|
The Designful Company: How to build a culture of nonstop innovation (Voices That Matter) | 
 enlarge | Author: Marty Neumeier
Publisher: Peachpit Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.99
Buy New: $15.61
You Save: $9.38 (38%)
New (15) Used (1) from $15.61
Rating:  24 reviews
Sales Rank: 6660
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 208
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.8
ISBN: 0321580060
Dewey Decimal Number: 005
EAN: 9780321580061
ASIN: 0321580060
Publication Date: December 26, 2008 (New: Last 30 Days)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New, Perfect Condition, Please allow 4-14 business days for delivery. 100% Money Back Guarantee, Over 1,000,000 customers served.
| |
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
“The complex business problems we face today can’t be solved with the same thinking that created them,” says author Marty Neumeier in this entertaining and original read. Instead, he says, we need to start from a place outside traditional business thinking. In an era of fast-moving markets and leap-frogging innovations, we can no longer “decide” the way forward. Today we have to “design” the way forward?or risk ending up in the fossil layers of business history.
This is the third in the author’s bestselling series of “whiteboard overviews.” In his first, THE BRAND GAP, he addressed the gulf between business strategy and customer experience. In his second, ZAG, he explored the number-one strategy of high-performance brands. In the third, THE DESIGNFUL COMPANY, he shows how design thinking can build a culture of nonstop innovation. “If you wanna innovate,” he says, “you gotta design.”
Excerpts from The Designful Company
(Click images for larger versions) |  |  |  |  |
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 19 more reviews...
 Good book to read on airplane January 6, 2009
Nishant Agarwal (Calabasas, CA USA)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Let me start off by giving my background, so that it gives a perspective.
I am a senior software engineer, mostly doing architect work around these
days.
The book is short, as the author wanted to make it readable on an
airplane trip. Now, let me say that this has worked both for and
against in my opinion. The book is full of glorious tidbits which
could take up an entire semester of design course in MBA or industrial
engineering. But to condense it in one small book, means that the
reader has to be attentive and excercise his mind to understand the
points made by the author. Also I felt that the points were not
really new, but heard before, and there were just too many in the
book. Instead of harping on one common theme of making a designful
company, the reader gets boggled with various ideas thrown at him.
The tone of the book is not academic, like a professor, but like a
consultant who would want to advise you on how to turn around the
design culture of your company and charge a million for that. It
almost feels like a presentation, a huge one at that, given by
a top notch consultants to interested CEOs, COOs etc.
There is a short text summary of the entire book at the end for those
who can't read the entire book. There is a list of top ten "wicked" problems
at the end and suggestions on how to solve them.
Some readers have complained about the font and the binding of the book.
But I would like to point out that most of these were given
advanced reader copies for review, and it is expected that the books
are not in the final production stage. I really dont think the final
production of the book to suffer from quality issue.
Not a bad book for company execs to pass around to their employees
to try ignite a designful culture. And yes, the author's purpose is
served, good book to read on airplane. Some food for thought.
A thought provoking book on innovate or perish January 6, 2009
Mannina Magha (Traveller)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I was recently reading an article on Forbes maganize which talked about 'who would have thought that we would need a fabric softener before downy was introduced by P&G' and talked about P&G's product innovation that happens in cincinnati. The article went into detail of how ebay under the leadership of Meg Whitmanbecame the 'ibm of silicon valley' with all the consultants they hired and every idea had to be in a microsoft ppt and ebay hired McKinsey in 2002 to study if Google was a threat to ebay !
Coincidentally, within a week of reading that article on Forbes, I happened to stumble upon this book and read it and it reiterated on the fact about the design and innovation are key things for any company to survive and thrive in the economy.
The Author starts off with examples and explains how innovation and design can keep a company live and kicking by constantly inventing new products, designs and going into new markets.
I like the statement that companies do not fail because they did something wrong, but because they did not do innovate.
Then the author goes how to make the company design and innovation oriented - eliminating ppts, encouraging & supporting innovation and listening to your employees/partners.
The book has a lot of nice graphics, easy to interpret pages and lots of good thought provoking ideas
 Could use a little oatmeal January 4, 2009
J. Offenbach (noVA)
I must preface this by saying that I hope the binding on this book was weak because it was a copy for review. Personally, however, if I published a book on "Designful"ness, I would design a better quality for the delivery of that information and secure the pages so it could be read without having to look at the tiny page numbers for reorganization. The book is printed on hard white paper, in stark black and white with a little lavender on the cover and a tiny amount of gray on a few images. This book is available online from Peachpit.com, and I would suggest reading it from the website if the physical book construction is not improved for sale. Now to talk a bit about the words and ideas presented.
Had I not promised to review this book, I doubt that I would have read past the first few pages because I am not fond of catchy phrases, the backbone of this book. As a person who uses both sides of my brain, I like to be challenged -- this is what the author talks about at some point, but I felt no challenge from the doctrine presented in, "The Designful Company." Another reviewer commented that he/she felt as though they were attending a seminar on this topic and I must agree, but I received no little goodies on the way out other than a list of recommended readings, albeit some of which sound interesting. Mr. Neumeier of Neutron (what a clever name for his company) drops sayings and companies but they fall flat for me because it really doesn't take me further than when I started reading. Much of this I've already read in The Wall Street Journal or seen on the internet or CNN. At the end of the book, I found a simplified list of his "'isms" which could have been read rather than trudging through the examples of his presentation. I guess I'm just not the audience for Mr. Neumeier's book because I work in a creative position with teams that are ever changing and his approach to designing a new company seems to be geared to a fledgling company comprised of staff employees who still are powered by competition and greed. I was eager to learn what I could apply in working with the few clients of this sort, but I didn't really gain too much other than a couple hours of aging while reading the book and writing the review. Although the author gives advice on limiting PowerPoint presentations to 10 words, he produced one on paper of 194 small and loosely bound pages. Could use a little oatmeal to keep it together and give it some fiber.
motivational book without considering costs January 4, 2009
Chen Sun (Houston, TX United States)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book is poorly written; basically a set of distilled personal opinions on why innovations are important. I frequently consult in marketing innovation implementation, which are difficult, and this primarily-motivation book doesn't really address the cost side of the benefit-cost ratio equation for implementation.
This book feels like notes from a motivational corporate seminar on how to design innovations--more for staff encouragement than understanding for leaders. The new catch-all phrase "Rah, rah, rah--Design!!!, to solve all problems...", so the seminar leader goes.
This catch-all motivational book I find a waste of time first because it redefines the word "design" to apply to nearly every marketing or management function... not just visual design, but also engineering design, customer relationship design, product design, services design, corporate design, employment design, etc.. More accurate terms would be innovation and innovative management.
If the author wants to say a firm should continually innovate and put in the processes for this; OK, it's hard to disagree with this. But what are the tradeoffs? It's easy to write platitudes, but to accurately assess its costs and implement these are far more difficult. Figuring out all the potential costs (human as well) of a change isn't easy; and figuring which of the innumerable potential design processes yields the highest returns is difficult.
I've seen far better books on design processes or management than this. The one thing this book does well is to motivate someone to think about design processes.
 Big Words, Little Utility January 3, 2009
Jeffrey A. Veyera (Matthews, NC United States)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
The author aims to "knock Six Sigma off its perch" but utterly fails to understand what has made the Six Sigma movement successful.
As a quality professional for the past 15 years, I've seen quality fads come and go. Quality Circles, Total Quality Management, yadda yadda yadda---all had good ideas, sound tools, and petered out quickly.
Six Sigma is the most labor and time-intensive of all quality approaches, and yet it is the one which "stuck." How come?
Simple---Six Sigma focused from the outset not just on improving quality, but on linking quality improvement to quantifiable bottom-line results.
We're witnessing the growth of business interest in design, led in part by the Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) methodology's widespread adoption. The author has nothing positive to say about Six Sigma, instead giving lots of happy talk about design which sound very familiar to this quality geek: we must change our culture, we must have top-down buy-in, we must free experts to do what they do best, etc.
What's missing is the how and why.
I'm still waiting for the design revolution book that will make this case.
I highly recommend that anyone attempting to do so first follow carefully the work of information designer Edward Tufte. Not only does he demonstrate how to apply sound principles in the design of visual displays of quantitative information, but he walks his own talk. His books are marvels of the very design principles he advances.
Not so this book, which is not so much designed but compiled as an advertisement for the author's consulting company.
It fails even in this regard, for the nebulous discussion and unclear methodology lead me to believe that this company has chosen to measure customer delight in terms of billable hours.
Just like every other consulting company.
Avoid this waste of time and ink.
|
|
|
SEO and Marketing TipsBETA RELEASE | |
