Although memories of my early formal education have started to fade, I vividly recall two distinct types of learning experiences: brainwork and handwork. The vast majority of my time in school was spent listening to lectures, taking exams, writing essays, and so on. On rare occasions, we’d roll up o...

Fraser Doherty's simple recipe for success? Do what you love. Photo courtesy of SuperJam. Living in Silicon Valley, I’m used to being blown away by the technical genius of entrepreneurs and the sheer determination the best of them have to use technology to make the world a better place. Earlier thi...

A little empathy goes a long way in an overcrowded emergency room. You don’t have to be a medical professional to know that affordable healthcare in America is complicated business. The system is so sprawling and intractable, only the biggest and boldest of innovations will make a difference, yet o...

When we’re doing job interviews, the phrase “good cultural fit” gets bandied about a lot—and for good reason. IDEO’s stock in trade is creativity, collaboration, and human-centered innovation. We don’t have discrete departments, rigid job titles, or corner offices. In fact, most corporate trappings...

Brett Myers (center) and his team at State Farm Next Door; A chalkboard calendar of events at Next Door's bustling Chicago café and co-working space “In our experience, everyone is the creative type.” So true. The quote comes from Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us Al...

Moments after this photo was taken, the members of this meeting stood up and sang to me. Ever had a business meeting end with people spontaneously bursting into song? Before last week, neither had I. I’ve been in meetings all around the world—Glasgow, Moscow, New York, Tokyo—and they’ve all conclu...

Churning out homemade pasta for a shared meal in our Chicago studio One of the first things visitors notice when they visit IDEO is the food. It’s everywhere. Some might look at our breakfast spread piled high with bagels, cereal, granola bars, and coffee and think: typical Silicon Valley gimmick p...

No longer the province of the lone practitioner, design has become a broad, collaborative process. Photo courtesy of IDEO Boston. Just 10 years ago, design was considered to be a professional priesthood. The Designer (capital “D”) would be given an assignment—create a more attractive widget, say—th...

LAND HO!: A still from "Embrace Ambiguity," a video by the old salts of IDEO's New York office. The team wrote the script, hand-built the sets, then filmed and edited the clip themselves. Fog is always present at IDEO, and not just at our San Francisco office. It's a metaphor we use for those iffy ...

I’m the CEO of a global company, but I don’t have an MBA. Much of what I know about business I learned from Peter Drucker. I first discovered the Austrian business theorist’s writings on innovation, entrepreneurship, and management in the late 1990s, when I was heading up IDEO’s London studio, and t...