Business: Culture Change

Shifting trends are forcing technology companies to reimagine their value proposition. IBM has chosen to create disruption through design. In embracing the future, the company is essentially invoking its past. Back in 1956, IBM was the first large company to establish a corporate-wide design program. But this time, the company’s goals are more ambitious.

Recently, we interviewed Karel Vredenburg, Director of IBM Design’s worldwide client program and head of IBM Studios in Canada, who told us, “We’ve put everything into this transformation.” The company is investing more than $100 million in becoming design centered. Read More

If you, like most UX professionals, have worked within organizations that seem to respond to User Experience in much the same way that the human body responds to a virus and want to understand why that happens, you should read Creative Change: Why We Resist It… How We Can Embrace It, by Jennifer Mueller, PhD. If you want to understand why organizations struggle with innovation, you should read this book.

Creative Change is a great book about creativity within organizations that is grounded in solid research. Mueller has been studying creativity for almost twenty years, and her research has revealed that, even though many business leaders lament a lack of creativity and innovation within their organizations, they commonly reject creative, innovative ideas. They tend to be biased against and fail to recognize the value of creative leadership as well, believing that creative leaders lack business acumen. This does not bode well for UX leaders.

Occasionally, among the many books I read, I discover a book whose ideas are so transformative that I feel impelled to share them with UXmatters readers. This is one of those rare books. Read More

Recently, I sat down with the CEO of my company to discuss some topics relating to User Experience. We meet pretty regularly because he is, in general, very interested in getting our customer experience right. Though this was not the focus of our conversation, we talked briefly about the fact that fiefdoms exist in every company, large or small. Some people and groups in every corporation continually seek to create little feudal empires that truly stifle creativity and impede an organization’s ability to move forward.

While our conversation just touched on this topic lightly, it got me thinking about the current state of enterprise UX—where we are in danger of creating fiefdoms. I have previously written about how UX teams are literally in a golden age, finding themselves in unprecedented positions of power and influence within organizations that are finally realizing how critical User Experience is to the success of modern-day products and services. However, the internal actions of our UX teams could easily diminish the positive effects of this golden age. Read More