November 19, 2013
By Tim Brown and Jane Fulton Suri There’s an entire industry built around how to be a better leader and build strong, dynamic teams. But for the last few years, my colleague and dear friend Jane Fulton Suri and I have been looking to the earth and seas and sky for inspiration. A Partner, Chief Cre...
October 10, 2013
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...
July 30, 2013
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...
May 21, 2013
Here’s the commencement speech I gave at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Information in 2010. It’s been adapted a bit for length, but my advice to you is the same: start designing your life. I am a designer and I was trained at an educational institution very different from this. I was trained to ...
April 18, 2013
One of my all time favorite design films is Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames. Apart from being beautiful and technically ingenious, it is a wonderful reminder of one of the most important principles in design—reframing the question. Often the quickest route to new insight is to take a step bac...
March 27, 2013
Identity is an interesting thing. On the one hand we are responsible for our own identity and can be intentional about it. On the other hand it is shaped by the perceptions of others. For individuals or corporations, the challenge of re-designing identity is one of evolution rather than revolution. ...
March 8, 2013
How might we improve the way citizens and governments interact? This is the question posed by the current Knight News Challenge, a media innovation contest open to participants anywhere in the world. Winners receive a share of $5 million in funding from the Knight Foundation and feedback from a coll...
February 7, 2013
It was good to see a strong focus on education at Davos this year. One session at the Annual Meeting that I particularly enjoyed discussed the addition of creative and artistic education to the traditional STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) agenda. John Maeda, Carol Becker, Justine Cas...
February 5, 2013
I recently returned from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The overall sentiment there was one of cautious optimism. While there is a long list of major problems to be tackled, the immediate prospects for the global economy seem reasonably good and there is a sense that most economies ...
December 6, 2012
Recently I posted one design thinking tip from Change By Design: Once a Day, Deeply Observe the Ordinary. Here's another: Don't Ask "What?" Ask "Why?" Instead of accepting a given constraint, ask whether this is the right problem to be solving. Every parent knows how infuriating 5-year-olds can be w...