I saw Dan Pink Speak at IDEO recently. It was quite a good talk and clear he is enamored with both IDEO and the idea of design's potential as anyone in the business press. It was mostly taken from his book, I understand, so if the ideas are interesting I recommend you check it out. These notes are really notes, and were taken on my treo, however, so let me know if anything is particularly obtuse.

He begun with some good advice on speaking...

Good speech has
brevity
levity
repetition

then spoke on the fact that right brain thinking is increasingly important to competitive survivial, but that most left brain thinkers resist it. there for arguments for this shift had to be explained in a left-brain fashion. (if you dont' know it, right brain is considered verbal, synthetic, creative, left-brain analytical, mathmatical)

three ways to explain rise of right brain.
Abundance (arms race of design toilet brush. How to sell? features no longer matter) (demoncratized pursuit of meaning and joy. Fogel)
Asia (outsourcing - left brain work goes first)
Automation (john henry, kasparov, completecase.com, uslegalforms.com, yourdiagonosis.com- or indian cpa, turbo tax)
change
agricultural age to industrial age to info age to conceptual age
frombacks to left to right brain

Threee questions you must ask if you are in business today:

1. can some overseas do it cheaper?
   
2. can computer do it faster?
   
3. is what your selling in demand in the age of abundance?

It's not just function but design

robert lutz... "I see us in the art business. Art, entertainment, and mobile sculpture, which, coincidentally, also happens to provide transportation."
roger martin.."Businesspeople don't just need to understand designers better -- they need to become designers."
bizweek... Mba applicants are mia.

Butterfly ballot is sputnik-- the thing that tells us we are in danger because we cannot desing, just like spunik told us we were in danger because we didn't know math and science. A president was elected with bad design.

For a business to suceed, you need

• not just argument but also story
  story as product differentiator
  example: the wine, big tatoo red (also target, apple, wholefoods... All stuff at wf has a backstory)

• not just focus but symphony
  big picture thinking, wholistic thinking. Selfmade millioners are 4 times more likely to be dyslexic
  
• not just logic but empathy
  
• not just seriousness but play
  "got game" failure is required for success
  laughter clubs
  
• not just accumulation but meaning
  what matters with pay? Internal and external equity. after that, money is not a motivator. meaning is.

design symphony story play empathy meaning

www.danpink.com

Those are some really great notes. Do you happen to know of anyone else that attended and uploaded notes?

Dan Pink is an interesting guy, and I am the co-founder of a blog on the field between design and innovation. Not just from an aesthic point of view, but also looking at design as a process.

I typed "lecity" into Dictionary.com and it asked:
"Did you mean levity?"

Well? Did you?

Ok... the Robert Fogel who wrote The escape from hunger and premature death?

I've been all hip onto the idea of story-telling and tool-making as fundamental human pursuits (I'll send you link to essay-atic rambling). Does he go into the idea of stories, or the importance of stories in the book?

levity, and no he doesn't-- he seems very focused on design at least at the moment. do check out his blog at www.danpink.com

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