>> Curtis Wong: Afternoon, my name is Curtis Wong and I’m a principle researcher here at Microsoft
Research. It’s a great pleasure to introduce Bruce Nussbaum here. I think if I had to associate Bruce
with a sort of word tag cloud there would be words like writer, innovation, creativity, inspiration, words
like that. I mean at that, I think they sort of characterize what I think about Bruce when I first met him
actually. Bruce is a former Assistant Editor at Business Week. He’s a Professor of Innovation and Design
at the Parsons School in New York, he also blogs at Fast Company in Harvard Business Review. Then he’s
also the person behind the International Design Excellence Award and The World’s Most Innovative
Company Survey. But I think my favorite thing about him in his bio is that he was in the Peace Corp and
he taught science to third graders in the Philippines. I think that sort of, really sort of tells you a little bit
about who Bruce is. I really am really thrilled to welcome my friend Bruce Nussbaum.
[applause]
>> Bruce Nussbaum: Thank you. It’s significant right that I keep that in my bio. A lot of people ask me
well why do you put that in your bio? That’s the reason. So, is this okay? Well a couple things, I didn’t
know what to wear to talk to you guys and I got a lot of wear a sports jacket, wear a sports jacket with
blue jeans, but wear the kind of blue jeans that cost three hundred dollars, not the kind you wear, you
know Levis. So I decided to wear black jeans because I come from New York and just wanted a signifier
we all wear black in New York. Then I decide to wear this sweater which my wife’s mother made. It’s
one of my precious, most precious possessions. Every Christmas for twenty years she would send a
sweater. Her name is Lucy; she’s from Portland Oregon so I spend a lot of time in Portland. It was a
ritual and it was, in many ways as important as Christmas was to me. It made Christmas and it also
showed me how important, hi, it showed me how important certain rituals are as pathways into
meaning for people and for cultures. So I learned that from Lucy and her collection and I decided to
wear it, so there’s that, here I am.
Just looking around I wasn’t sure, you know there are some companies and there are some industries I
know really well and can put together a presentation that is deeply detailed and insightful. I don’t know
Microsoft all that well, although as you could see here it did change my life and I’ll talk to you about that
a little bit. I know a little bit more about Microsoft ever since I met Bill Buxton a bunch of years ago. Hi
Bill I hope you’re watching. He told me all about everything in life actually if you know Bill. Including
how to make a Cree canoe using tradition Cree instruments in a traditional Cree way and I’ve yet to see
that canoe but I’ve heard a lot about it.
Then I talked with Curtis this morning, or this afternoon for a long time, for the first time and learned a
lot about what’s going on here. It’s fascinating and actually validating because it reinforced a lot of what
I’m going to present. But it’s not represented in the presentation. So what I would like to do and I’m
looking around and most of us here are not twenty-one so we’ve probably been through this a lot, right.
You’ve had a lot of presentations. I’ve certainly been there listening to people so I think the value that
we’re are going to get out of today will probably happen in the engagement in conversation that comes
after the presentation.
So what I’d like to do is start off with a couple of provocations, retinues provocations. Go into my
presentation and then come out of it and have a conversation with you all and see if we can come up
with something interesting and spend an hour together. Is that okay? Okay, so we’ll do that.
So I’ve already told you about my dress. At Parsons, I teach at Parsons which is a marvelous place. It
began as a fashion school and it’s still about a half fashion. I don’t teach in that part of it, I teach in the
School of Design Strategies. But I get a lot of grad students from fashion and I have to say, you know I
spent a lot of years of Business Week covering design innovation. Fashion students are amazing in their
understanding of culture, and meaning, and their work. You know, they have to; in terms of a business
model they produce two collections a year. They put together a project team for each collection. They
have to perform. They have to get on a runway. They have to create and then they also have to
produce. As they’re creating they have to, if they sell their stuff they’re also making it. It is capitalism in
the raw.
So we have this image of sort of fro-fro fashion whereas up close and personal they have a lot to teach
us. As one of my students, I have a lot of British students; she said while we wrap the body, okay, we
wrap the body. I just sort of looked at her said, people are, I can’t do this so I’ll, back to my American,
people are born naked and the first thing that happens to them is that they are wrapped in cloth, you
know. That’s the beginning of fashion. It’s like, wow, so after that I really respect them. That’s all I’m
going to say about fashion.
Okay so let me talk; let me begin with just a series of provocations and things that we will talk about if
you want to talk about them later on. So, number one, provocation. Big data is like cultural
anthropology only less insightful, okay. Multi-disciplinary teams are usually not that creative because
they are too smoothly integrated. What we need today are anti-disciplinary teams. Okay, the high tech
innovation model of Beta testing is inherently wasteful, tragic, nasty, and archaic. You engage with
people way to late in the cycle.
Okay, these are provocations and I’m beginning to see people getting provoked and it’s scaring me.
There is no difference between data driven people and culture driven people. They both seek the same
thing which is meaning.
>>: [inaudible]
[laughter]
>> Bruce Nussbaum: Okay, ha, ha.
[laughter]
And they are both cultures themselves. Okay, Marissa Myers is both right and wrong, okay. The
concept of user experience is dead. A new concept user engagement is born. I only have two more,
three more. Social media is peaking like globalization opening up new opportunities for Microsoft and
for anyone else that wants to seek them. The final one is, it’s not just user needs or wants, or even
delight that’s important it’s deep meaning, deep cultural meaning that’s the key. That’s what’s
important. Okay, those are my provocations.
I’m going to take a little water here and then get into it. So, first off I do want to thank Microsoft for
changing my life and I’m not kidding. I want to do, be a writer ever since I was a kid. At first I wanted to
be an astronaut, okay that’s true but I was told that you couldn’t be an astronaut if you had glasses so
that was out. Then I wanted to be a fireman but I was told I couldn’t be a fireman if I was short, yeah I
was relatively short as a kid. Then I wanted to be a farmer but I was told you couldn’t be a farmer if you
were a New Yorker.
[laughter]
And Jewish, so then I became a writer and that seemed to work really well. But writing has never been
easy for me. It’s actually been very hard for me. It was really hard because I started writing in this age.
I started writing on typewriters. Now typewriters are really hot. I don’t know if they’re hot in Seattle.
They’re really hot in New York now and Brooklyn. You know, they cost three, four, five hundred bucks,
three for a vision. I understand why they’re hot and we could talk about the effort to slow down and
the effort to move back to a mechanical visceral tactile thing. But for me my mind was always racing
faster than my hands could carry me. You know, I’d have all these thoughts and these ideas, you know
and I just couldn’t get it down. It was incredibly frustrating. I always felt like I was about to burst and
scream.
So it didn’t stop me from writing. In fact, this is my first cover story, Did Christ Have a Crewcut? I think I
was twenty-one when I did this. I read it the other day. I was looking for an image and this was the first
cover story I ever did. So I read it and it has really ferocious left wing fervor. It was very anti-war and it,
as I was reading it, it’s happening to me now, you know I’m getting hot and anxious over remembering
the process of getting that out. Because I had so many great ideas and I couldn’t get them down and it
drove me crazy. So, but it didn’t stop me from being a writer.
After the Peace Corp and I started doing this well in the Peace Corp, I went to Ann Arbor and I spent my
hundred years in grad school in everything, mostly Anthropology, Sociology, Political Science, that side.
I was writing around that time and that is when a couple of guys, Bill Gates and Paul Allen did something
that allowed me and it allowed me to integrate my hands and my mind. Through them and through
Microsoft I was able to finally end this antagonism between my mind and my hands. I was able to get
down on paper almost as fast if not faster my thoughts. So, I mean to me what they produced, you
know the Office, the operating system wasn’t software to me. They were not products and they
certainly weren’t code. It wasn’t about efficiency and they didn’t just meet a need. It met more of an
aspiration to get my thoughts down on a page as fast as I could think them; you know Microsoft had
great residence. It had deep meaning for me. Bill and Paul created something that beckoned me, it
pulled me in. I used it all the time, it engaged me; I never wanted to let it go. It was about passion, it
was about emotion, it was about engagement, it was about aura, it was about love. It was I mean you
know it was that level and that meaningful to me.
So I wanted to begin the story about how Microsoft saved me so that I might perhaps help you all here
at Microsoft. Yeah I know Microsoft doesn’t need saving like Apple needs saving these days as it loses
its aura. But I’d like to suggest a few things that might increase the success rate for Microsoft’s model of
innovation. If they’re adapted, some of the things I talk about in my book, Creative Intelligence. The
mistakes made in such things as the Segway or Halo, or the Newton, or I would say the whole Genome
Project. All are great inventions, all great technologies; all prove to be wildly expensive failures. The
Genome is still out.
So here’s a provocation, another one, Microsoft has a model of innovation that is truly archaic. I know
you believe otherwise but here me out. Microsoft’s model of innovation is simple; engineers come up
with cool shit and throw it over the wall. Developers, designers, and marketers and creatives get a
chance to dress up that technology. This is very much a west coast, Silicon Valley, Beta testing model of
innovation. Do the tech first and offer it to consumers, offer it as a gift. Some people call it a push
model of innovation. I like to call it a gift model of innovation. As anyone who’s ever given a gift on
Valentine’s Day knows it can be problematic.
[laughter]
You know, sometimes it works and sometimes it really doesn’t. Should I give her or him cash and let
them buy what they really need and want because I can’t quite figure it out or don’t want to, will I get it
right, will she get it right? It’s fraught with tension. So the gift model of innovation has been around a
long time. Clearly it works, especially for successful start up companies where the founder’s vision
embodies the desires and values of the founder’s audience. It works when the product beckons and
calls you to engage, and return to it again, and again, and again. Like my engagement with Microsoft
when I was starting out as a writer. But when founders leave visions often fade, the connection with
people sometimes erodes and the beckoning ends. The process of innovation, throwing gifts of
innovation over the wall that continues and becomes routine. But very often you’re throwing gifts into
someone else’s vision. So you switch to a fast follower strategy and you’re throwing gifts over the wall
again into someone else’s vision. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.
Now the Japanese electronics companies in the seventies and eighties they did this. This was what they
did, their engineers were fantastic. They came up with the most incredible functionality. They crammed
it all in to the wonderful remotes that I think Bill Buxton still has some of these remotes. I remember
getting the first one for my VCR. It had like I don’t know a hundred buttons; literally it had a hundred
buttons on it. Of course most people only used two or three and it drove them crazy but they still
wanted to use their VCR. So in the end the Japanese, Sony in particular listened and simplified. Sony in
those days was smart enough to know what it didn’t know.
The question for everyone today including Microsoft is; are we smart enough to know what we don’t
know? Do we care enough to find out? So let me offer an alternative model of innovation that begins
with meaning not with technology. At its core any brand is the commodification of what is meaningful
to people. So, I’m going to say that one more time. At its core any brand is simply the commodification
of what is meaningful to its audience.
Now Microsoft like most tech companies is really good at understanding what it’s meaningful to its own
cohort, okay, its engineering and developer communities and a slice of Gen-Y and some other
demographics. I use the term knowledge mining in my book to describe how we prospect for and mine
meaning. One way to mine meaning is to mine what we embody. I think engineers in particular, I’m
looking out here I can’t tell who’s an engineer or who’s not. I was expecting an audience of engineers so
forgive me. Engineers are really good at embodying, at mining what they embody and knowing what
they know and it’s a very strong culture. Of course it generates a lot of stuff; it generates a lot of tech
and a lot of functions.
I would pause at that, Microsoft like a lot of tech companies, is not as good at mining cultures outside
itself, at mining cultures outside the engineering culture. It doesn’t mine the existential all that well.
Now Nike has that capability. There’s a guy in New York, it’s very interesting we all know about Nike
Plus and the Nike Fuel Band. Well, that stuff, the mining of the communities of runners and what they
really want and what they really need happened in New York with a guy named Bob Greenberg at a
place called RGA. Bob Greenberg who’s a very strange fellow, he’s about I don’t know somewhere
between sixty-five and a hundred, bald with long scraggly white hair, crown of white hair, who wears
only black. I think he actually is in to motorcycles but I can’t tell, with a lot of silver jewelry, okay. He
started out in LA doing movies and he’s basically reinvented his business and his life every ten years. He
reinvented it recently again and we can talk about this later, he broke all of RGA it’s up to like fifteen
hundred people into different groups of a hundred and fifty. That one fifty is very significant. I didn’t
put this in as a provocation but we should talk about what is important in terms of a team.
Okay, so it was Bob Greenberg in New York who was able to find out what is meaningful, truly
meaningful for the runners who use Nike and come up with Nike Plus and Nike Fuel Band. Okay, so
what do I mean by the existential? Most creativity I found that is welcomed by people as meaningful in
their lives comes simply from connecting two or three dots. It’s not the hundred things that comes out
of, that come out of brainstorming, that swarm of yellow stickys that we all sort of live through,
continually. It’s what you know connecting to one or two other things out there. So it’s like cars plus
the net equals, whoop sorry, cars plus the net equal’s zipcar. I’m sorry cars plus sharing plus the net
equal’s zipcar. Green plus cool equal’s method, I like this because this is not an example of connecting
to another technology. This is connecting to two value systems.
Two guys, one guy was a researcher for Carnegie Melon or Carnegie something on weather patterns and
another guy, a buddy of his who is a junior ad agency guy and they were in California. No one read any
of the reports on sustainability so that guy was miserable and anyone who knows anything about the ad
business knows that being a junior ad executive is just a life of misery. They got together and apparently
their house was really dirty and they decided to do something in detergents, you know God knows
where that came from. But what they connected was, you know they wanted detergents, they wanted
something sustainable that wasn’t brown and ugly and painful to use. They wanted it to be normal.
They wanted to normalize sustainability. That was their culture. So they connected, you know the limits
to growth and all the flagellation about saving the planet to a different esthetic, different value system
and they came up with a whole new company, Method, and their products are pretty cool. Okay, so
there’s that.
So how about connecting shoe shopping with the net and you get Zappos and a really manic CEO if
you’ve ever seen him perform, he’s very happy. He’s so happy, okay, ha, ha. My latest favorite is
connecting eyeglasses to fashion to really trying to be cheap to the net and it gets you Warby Parker.
So, I don’t know if you ever used Warby Parker to buy glasses. I gave a talk last week to the Vision
Association. The Vision Association is a trade association of all the companies that are involved in
glasses. So you have this and you have eye doctors, you have hospitals, it’s an enormous industry, you
know who knew. So I go and talk to about four hundred of them and tell them about what we’re talking
about here, disruption, what you need to do, why you shouldn’t have anxiety about creativity, and there
are pathways out of your predicament. Which is your industry is falling apart because of new
technologies and new demographics. So I gave them a message of hope. I also asked them, well,
everyone is here except one player, who’s not here? They didn’t invite Warby Parker, right. So it was
fascinating to see that the Vision Association wouldn’t invite someone who’s clearly in their business
that is disrupting them. They couldn’t do it; they couldn’t bring themselves to do it. It’s fascinating.
Okay, so in this process the first thing you need to know is what is meaningful in the culture you’re
trying to connect your dot to, okay. It’s important to know what is important to your cohort group
because you embody that knowledge. But then you also have to know what is important to the other
group that you want to get into, that you want to sell something to, that you want to embrace, that you
want to engage with. Now, it’s not easy and sometimes it’s very difficult. Lots of people say you know
most innovation comes from small start ups these days. I mean think of all the innovations that have
changed our lives, where do they come from? Start ups that scale, right.
However there are some companies that, in fact, have changed dramatically. IBM, I love the story of
IBM. You know as I was growing up this was in fact the standard, right. By the eighties IBM was road
kill. IBM stock was falling apart, Wall Street wanted to break them up, right. Just like they wanted to
break up Microsoft, and by some miracle and I don’t know how this happened the board of directors
actually chose unlike HP’s board of directors they actually chose a new CEO. They made a very
interesting decision; they brought in something, someone who was not an engineer, who was not an
IBMer, twenty year IBMer, who was in fact Lou Gerstner from RJR Nabisco, a food and tobacco
company. It’s like what is that all about? Okay, how could that person possibly do anything for IBM?
Well, the first thing Gerstner did when he became CEO of IBM was go away from IBM. He actually spent
about one day at IBM and then hit the road. He spent I think six months or nine months on the road
talking to IBMs customers, not IBM. He got into their culture. He asked them what was meaningful to
them and what they needed from something like IBM. What they told him in the end was look you
know we need help. That’s all they said we need help. We need help in making decisions. We need
help in dealing with our customers. What we don’t really need are computers per se. We don’t need
heavy metal, we don’t need mainframes, we need help, you know. To the degree that, you know some
metal does the trick that’s fine but what we need from you is help with our business.
So he went back to IBM and he said, well you know did you guys start out by you know putting together
data and presenting it to businesses to help them make decisions? Didn’t you sort of get lost along the
way with an obsession with mainframe computers? That business has gone to hell, so let’s go back to
our roots, let’s go back to being a company that helps, that services. He turned IBM from a heavy metal
company that sold things to a service company that helped his clients. It was a dramatic change. It took
about five years or ten years. He fired half the staff which is another issue we could talk about. I mean
he dramatically changed the culture by changing the people, some of the people. But he basically saved
IBM and he reframed the entire company. It’s a fascinating to me example and it’s a rare example. But
it is an example of deep cultural change happening in a very complex organization. So I kind of like the
IBM example.
Okay, let’s go back to what I mean by meaning. In understanding the deep meaning of culture you need
to know the patterns. You need to know what the deep patterns are in that culture. What exists that’s
normal, and average, and conventional, and what’s not there. What’s missing, what’s an opportunity
for you, what’s outside the conventional? I call this process of finding what’s not there donut thinking.
You’re looking for the donut. First you have to find the pattern. That’s very essentially and it takes a
long time sometimes to find the pattern. Then you have to begin to look for what’s not there.
Now I’m a birder, I do a lot of bird watching. Birders train to look for what’s not there. You look for the
rare bird, the odd bird, the odd duck, that’s what you’re doing. The big thrill for a birder is to find the
rarity, what shouldn’t be there during that season, during that time. You’re always looking for it. It’s
not like what’s his name who did the black swan Tussem, Tusseim, Taleb, thank you. Who put together
a whole economic theory about how black swans come out of the blue unexpected, do terrible things,
and you have to deal with it. He’s got a second book on resilience; resilience is very hot these days.
Birders train to look for the black swan. I saw a black swan in Singapore, it was a big thrill but I wasn’t
really surprised. For one thing Australia’s close to Singapore and black swan is an Australian bird. But
we train to look for what’s not there. We train to look for the donut hole. We train to see the patterns
and what’s not in the pattern.
For a business or organization what’s not there is very often your opportunity, very often for you to
come in and provide something. So donut thinking is particularly important today. Every one, let me
slow down here, I think it’s very important today because everyone is fast following social media.
Everyone is fast following Facebook into the space of social media, Google is, Microsoft is, Twitter is.
They’re all shoveling their gifts over the wall into the river of social media.
But I have to say like most of us, you know I’m good at one thing or maybe two. One of the things I’m
good at is seeing at the edges what’s not there, I’m a birder. I noticed this year that a lot of my students
are getting off social media. There are some rituals in life that still have meaning, deep meaning, and
New Year’s resolutions are really still very meaningful to people unless their New Year’s resolution is to
drink more water which is apparently one of the top New Year’s resolutions in America. I always asked
my students at the end, yeah it is, so I asked them at the turn of the year in the next year what your
New Year’s resolution is. A lot of them this year surprisingly said, well I’m getting off Facebook, you
know I’m disconnecting. Some of them said I’m getting rid of my Smart Phone. I’m just going to get a
regular phone. You know these are the most tattooed, the most pierced, the coolest, the ones who
really live in really shitty neighborhoods of New York which is getting very rare. It’s very hard to get a,
you know find a slummy area of New York, they found them. So they’re really at the edge and so I’ve
talked with them and I said, you know what’s this all about? It gets back to what they are looking for in
terms of meaning in their lives. They’re looking elsewhere for deep meaning in their lives. They’re
looking away from being hyper connected to so many things, to so many people. I don’t know where
they’re going but I think this is significant. I think this is one of those donut holes that is opening up for
people to begin to examine. I suspect that if it is real and it opens up into something large there will be
enormous opportunities. But you have to not be a fast follower. You have to actually be into that
culture, understand it, and engage.
Okay, so I’m going to play two clips. My favorite clip is from Zero Dark Thirty which is a great movie. It
got robbed at the Academy Awards. It’s so much better than Argo, okay. I’m going to play this twice
and I think this clip exemplifies and shows just in sixty seconds a lot of the skills that I talk about in the
book and a lot of the things I think we need to do. Here we go.
[video]
Okay, I’ll play this one more time. I like this for lots of reasons. I mean first of all there is no one else,
right. That’s the message we all need to realize. There’s no one else who’s going to save us whether it’s
our personal career or our company or our industry. There’s no one else so it’s up to us. It was up to
them. I love this particular clip because you can see in this that the analyst, Mia, okay finds Osama by
reframing, by taking the frame and reframing the CIAs entire narrative story of Osama. So the CIA has a
story about him. That story is he’s inaccessible in a cave, far away. We’re never going to get him. So
they have another frame. They have another story about him. The way they engage Osama is to look
for the bombers, the suicide bombers that are going to come and kill us. So the way, the only way we
can engage him is to try and intercept these bad guys, these killers, okay. She says Mia, who by the way
is questioned by the head of the Soprano’s, Tony who’s now the head of the CIA in the movie, didn’t
catch that. He’s looking at her, you know here’s a woman in the CIA, fairly young woman and he says,
basically who are you, what have you ever done, what else have you done for us? Looking for credibility
and she say, I’ve done nothing else; I’ve done nothing else for ten years. She immersed herself for ten
years. She knew the patterns, she knew the deep patterns, all the patterns of Osama and Al-Qaida and
she knew what was aberrant. What was not there, donut hole.
To her there was this guy who was not a suicide bomber going around different cities making phone
calls from public phones. I mean who uses a public phone not a cell phone? Never using the same
phone twice, right, something was different from the pattern, something was different. So she said,
well you know why are we only looking for suicide bombers? Let’s look for this kind of guy, this person.
This is the type of person that’s carrying information. He’s a currier he’s not a killer. Look for curriers;
she changed the frame of their engagement with Osama and Al-Qaida, okay. She says in the movie, you
know stop and think for a moment, you know how in the world do you run an international organization
based on cells from a cave? You can’t do it; it’s not going to happen. So she reframed the story of the
CIAs engagement with Osama and opened up the possibility that he’s in a city. Those two things led to
the capture of Osama Bin Laden, her reframing of their engagement with him and of the overall story.
I want to play this one more time because there’s one more lesson in here. Let’s see.
[video]
Okay, the other thing I really liked about this was the Lamborghini. So they need a number from this
informant, this Pakistani guy informant. How do you get that? Well somehow you had to know what he
wanted. They didn’t offer him a BMW or a Cadillac. They offered him what he wanted, what was
meaningful to him which was a D ten, V ten Lamborghini, right. They got it; they got the number in
exchange for the Lamborghini. Again, it’s incredibly important to know what is meaningful for the other
person, for the other culture for you to engage successfully in that culture. Knowing when to give your,
when to give a Lamborghini or not is key I think to creativity, to finding new things, new opportunities,
and generating new economic value. We could call that the Lamborghini affect.
I want to play one more final video and wrap up after that. This video is from a conference in India that I
attended about two years ago. It’s called the Dream In Conference.
[video]
Okay, so it’s a little slick…
[inaudible]
>> Bruce Nussbaum: But it’s okay. You know if you ask people what they need they’ll give you a list.
They’ll give you a list of; you know maybe ten things or sometimes twenty. If you ask them what they
need in the morning and you ask them what they need at night they’ll give you a different list. If you ask
them what they dream about they will give you two or three things and they’ll stick to it. They won’t
change it. It has deep meaning to people what they aspire to, what they dream about.
This is a conference put on by this great company in India called Idiom. It’s like the Idio of India, Idiom.
It’s a great innovation consultancy that does a lot of business model innovation. I went to this
conference. What they did as you can see they gathered about a hundred, a hundred and fifty students,
trained them to be videographers and interviewers and sent them out to talk to people in their own
language, local languages throughout India, mostly northern India, little bit of south India. Basically
collect their dreams. They brought back thousands of these things and they collated them. The four top
dreams that people had out of this data was that people dreamt of more education, they dreamt of
women’s rights, they dreamt of serving their nation either in the military or the police, and they dreamt
of starting their own businesses. Those are the four top dreams. They never dreamt of more food, they
never dreamt of more vaccines, they never dreamt of cleaner water, they never dreamt of better
housing. These are the typical needs that we think of when you’re talking about the bottom of the
pyramid and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Their dreams are different. Their aspirations were very
different. I was really stuck by this. I didn’t expect it.
They’ve had this conference again in Brazil and they’ve had it in, they’re about to do it in China and
they’ve had the same sort of results. The dreams are consistent, they’re very specific. When they ask
the question they ask for a couple of dreams or it was an open ended question and people only gave
one or two dreams actually, maybe three. So as part of this conference now, I’m bringing this to
emphasize the need to find what’s meaningful in different cultures. There are different ways of doing
that. Asking people about their dreams is one way to find what’s meaningful. It’s a trick on one level,
it’s a ritual or ceremony in another but it’s a meaningful way, it’s a meaningful pathway to get to what is
meaningful to people in order to engage them, in order to do what you want with them.
As an after thing to this, I’m involved in coming together with various people to come up with plans to
enable these dreams. Two thirds of them are business plans and about a third of them will be sort of
non-profit. The business plans will involve private capital, government capital, crowd funding, crowd
sourcing, and various other things. So it’s a very interesting model based on dreams and what we think
are meaningful things coming out of people. The gift here is their gift of their dreams to us to enable as
opposed to our giving them gifts of our technology. It’s a different dynamic and we’ll see how it goes.
So I talk a lot about framing in my book, framing and reframing. I think of the five creative competencies
I sort of list in the book I think framing and reframing are the most powerful; yeah they’re the most
powerful. Just to recap I talk about narrative frame, the framing of the larger story within which we
make sense of the world within which we take the data that we get from day to day and put it into that
context. That’s what gives us our meaning. The story is the context and we create our identity through
it. You can change that story, you can reframe that narrative. The other frame that I talk about is the
engagement framing. How we engage, you know, I don’t know my parents were born into groups that
pretty much defined their engagement. They were social groups. You know they had about a dozen of
them or whatever. We create our own groups now. We create dozens of them, we shut them down,
we start them up. We have all kinds of digital groups that we participate in and we engage in. We
engage in them in very different ways, right. I mean this is a weird engagement.
So the idea that we should understand that we have many engagements, that we frame them all
deliberately and differently. That we can reframe them empowers us; give us a sense of what we can do
and how we can change it. So I would say that Microsoft has very clear narrative and engagement
frames. You might just take a moment to ponder whether if some of them should be reframed. As
Microsoft pushes out new technologies as gifts through humanity it could help to know just what people
really think and desire.
There’s a guy Frank Knight, Chicago School Economist known mostly for his work at options trading. He
loved to talk about uncertainty and risk. He said that social uncertainty and chance were the real
sources of knowledge, opportunity, and profits. He said that focusing on the wants of people was
insufficient when, here his quote or my quote of him, “The chief thing which the common sense
individual actually wants is not satisfaction of the wants which he has but more and better wants.” So
Microsoft is doing a great, is doing great but does it know what we really want? What people out there
really want?
File side is just a word cloud of things that are in the book that we could talk about. But I think we
should end this now and we had a bunch of videos and a lot of blah, blah. Open it up to discussions
about any provocation you want to talk about. Thank you very much.
[applause]
>> Bruce Nussbaum: And if you’ve got to peel away peel away.
>>: Quick question, so, when you were talking about what people want and listening to that, right. How
do you distill what they want that are meaningful and that are beneficial to the want to them and just
the ones that are just super foolish or not like beneficial to them in the first place?
>> Bruce Nussbaum: Yeah, I mean it gets to the heart of, you know the heart of assessment. How do
you assess these things? I’m not going to give you a simple answer. I’m going to say that there are at
least two ways of doing it. One way is through data, you know assessing lots of data. Now we have the
capability of amassing lots of data and I’ve seen something, some stuff today that is just wonderful
based around the data. I would, my only caution with this approach and that’s major engineering
approach is that data without context is less meaningful than you think. You need to really combine the
data with the context to get a much deeper and richer picture of what’s going on. On the other hand
there are lots of qualitative assessments, qualitative techniques that people have been using for a long,
long time that get you very deep into the meaning of cultures and societies and they’re accessible.
You can bring in people who know how to do this. I’m sure there are hundreds of people at Microsoft
and maybe fifty people sitting here who know how to do this. There assessment of what is meaningful
in a culture is pretty good. One of the things that strikes me is that creativity or things that are
meaningful are very often must be judged within a specific domain of knowledge. So, you know if you
turn on TV today there are a million reality shows of people dancing and singing. The structure is you
have people out there trying to be their most creative and their best and they’re being assessed by a
jury of three or four people. Research shows that within specific domains expert juries of three, two or
three people have an amazingly, you know great success rate at finding out what is truly creative and
what is truly meaningful. They have this ability. They know the patterns and then they know what’s
outside the pattern, right.
So you could do that through data, you could do that through other means, or simply getting the, you
could do it through data or you could do it through expert panels. I’m sure there are other ways of
doing it. You’re asking the right question but there are several answers and they’re at hand. Yeah.
>>: It seems like empathy is a real key to understanding these wants. Do you have any ways or
thoughts on that?
>> Bruce Nussbaum: Yeah, empathy is key and empathy is pretty squishy, you know. My sense, let me
give you my critique of empathy and a critique of experience, I mean the concepts of these things. I
mean, how do I mean? I think empathy is a learned behavior. It’s not intuitive it’s learned like most
other things. What you’re doing is quieting down and listening enough to learn enough about patterns.
In the end empathy is simply a technique to get to meaning and the meaning is patterns. You know,
knowing what’s real, what’s average, what’s common, what’s different. There again there are different
ways of doing it.
Empathetic techniques are, you could find out how to do it. Basically in my classroom it’s, how do I put
this, it’s going to sound strange. I’ll really personalize it, right. So Parson’s is unique in that it has a very,
very special student body. A third are European and Brazilian, a third are Asian, and a third are
American. In the classroom, you know it’s the Americans who are wow in your face, it’s what we do.
The Brazilians are pretty much in your face too. The Europeans are a bit more reserved but, you know
they’re there. The Asian students are, they’re not in your face and they’re not supposed to be in their
culture. If you continue to just pick on the people who are in your face other people are basically
excluded and you evaluate them only on what they produce on paper or on video.
If you quite down and just let people talk they will talk, you know, they will very often say well I can’t
quite express it but and then it comes out. There are ways of eliciting the meeting that we talk about
empathy but it’s basically eliciting the information that provides you with the meaning. I don’t know.
>>: Okay.
>> Bruce Nussbaum: Yeah.
>>: Can I comment? So my son when he was at Berkley worked for a company called [indiscernible]…
>> Bruce Nussbaum: Yeah.
>>: Book called [indiscernible] The Importance of Empathy. What they use to do is need find in these
various organizations…
>> Bruce Nussbaum: Yes.
>>: Specifically developed like your dream capturing dreams they were doing…
>> Bruce Nussbaum: Yes.
>>: Capturing what customers actually want. The story I’d like to tell is that, you know they hired a lot
of computer scientists from universities and they noticed that they’re all using [indiscernible] machines.
They said, yeah but the cool [indiscernible] we should all use these and the less [indiscernible] we should
use the machines that our customers use.
>> Bruce Nussbaum: Yes, exactly.
>>: So they had to have empathy with their customers and suffer a little bit with this, ha, ha.
>> Bruce Nussbaum: Well exactly. Part of it is having good eyes and good ears. Sorry [indiscernible], if
you become a birder this will all become intuitive to you. But I mean actually using your eyes and your
ears deeply and giving it the time to actually see and hear allows you to connect. I mean that a, and not
imposing, I mean we’re all, we all think our shit is great and we think everyone else should be using it
because it’s so great. Very often it is greater than theirs but that doesn’t mean, you know, so that’s a
very good example and Dev is Indian, so he’s an Indian from Poughkeepsie. Yeah.
>>: So kind of an extension on that and an observation here in an engineering culture a lot of the
background has been pattern matching, connecting dots, and that’s what I’ve done for a very long time.
The emotional aspect those you do have, you do have to be egoless when you’re doing that. I think as
creative’s we need to at least pretend to as you get profession learn to keep yourself sometimes out of
the equation to really see the dots and patterns. Then working at times with engineers who don’t have
as much experience in lateral thinking but they’re very good vertical thinking. They don’t realize when
they’ve fallen in love with their own solutions. A lot of times as profession designer I’ve yet to learn
when to, you know when to throw away your, when to kill your [indiscernible] like [indiscernible] said.
So when you meant anti-disciplinary teams can you explain a little bit on that cause I think we’re in
agreement but I just want to make sure?
>> Bruce Nussbaum: Yeah, yeah I was having a two way distance learning conversation with Bill Buxton
about what they hell should I be talking about today. He said, well, talk about the nature of teams.
We’ve all sort of been brought up with the idea that we need multi-disciplinary teams, right, and that’s
the way to go. It’s, you know it still sounds kind of right. But one of the things that happens and I’ve
seen this in my own, you know teams. Often we will put together a team where, you know we want to
work well together, and we want to trust each other, and we want to really be able to play together.
These are all the elements of what a great team is suppose to do. The result is there’s no friction. You
know there’s no tension. We all are on the same path and that has consequences. You know if you look
again at a lot of the innovations that have changed our lives they have come from founders who are
basically two people, three people, dyads, the dyadic relationship is really fundamental to what we got
out of Apple, and Google, and Facebook. With the exception of Google they all broke apart. You know
in the end there was a lot of tension and anger. But they were incredibly creative.
So the cautionary note in that is that we should be a little careful when we put our teams together that
we’re not to smooth and to into gear in that we mesh too well. We should throw a little dirt in that and
have a little friction in it, and maybe not be so multi-smoothie and bring in some people who will shake
things up who have a different, a radically different perspective, and are anti-disciplinary as opposed to
multi. It’s just a thought, I mean it’s an early thought and I have to thank Bill for, I think he knows more
what he’s talking about here at Microsoft than he’d let on. But I like the idea. I like the idea of going too
far in bringing a team that works so well together because that’s what we all talk about, you know the
great jazz team. But when you actually look at great, you know quartets or jazz bands over a period of
twenty years; you know a lot of shits going on in there. You know, people fighting, they’re making love
to each other’s whatever, spouses. There’s tension that breaks up, new people come in, the drummer
drops out, they, there’s a lot of stuff that’s going on in that team. They’re still wildly creative but it’s not
smooth and easy. So maybe it should be so smooth and easy.
>>: I think you’re review of saying we’re too aggressive we can say we’re moving the needle forward on
creativity…
[laughter]
>>: Instead of saying…
>> Bruce Nussbaum: Exactly.
>>: Alright.
[laughter]
>> Bruce Nussbaum: Yeah.
>>: So I was curious what’s your take on the sort of startup scene, we had a little startup scene here in
Seattle, Silicon Valley, you’re from New York. I read a post recently that said that it seemed like a lot of
the startups coming out this day are trying to find fantastic ways to serve advertisements to people. You
know it’s basically that was a lot of focus and a lot of sameness.
>> Bruce Nussbaum: Yeah.
>>: Need new things that…
>> Bruce Nussbaum: Yeah.
>>: Allows you, allows us to put banner [indiscernible] in front of you.
>> Bruce Nussbaum: Yeah.
>>: And along the lines of your thought of donut thinking, you know what is it that we’re not seeing?
Let’s say that I wanted to engage, or we or somebody wanted to engage in donut thinking for the
startup type of thing whether it be internal Microsoft or whatever, what advice would you give in the
context of your talk and the book? I know just read your book but beyond that.
>> Bruce Nussbaum: Definitely read my book, first buy it.
[laughter]
Then read it. So that’s a series of questions let’s go one by one, okay. I’m going to forget the second or
thirds so let me start…
>>: [inaudible]
>> Bruce Nussbaum: Okay, there is a, one of the things that struck me when, you know Occupy was
really big in New York last year, they, and the Tea Party was really big in the U.S. the year before and last
year too. They both come from, you know completely different political extremes but they had two
things in common. They both hated crony capitalism and said so, and they both love Steve Jobs and said
so, okay. These are people from, you know and this way to in terms of age and color, so they’re old and
white in certain parts of the country and they’re young and multi-colored, and multi-whatever with
Occupy but they had these two things in common. They hated crony capitalism and they all liked Steve
Jobs. You know he died during the Occupation and so there was a physical manifestation, you know
people had candles. It was a really big deal. It was the whole lower Manhattan was lit up with a vigil to
Steve Jobs by the people of Occupy. Didn’t get a lot of publicity but for those of us in New York and of
course half the students at Parsons were down there. So we spent a lot of time down there and it really
struck me.
There is a huge entrepreneurial surge in America. You know people are really; many people are really
sick of big corporations that they perceive as being corrupt and tied into Washington and big is bad. My
students for the first time that I can remember really want to start their own companies, you know
which is, you know when I was going to school I didn’t even like money much less start my own
company. This is, and they all want to start their own companies and they all want to make things,
that’s the other thing. You know the return of make culture is enormously powerful. We have new
technologies, it’s all over the place here, but it’s all over the place in the art scene. You know three D
printing of art and clothing, and jewelry is huge and gorgeous. The things that you could do you can’t do
otherwise. So it’s wildly creative.
So there’s this entrepreneurial wave going on and it’s overlapping with a make thing. That’s a wonderful
opportunity for stuff, for all kind of stuff. In my book the whole back portion of the book is about what I
call Indy capitalism. You know the replacement of financial capitalism and a capitalism that focuses
really on shareholder with a different kind of capitalism. I connect creativity which basically creativity
has always been the major source of generating economic value. I mean you could get economic value
out of squeezing, out of efficiency and I think we’ve been doing that quite a bit over the last thirty years.
But the greater profits come from the new and creativity generates more economic value per whatever
measurement you want to put around it than efficiency.
So I’m trying to reconnect creativity and capitalism again within the context of these new waves of
entrepreneurialism among the young and making. I think that’s hugely powerful. That’s one of these
opportunities where if you find it, you know find the right product or service, or whatever it’s going to
take off, it’s going to be wildly profitable. It’s very strange, you going to take off?
>> Curtis Wong: No, no.
>> Bruce Nussbaum: Okay. I mean to me its wild, it’s crazy that HP the great printer company is not
into three D printing, you just think about that.
>>: [inaudible]
>> Bruce Nussbaum: It’s fucking crazy, right.
[laughter]
And the reason is what I’ve been talking about; they can’t get out of themselves. You know they’ve lost
the whole culture. They killed their culture of organic innovation which was so wild and great. I mean
here was a company that, you know had all these great labs and whatever came out of those labs,
whatever they could scale, make commercial, make commercializable they did. So they went from
scientific instruments to ink jet computers, to, and they’re just bouncing around. It didn’t matter, you
know it was, the people were having such great fun in these labs, and as a company they were having,
you know wild profits while it went on. Then it’s over and then you have this incredible opportunity and
they can’t, they don’t even see it. So someone else is going to do that.
Anyhow that answers one of your questions. I’m not quite sure what the others were.
>> Curtis Wong: I just want to point out Tom at the back of the room we have copies of his book. It’s
really terrific and there’s a limited number of books that, you know Microsoft Research subsidizes it so
those are ten dollars and the rest are retail. So I highly encourage you to grab a book, Bruce will be
signing them but he can still do questions while you guys are waiting in line to get the book.
>> Bruce Nussbaum: Sure, you know the other crazy thing in the world? Books sell for like, I think that
book on Amazon is whatever seventeen dollars. You think about it, you know seventeen dollars for a
book is, it’s basically free and of course the e-book is even less. Valuation in our society is just wildly
bizarre so that comes from me as an author; it’s very strange, other questions, yep, yeah.
>>: So certainly that’s a need in needing, I can definitely see the distinction that you’re drawing
between meaning that seem, like dreams that seem to persist and speak to ret ruthful things in our
lives. But some of the needs that you mentioned water, decent housing…
>> Bruce Nussbaum: Yeah.
>>: Vocation that saves lives are very real needs. So what, how do we connect those two when those
are both present so that the meaning in our lives is a need as well? So how are we addressing those, has
that become a hierarchical thing or are we speaking just to opportunity?
>> Bruce Nussbaum: You know I spoke at a big gathering of people who were into social innovation
which is really hot, right. Not all space of social innovation is growing, business schools is the fastest
growing and design schools. In fact social innovation that was sort of here is kind of morphing, you can’t
really tell half the time what is a commercial enterprise and what is a social innovation because they’re
all kind of markety. They use markets and profits are real, so you have a non-profit, profits, profitprofits, whatever. So I was at a conference and we were talking about this and the answer is I don’t
know. You know the answer is we all have to be aware of our own value system and political system,
and what we impose on people. Because all the social innovation people well they’re into providing,
you know clean water and food, and because people obviously need it in certain places around the
world. But the question is what if those people have other desires, you know do you listen to them and
satisfy their higher order desires or do you say well your dreams are all right but here eat this?
I mean I don’t have an answer but I think we all have to at least be aware of the value systems being
expressed on both sides of that exchange, and on the decision making process, and on the weight you
give to the others decisions and values. Very often that’s not the case and I am speaking as an ex-Peace
Corp volunteer, former Peace Corp volunteer. So, but it’s a, I mean it’s a key question. Do you want to…
>>: Assuming that you’ve done the work to identify the meaning you want to go out with us, you know
the audience, you know some of the problems you want to go solve. Could you speak specifically to
how you go create a new solution? You mentioned one technique which is donut thinking. What other
[indiscernible]?
>> Bruce Nussbaum: Well, if you find something that’s meaningful and, well lets go to the dream in
things because it gives us some, bit more concrete, so I really wanted to show you the videos of some of
the people who were talking but I just couldn’t make that happen cause I didn’t know how to make it
happen. I was really struck by two things, one they talked with a lot of children about their dreams and
almost invariably the kids wanted more education. The reason was a lot of children go to school for,
until they’re eight, or nine, or ten and then they’re pulled out of school to work because the family
needs the money. But they want that education but they can’t go to school again because they still
have to work. So what is meaningful to these kids is learning in an environment where they can go in
and out for an hour or two a day and then go back to work.
At our job in this particular, is to find a way to provide that. The business plan that my group came up
with was in a lot of the cities and a lot of the towns there are kiosks, there are internet kiosks basically
that are very popular. You go there and one of the great, you know Indians are hugely innovative and
they have this jugaad innovation where they take the constraints and they innovate around them. One
of the things that they do so well there is they price, they macro-slice, so, you know cell phone calls are
very, very cheap. Using the internet can be very, very inexpensive for a short amount of time.
So we built up a lesson, a business plan around trying to use these kiosks as schools for certain hours of
the day so that these kids can come in before, during, after, however it works for them and they could
actually plug into lesson plans, online, you know, or, and/or actually having people there to work with
them on lessons. So we’re trying to take their dreams and implement plans around their dreams that
actually work to satisfy them.
You want me to abstract that a little bit or does that work for you? So you get the dreams, you get the
meaningful dreams; you get what’s meaningful about it, okay. They have to I guess be meaningful in a
sense of concrete enough to do something about it. Like if I dreamt I wanted to be an astronaut and I
had glasses there’s not much I could do about it. But if I’m dreaming about education you could
provide, one can provide that. The next step is finding novel ways of providing it.
>>: Yeah that was what I was wondering is specifically on that fine novel ways what techniques in
addition to the donut thinking do you find effective?
>> Bruce Nussbaum: Yeah, that’s one of the things I don’t go into in the book. It’s a very interesting
question. Sounds like it would make for another book, right. So I’m going to think about that.
>>: Okay.
>> Bruce Nussbaum: That’s the part where you start using your imagination and think about delivery
systems, okay. But I don’t have anything…
>>: [inaudible]
>> Bruce Nussbaum: Significant to say about that.
>>: [inaudible]
>>: Bruce try to make that the last question tonight.
>> Bruce Nussbaum: One more question.
>>: One more question.
>> Bruce Nussbaum: One more question and we’ll make that the last question.
>>: Okay.
>> Bruce Nussbaum: Okay.
>>: So what’s the difference between I guess understand making sure you’re looking at the right donut
hole and making meaning or innovating so [indiscernible]. What do you think Microsoft’s issue is? Is it
that we’re looking at the wrong donut, not seeing the right donut holes or that we’re not innovating in
the right way?
>> Bruce Nussbaum: You know with some, couple of great exceptions my sense is there was that period
of ten, twenty years where Microsoft was a revolutionary leader, providing incredibly meaningful things
to people in a deeply significant way. Then it became mostly a fast follower, an excellent fast follower
but basically a follower of other trends, and other vehicles. Do it as well in a different way, as well in a
different platform. You know X-Box and Key Note they’re exceptions but basically that’s how I perceive
it. I think that kind of been true for the last twenty years let’s say.
I would argue that now that hierarchy is beginning to break up. The Apple thing is beginning to break
up; even the social media perhaps is beginning to break up. Other opportunities are beginning to
emerge. If you can get out of, you know a fast follower culture there might be incredible opportunities
for a revolution again. That’s all I’m saying, I don’t have enough information and deep cultural
knowledge of Microsoft to say anything more than that.
>> Curtis Wong: Okay, let’s give Bruce a big hand and thank him for coming.
[applause]