and effect" worldview doesn't work. We dissect and fragment it. The bits soon take on a life of their own, often creating comforting rituals bereft of context and initial purpose. Occassionally, someone helps us re-synthesize and "get the big picture" once again. In striving to increase my ability as a "complexity visualization" agent, I have experimented with a variety of mediums, and watched how others have successfully transformed information. A company that has aptly demonstrated this achievement is Xplane . On their web site, they show how fragmented, prolific content can be transformed into powerful, information-intense visuals. Eduarde Tufte, the data visualization guru, also has produced some innovative work in visualizing complexity. On his web site , he demonstrates how sparklines (intense, word-sized, si

What's in a Name?

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Choosing creative, meaningful and available business names is not a task for the faint of heart. In my recent endeavours, I found the following tools to be very helpful: Marcia Yudkin has assembled a useful process that, although does not do the work for you, is rife with links to useful tools. Your best friends in this process are a thesaurus, homonym and cliche references, rhyming dictionaries, and various name databases. To check for domain availability, try out these web sites: http://www.internic.net/index.html http://www.makewords.com/default.aspx?src=business Good luck!

Purpose - The Heart of Design

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I have had the great privilege of participating in the rediscovery of key design principles through the recent renaissance led by the likes of Alan Cooper ( The Inmates Are Running the Asylum) and the folks at IDEO . Using a fresh emphasis on observation and the capture of customer behavior and goals, they have successfully realigned our methodologies of how to sustain success in this overengineered culture. The questions, "Why are we building this?" and, "How can we make this more compelling?" have gone far towards improving our existing offerings. More importantly, they have helped us connect with the core purpose of our products and services, a critical conduit to the value opportunities in an increasingly complex world. In addition to rejuvenating our production value, the same principles can also be applied to the organization as a whole. When business leaders help their teams effectively connect with their shared core purpose, it creates a significant synergy