Cool New Trend in Resumes

Looking for work? Got a resume? This is for you:

Why be boring and staid like everyone else in the pile of resumes? Why not show your uniqueness, creativity and visual thinking design skills in creating a visual resume?

One of my favorite blogs is "Cool Infographics". He's got an awesome set of 18 infographic resumes.... for example, this one

Do I listen to what I say I do?

Anyone who studies behavior knows that what people say is not what they do. More evidence reported in the NY Times shows that what people report listening to isn't what they actually listen to.

Visualizing You.... leveraging the internet to break down your name

This shows 3 iterations of "Wendy Castleman". It is a pretty cool visualization from MIT:

It combines all of the data on the internet related to your name and creates a "digital DNA map". It seems to change every time I do it... and it combines me and at least two other "Wendy Castleman"s out there. Still... it's pretty cool.

Why not solve for everyone?

I consistently get push-back from teams when I encourage them to solve for only a subset of people. I explain to them that if they want to really delight someone, they need to focus. That if you try to solve for everyone, you end up making choices that make it non-optimal for anyone. The experience for customers is like the difference between getting a gift that is absolutely perfect for you ("you know me so well! This is perfect! Wow!") and one that could work for anyone ("oh, how nice").

One of my colleagues just pointed me to a rather old video that I think I can use to help make my case:


What do you think?

Understanding Customer Values

Understanding customer's values is key to getting to delight.

How often do you identify what your customer's values are? How do you use that information when designing solutions for them? If the solutions to customer's problems don't mesh with their view of the world and their values, they won't find the solution delightful. If they do... wow.

Examples of companies that focus on values:

• Harley-Davidson designs everything to support their customer's underlying values of experiencing freedom, adventure and community.
• Boon designs things to support their customer's underlying value of style and whimsy.
• The Body Shop designs solutions to support their customer's underlying values of being sustainable, natural and unique.
• Lego designs things that support their customer's values of play, creativity and community.

The better you are at recognizing a customer's values, the more likely you will be to delight them.

Here is a wonderful video of a small business customer talking about his business. Watch it and try to figure out his values. Then, look at the first of the "comments" on this blog entry for my assessment. How close are you?

Deeper Empathy Through Reflection

One of my passions lately is in understanding how we can get deeper understandings of our customers... if we can establish "Deep Customer Empathy", then we can develop better solutions for them. I'm not alone in my recognition that we need to get deeper. Companies are starting to hire more ethnographers and specialists to help bring those understandings to the company. However, that's not enough. Everyone at the company needs to have the empathy, not just the researcher. Matthew May just wrote about this a couple of days ago. There is a WONDERFUL new book on the topic by Dev Patnaik, called "Wired to Care". Both are well worth reading.

To researchers and designers, this stuff might seem like it is old-hat. However, I've found that even researchers and designers don't necessarily go far enough in their investigations. I think an important step, when studying people who aren't you, is "reflecting" what you have heard and seen and how you are interpreting it. The customer can "course correct" you if you are slightly off.

For example, a team I was recently working with was trying to come up with new ideas for a market they hadn't really focused on before - young adults. I had them do some ethnographic research and some interviews, and when they analyzed the data, they determined that the area where the most opportunity seemed to be was in planning for the "mid-term". This market was great at managing near-term events (things in the next few weeks) and very long-term (retirement), but not really the time in between. The team identified a problem around planning for the time between 4 months to 40 years. I then brought some of the participants from our earlier research in to review the insight. Their reaction was lovely. They absolutely agreed on the problem, but they couldn't agree with the time frame. For this market, they couldn't really comprehend 40 years. They corrected the time-span of the problem to 4 months to 10 years...

This was just one of the things they dug into with the customer. But, it illustrates the importance of clarifying and getting deeper with customers. It isn't enough just to observe customers and understand where they are coming from. Since you are filtering things through your own eyes and experience, you should go the extra step to reflect with the customer to make sure you have it right.

New article on being a better manager... via Design Thinking

There is a lot of talk about Design Thinking lately. What is it? It is applying the methods of "thinking like a designer" to problem solving. And it works so well that very legitimate sources of information in the business world are starting to embrace it.

The latest article on the topic is from MIT Sloan Management Review: How to become a better manager... by thinking like a designer. The article covers a variety of topics, from simplicity to experimentation, from effective team size to communications.

One of my favorite quotes in the article is from Nancy Duarte:

"[Managers] rely heavily on data and information to tell the story and miss the opportunity to create context and meaning." (p. 40-41)

People can interpret things very differently, even when it is concrete data. We tend to filter our understanding and interpretation of the world based on our own perspective, values and assumptions. By creating a context around the information and redefining the meaning of it, you can build a persuasive and compelling story - which can result in a shared vision.