Blog Amphibious
By Adam Richardson - August 18, 2011
Editor's Note: frog Senior Strategist Tanya Khakbaz authored this as a continuation to an earlier post. In her last post, she described how she entered the design industry as an MBA, having been exposed to the fanfare and excitement of design thinking that is dominant in business schools today. As a strategist working on teams with designers, Tanya has learned several lessons about what it takes to make the business-design partnership work, which she continues to share in this post.
PROBLEM-SOLVING: Top-down thinking has its limits
As a former management consultant, I was conditioned to think “top-down.” We generated hypotheses at the start of the project that we adjusted depending on the results of the analysis. Though we were creative within a framework, we relied heavily on these frameworks to ensure that we were thinking about the problem in a systematic and exhaustive way.
Blog Amphibious
By Adam Richardson - August 16, 2011
Editor's Note: frog Senior Strategist Tanya Khakbaz authored this post to share her own experience transitioning from being an MBA to life in the trenches at an innovation firm. At frog, Tanya works with design teams to incorporate the business and market perspective into the design process. She has worked on a diverse set of frog projects, from ATM redesign for a large bank to digital media strategy for a media conglomerate. Before joining frog, Tanya worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. She received her MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School and her undergraduate degree in Economics with distinction from Stanford University.
(Part Two here)
PART ONE
When I was an MBA student at Harvard Business School (HBS), there were several companies that drew crowds of over-eager students to their recruiting presentations. Students would claw their way into classrooms to snatch a seat, and after the presentation, stay late to elbow their way to speak to the presenters. These sought-after potential employers were the usual suspects: venture capital and private equity firms, hedge funds, top-tier management consulting companies. However, there was one industry whose companies only started to participate in recruiting, but nonetheless generated Justin Bieber-like fanfare: design consulting.
Blog Amphibious
By Adam Richardson - March 8, 2011
We recently hosted at frog a group of mid-career executives who are in the Global Executive MBA program at the IESE Business School in Barcelona. We have done this collaboration for several years now, and it's enlightening to see how the students are facing an ever-changing set of innovation challenges. Given the diversity of countries and industries (everything from energy to telecom, government to nonprofit) and company sizes (multinationals to startups) there are some striking commonalities that emerge. See if these feel familiar, and consider if they are trending up or down for your business:
Blog Amphibious
By Adam Richardson - January 19, 2011
Here's a company I can be pretty sure you've never heard of: Grace Manufacturing. I'd never heard of it either until this New York Times profile, though I've seen and used its products — "microplanes" for shaving cloud-like piles of parmesan, truffles, and other high-end ingredients. Microplanes for kitchens now make up 65% of the company's revenue, yet it was a product category completely different from what Grace started out doing, and only got into reluctantly. It's a fascinating example of questioning assumptions about your business domain when under pressure, staying alert to customer needs, and being open to opportunities as they appear.
Blog Amphibious
By Adam Richardson - December 2, 2010
Blog Amphibious
By Adam Richardson - September 23, 2010
I have recently started blogging for Harvard Business Review which is an exciting forum to be part of, and certainly I’m humbled to be in such esteemed company as John Hagel, Roger Martin, Michael Schrage, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, and many others. The first installment looked at the benefits from not over-determining a product in an early-stage category, using the iPad as an example, and the second at the downsides of using skunk works to boost innovation.
Blog Amphibious
By Adam Richardson - July 8, 2010
The common wisdom for starts-up looking to take on entrenched competitors is to look at what the competitors are doing and offer a different - but relevant - value proposition to customers. The best-selling book Blue Ocean Strategy which came out a few years ago gives a clear way of thinking about and visualizing your unique value, the "strategy canvas". Unfortunately it's not always as simple as just "thinking differently". The struggling upstart airline Virgin America is a case in point.
Blog Amphibious
By Adam Richardson - February 19, 2010
We recently hosted one of a series of workshops that we do at frog for IESE, the highly-regarded business school in Barcelona, and it was interesting to see that several challenges emerged as common for the participating companies.
