I really love management and organizational theories. I spend a fair amount of my time reading books on this subjects (Usually 2 or 3 at a time).
One cannot love those subjects without reading the materials and concepts of the biggest theoretician of them all – the late Peter Drucker.
Currently, I am reading his book “The Effective Executive” and I am enjoying every moment. While reading the book I have bumped into a very interesting idea of his concerning the complexity of organizations. It did remind me of the 37signals model.
And it goes like this (taken from page 14 on the book):
The fewer people, the smaller, the less activity inside, the more nearly perfect is the organization.
And it really works well with Seth Godin’s “Small is the new big” and Tom Peters’ idea of the Professional Service Firm (PSF).
The only difference is that Drucker wrote about this in 1967. 1-9-6-7. That’s right, 40 years ago. This man knew what he was talking about.
There is a huge buzz around Zappos recently. I had some questions on my mind regarding the great culture of that company (which is clearly it’s competitive advantage). The main thing was whether this culture was born in lengthy strategy meetings or was it more of an evolution of the company.
ATMs have been here for a long time now. So it’s nice to see how Wells Fargo has made an effort to innovate and change the traditional interaction of those machines. They have hired a great design agency, Pentagram, and the results are sweet – a great and clear user experience. The banking and financial industry is a complicated market and we usually see how users fail to understand how things work.
By crafting this new experience with the ATMs, at least one bank/user interaction is solved.
Although a couple of months old, I thought it would be interesting to mention the Teehan+Lax’s UX fund experiment. On November 1st 2006, they have invested $50K in UX centered companies like Nike, Progressive, Apple, Netflix, Jetblue and more. They wanted to compare the stock performance of those companies with the general market performance.
The results are stunning. Those stocks gained 33% during a single year and have beaten the general market performance.
So, the consulting and accounting firm Deloitte has published it’s Technology Predictions report for the year of 2007. There are some fresh point of views in the report, and also some points shouldn’t have made it (they could fit better in the 2005 report…), but from my point of view the most interesting part in the report is concerning user interface.
The second chapter’s title is “Re-Inventing the User Interface”, and I quote:
In 2007, technology companies will have to make concerted efforts to reduce product complexity. Many will focus on redesigning the user interface, using both existing technologies and newer solutions, from haptics to artificial intelligence. Companies able to minimise product complexity may achieve greater success than competitors with superior, but relatively inaccessible, technology.
A consulting firm understanding the power of user interface. Music to my ears…
