Kiwi business leaders take a leaf out of the Valley’s book
By Sarah Robson,
San Francisco is known for its golden bridges, crooked streets and island prisons. It’s also known as a hotbed of design and tech innovation, which is why 25 Kiwi business leaders hit the city for a week in November, thanks to NZTE’s Better by Design programme.
It was an intense week of structured learning sessions, along with visits to 12 cutting-edge companies including Facebook, Apple and Google. The main focus was on how to design the innovation process better – for both employees and clients.
Phillip Mills
Les Mills International chief executive Phillip Mills says the trip was a wonderful opportunity to visit a lot of top companies.
But the key thing he took away was around the innovation management process, something that is driven by, and focused on, the customer.
Mills says the Stanford University d.school has come up with a five-step process to guide innovation: empathise, define, ideate, prototype and test.
What’s important is moving through the the ideation and prototyping stages quickly and testing innovations in the marketplace.
“Don’t spend months and months and months designing a new customer experience and getting everything pinned on that before you finally do your grand release,” Mills says.
“You learn a whole bunch more when you take it to market in a pilot situation.”
Mills says that at many of the top companies they visited, the office interiors were dominated by hundred of metres of whiteboard space, rather that inspiring décor.
“You don’t keep your stuff secret, locked up in your computer,” he says.
What you do instead is put your ideas up on the wall, so people armed with pens and post-it notes can give their input. It’s about opening up and encouraging the creative process – and living in the customer space.
Deloitte accounting and advisory partner Matt McKendry took away something a little different.
“These high growth companies, they focus as much on the employee experience as the customer experience.”
He says that while everyone is getting excited about how products and services impact on the human side of the customer, “when you reflect on that there’s a whole bunch of other humans in your business and they’re called your employees”.
“The rationale for that, clearly, is that if you’ve got really engaged people who love the employee experience, they’re going to personify the brand externally.”
Ultimately, it’s the employees who deliver the brand experience to the customers.
McKendry says they’ve started implementing some of what was learned in San Francisco at Deloitte already. The innovation process has been refreshed to encourage more hands-on involvement and there’s a lot more emphasis on empathy and emotion.
“I’ve come back a bit of a people person.”
Comments
Nick Jones
So they learnt design 101…
Esther Goh
We all have to start somewhere…
Martin S
It is amazing that NZTE still feel the need to take businesses to San Francisco to introduce these basic approaches, after eight years of claiming to build design capability in NZ.
Andrew
Nice to hear the “oh so superior” comments from the design gods above ….. marvellous……
Peter Thomson
I was cynical about CEO tours in general but a number of NZ business leaders went on them in the 1980s, to learn manufacturing techniques from Japan. The key part wasn't that you can't get the information in NZ, but that being away forces you to focus intensely and see more openly. Those tours were hugely impactful and the CEOs came back and made real changes inside their businesses. Time will as to the impact of the current Design Thinking focused tours but so far they seem to be working.
James Tait
It makes me laugh that you have a partner from an accounting firm harping on about employees and attending a CEO tour.
Its just another way for these guys to network and leech on to some poor hard working entrepreneur who has risked (everything) and dazzle him with pretty graphs and try to demonstrate how integrating design into your business will further enhance the growth strategy. The desired outcome is for Deloitte to bill hundreds of hours of fluff to keep the greedy partners happy. These guys don't know what employees are…
Stefan Preston
Surprised how critical most of these posts are. I would have thought that the design community would be very positive about CEO's being exposed to design thinking methodology as it applies to organizations and leadership. After all its going to create a lot of opportunities for people with design training to contribute more powerfully.
As a participant on the tour and a serial NZ- based entrepreneur and CEO I can attest to the massive gulf between the companies we saw and 99% of NZ companies. For the participants its probably one of the most transformational experiences of our professional lives.
We could do with more curiosity and less judgement - aka good design.
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