Matt and Julio – Episode 3: David
Kelley, Founder of IDEO
Welcome to iinovate, a podcast about innovation and
entrepreneurship with Julio Vasconcellos and Matt Wyndowe.
Hello everybody and welcome to our third episode. Once again, thanks to everyone who has
listened and especially to those who sent in comments. In this episode, we are thrilled to feature
David Kelley. David founded the company
that later become IDEO. IDEO is a design
company that has developed an almost cult-like following, and for some good
reason. They have designed such products
as Apple’s first mouse, the first laptop computer, the Palm V, the Leap Chair,
Eli Lily’s first insulin pen, and even the world’s first no-squeeze standup
toothpaste tube. IDEO has been heralded
as one of the world’s most innovative companies. Their client list includes Hewlett Packard,
AT&T, Vodafone, the BBC, Samsung and NASA.
David himself has won numerous design and teaching awards, and he is one
of the driving forces behind Stanford’s new design school, the d. school. I hope you enjoy listening to the interview
as much as we did recording. The
transcript will be up soon at iinovatecast.com, where you can also leave
comments. Thanks for listening.
Matt: We’re here at
David: Thanks, I’m glad to be here at
Matt: David,
you once said that IDEO isn’t an expert at designing toothpaste tubes, cars, or
medical devices, but you’re experts in the process of design. Can you speak a little bit about the design
process and what it entails?
David: Yeah, so as a design
consultancy, we run into companies where the people inside of the company have
devoted their life to being an expert in their subject, whether it’s toothpaste
or bicycles or nuclear reactors or the space shuttle, right? So they have the kind of depth in their
area. But design by its nature, is this
kind of broadening thing, this breadth kind of thing. How do you look at the problem in a different
way, which will come up with different answers than the expert, okay? So, design process is a really way of going
into a place where there are a lot of experts and still being able to extract
innovative ideas, right? And it is
surprising that this is true, but it is true that that’s possible. Like I always say a fish doesn’t know he’s
wet. Our process is to go in and try to
understand the people that you’re designing for. We call it user centre designer. Empathy for people. We try and look for a latent need, a need that’s
not been expressed in some way.
Matt: So David let’s say you’ve got a new project which is
design a cell phone for, let’s say Julio over here, and you have three minutes
to do it. How would you go through that
process for that specific task?
David: Well, what you do is you try to
understand what’s really important to him.
Watch him use his existing cell phone, look when he has trouble, you
know, when really he’s frustrated, listen when he’s saying profanities, that
would be good. Look when he’s having a
really good time; look when he’s smiling.
And then try to design that moment or that experience to be better. You first find out what he cares about; I
mean, the analogy that I recently worked on is look at gas stations. You watch somebody, and if you ask somebody,
“Do you have any trouble pumping gas at the local gas?” they say no, no
problem. Then you watch them,
right? First they come up, they have
trouble getting the car close enough to the thing, to the pump, I mean, and
then cause it’s not clear, how long is it?
And then, my latest one is, they just changed where you have to enter
the zip code, and I saw a lot of people leave without getting gas; they were
too embarrassed to go inside because it says enter zip code, but it doesn’t say
enter zip code and then enter key. So,
they put in their zip code, mine, 94301, and then they wait and nothing
happens. You look for those things. Although people can’t tell ya, he’s not going
to tell me what he really values in cell phones, right? But you pretty soon can figure it out you
know, and then you have to, from a business point of view, you have to, you
have a raving, I can make a raving fan, you know, of Julio, but I can’t, I
don’t know if that’s a big enough market.
From a business point of view, you’ve got to decide, okay, I mean, I can
make a raving fan of one person, that’s not a business right? But you do multiple people, and pretty soon
you figure out what works for a large enough market to make him a raving
fan. Here’s my take. I think if I could, you asked me, I’ve talked
more than three minutes but, in three minutes I’d find some moment that made
him very excited, I can make one moment.
You know, it doesn’t have to be, you don’t have to do everything well if
you design this one moment that’s really wonderful, really cathartic. So, if you had to do it fast, I’d look for
that one moment that was gonna really make, other than the individual you were
trying to please, you know, excited.
Matt: You
mentioned before prototypes. How would prototyping
work into that?
David: Well prototypes is the, you
know, the expression ‘A picture is worth a thousand words.’ I think a prototype is worth about, you know,
a million words. If I make a videotape
of what the future’s going to be like, when my idea, my idea for the d. school
or my idea for a better night’s stay at a hotel, or my idea for pumping gas in
a better way. If I show you that
prototype in some way, if I can quickly show you what I have in mind, you’ll
help me. And the prototype is really
based on this kind of notion that humans are very good at telling you what’s
wrong with your ideas, so if you put your idea out there quickly, earlier. One of my buddies always says never go to a
meeting without a prototype, and he always wins. You think about a business situation where
everybody comes into the room and they’re sitting around, and they’ve got their
yellow pad and a pencil, and one guy brings a prototype of what they are going
to talk about… who wins? I mean, who’s
the centre of that meeting? Who gets the
best feedback for that idea right?
Compared to the person who is telling you their idea, or even showing
you or drawing you a picture of it. The
person with the prototype gets all this rich amount of feedback. So the prototyping is really a way of getting
the iterative nature of this design going, so somebody will tell you, and then
you build another prototype, and build another prototype. So, it’s the notion that you can’t have all
the ideas yourself. If you build a
prototype, other people will help you.
Julio: You
graduated from Carnegie Melon then went to work at Boeing and then eventually
went to launch and grow one of the most innovative and influential companies in
the world. How did this transition
happen from big business to entrepreneurship?
David: I think you will see most people
who are manic like me, you can trace it back to, you know, they had some like
bad experience in their past and they’re trying to make up for it for the rest
of their life, you know, like, some bully kicked sand in their face and now
they’re Arnold Schwarzenegger’s body. I
mean, I think, a couple of things happened to me. One was, I went to a pure analytical program
– I was an electrical engineer at Carnegie Melon, and I didn’t do very
well. I felt like, you know, we all feel
like we’re special, but I felt that I was more special, and I was average or
below average, so I had to find something that I was put on Earth to do. I knew it wasn’t electrical engineering,
well, at least I hoped it wasn’t electrical engineering cause I was just going
to be like, an electrical engineer that worked through the week in order to get
to the weekend and water ski or whatever you do, right? I could feel that was where I was going – I
just felt like I had something more important to do than that. That was one of the things, and so I was kind
of, I was even teased by the professors some ways because I just didn’t, I
wasn’t a good fit for that program. And
then when I got to Boeing, and later National Treasure and the big company, I
really didn’t do well with, every relationship I have is basically a personal
relationship, I don’t really have any business relationships, I only have
personal relationships. And so, when I
got to Boeing, it was like I had a bunch of business relationships all of a
sudden. There were people I didn’t care
about, I mean, everyday I was working with a bunch of people I didn’t, I
wouldn’t have chosen to be with. You
know, like, I kind of vowed, I could see that I didn’t have to start a design
company, but I had started a company where I was with my friends every
day. And I think I kind of didn’t grow
up. As a college kid, you’re with your
buddies all the time, you know, by definition, kind of. And I got to work and it wasn’t like that, so
I wanted to replicate the working with friends kind of feeling, so IDEO was
really started because – unhappy, not kind of, you know, work environment where
I just loved being with the people. And
so I had to start that on my own.
Matt: Did
you have any big failures along the way?
David: Oh yeah, tons of failures.
Certainly product failures. We
had very few kind of organizational, your kind of organizational behavior kind
of problems, except that in a very friendly place, how do you get rid of
somebody who’s not performing? I mean,
in a friends-based system, how do you tell one of your friends that they got
another job? And we failed at that. I mean, so they stayed a lot longer than
would have been efficient to, but see, if I’m not a public company and growth
is not a go, I’m just trying to have a good time – that was okay in our
culture. As far as products, we had tons
of failures. I mean, like one of the
things that’s really nice about being in Silicon Valley is a failure is like a
badge of honor, I mean, like, you talk about failures all the time and people
hire you. We said, look how much
learning this guy had, look how bad he failed here, I bet you he’s really good
now. Which is the kind of, I don’t think
all cultures have that kind of – but we do.
And so as many product failures, in fact, I love, you know, I tell the
story of Monster Shoes which is a failure, and I even started a phone, the
Enorme Phone Company, which just failed miserably, and you know, it’s like, and
they’re actually better stories than some of the successes.
Matt: For
an entrepreneur building a business, how would you advise them to structure
their organization to encourage creativity and innovation?
David: Umm, well you know, there’s the conventional stuff and having it be flat
and so forth, but the main thing is, the main thing is more subjective than I
think is, which is if you want to be innovative you gotta use the full power of
all the minds in the group. In a group
where the boss talks all the time, or in a higher operation where, like people
suck up to the boss or the boss’s ideas are implemented more than the
receptionist’s ideas, there’s a problem there.
If you want to use everybody’s, all the creativity of the whole place,
and so getting to, you can measure this by the way, if you go and do an
innovation audit, you can just keep track in meetings of who talks the
most. And in an innovative culture,
everybody feels able to talk and will talk a lot. In a non-innovative culture, the boss talks
the whole time. The offices are
particularly bad, about status, you know, like who has the big office in the
corner. I suggest if you were a business
owner, take the crummiest office in the place, then you’ll never have to deal
with that. If somebody comes in says
they don’t like their office, say “will you trade with me?”
Matt: How
important is workplace design in fostering creativity?
David: Technically, an officer of the largest furniture company in the U.S.,
Steelcase, so you know, I have a bias to this, but I think it’s more important
that we take into account, I mean, Tom Peters, in one article he had written
about us, said, I could tell about IDEO in the first five seconds I was in
there that this was an innovative place.
And I think we as humans actually can tell whether a place is
innovative. Are the right things being
encouraged? You know, like brass columns
and prissy furniture that you’re not allowed to sit on is probably not a
conducive innovation, and high status for the people who have big offices is
probably not, and anything that says that this place is precious and there are
a lot of rules to follow, and the person in charge is probably watching you,
you know, to see if you are following the rules, is probably not an innovative
place. So I think you can tell
that. Immediately you go into somebody’s
house, and they you know, like, they have a living room where you’re not
allowed to go in except when company’s there, that’s probably not a very
innovative group whereas, you know… Like in our belief, you come into the d.
school, anybody, I mean, you go in and start moving the furniture. You, anybody can go in and
start moving the furniture. That says
that your ideas can be heard by that group.
I dare you to go to somebody’s house or somebody’s company and start
moving the furniture around, in their office, right? Not going to work. But, in d. school you can because that scene
is a creative act; so I’d say that the only thing I can say about that is that
I believe that space matters a lot and it should be considered a creative –
everything should be done to the hilt.
Matt: For
our listeners out there, in David’s office here we have a giant pair of
scissors on the wall, a couple of white boards on the wall and one on the floor
there, and what is that – Fantastic 4 running shoes?
David: Yeah that’s one of my favorite brands, it’s called the Bathing Ape –
it’s a Japanese guy who makes tennis shoes.
They’re very weird wear. In the
buying experience, you have to kind of wait in line outside and there’s a
bouncer and he only lets like one person in at a time and he’s built this whole
thing around this brand, which is really cool.
Julio: One
thing that we’ve been trying to do with our podcasts is ask the prior
interviewee to ask a question for the next one we have. So last week we interviewed Mark Leslie who
was a founder of Veritas software and he asked you, “How do you
institutionalize creativity?”
David: It’s pretty simple, you empower the people. Everybody’s creative, I mean that, like, so I
think the empowering people to think that they are creative, you think about
the d. school, we’re not actually making you more creative, we’re just, kind
of, raising your aptitude and your confidence around your ability to create
right? And so I think that it is all
cultural. The problem is it’s been
trained out. I think it’s inherently
inhuman, there’s a guide book called, “Orbiting the Great Hairball” I
think it was called. Anyways, he goes
into kindergarten classes and says how many people are artists? In fact, how many people are creative? They say everybody raises their hand. Everybody in kindergarten does and they’re
proud of it and they’re smiling, and they’re raising their arm and “Me, me, I’m
creative, I’m an artist!” And he goes
each year, and by the fourth grade, there’s one girl in the back raising saying
she’s an artist and everybody else is kind of looking at the floor embarrassed,
in an embarrassed way. Well, that’s
really what’s going on right, is, you just got to unlock that and just got to
give them permission and confidence, and not presume. You’re starting to get ideas from places that
people would before wouldn’t have ever come up with it. So it’s kind of a, I hate to be sounding so
Pollyanna positive, but I do think that you build a culture where others know
that it’s, that instead of saying things negative, you, every time you think of
something negative, you figure out how to improve, and take that insight that
there was something wrong with, that you think was negative, and take that
insight and think of that as an insight rather than stating that out loud and
building on that, and come out with a better idea based on your insight about
what was wrong with the other guy’s idea, and saying the positive solution to
what was wrong with it. That kind of
culture just keeps making things happen in a very innovative way. It’s a cultural change that’s no so
easy. That’s why it’s actually easier to
start it from scratch than it is to change an existing negative culture to a
positive culture.
Matt: David
you mentioned how difficult it is to fire somebody if the choice was
incorrect. When you’re making hiring
decisions, how do you make sure you’re hiring the right people?
David: My solution to that problem is
have a bunch of people buy in and take ownership and that thing. So if I can get ten people at IDEO, we do a
lot of taking people out to lunch and it’s a pretty tortuous process, though
it’s friendly, just a lot of people a lot of time. No, I’ve found that if there’s ten people in
a company or a 500-person company and there’s ten people that have a stake, and
you said, “Look, I think this guy’s gonna fit,” this person’s going to fit,
then those ten people will make that person successful, or they’ll weed him out
pretty fast if they’re not going to. So
I think it’s ownership of the other people, kind of bottoms up grass roots kind
of thing, rather than the boss picks this person and they live or die, and
they’re the boss’s experiment, and so everybody else is kind of like, trying to
prove their boss wrong or you know, something like that. Whereas if it’s kind of bottoms up and there
are ten people in there, of their peers, that have kind of put their, you get
it set up so that they’re on the line for whether that person is successful,
they’ll make them successful. So you’ve
got the whole organization in fact making them successful rather than the whole
organization trying to prove the boss wrong, that this person isn’t a good
fit. So, it’s again, getting everybody.
Julio: So
for small business owners out there, how would you as a small business owner,
encourage creativity in a small company?
David: You know, this isn’t going to sound like it’s great business advice
but, my point of view about this stuff is for small businesses, figure out how
to enjoy the process. Like, enjoy every
day. You know like, I’m a big Italian
fan. You go to
Julio: David
thanks for being on the podcast. It’s been a pleasure.
David: Thank you guys, it was fun.