Maslow for Market Segmentation

September 4, 2008 By

It suddenly struck me today that I’ve never seen a visualization of a very obvious way to understand markets at the broadest level: segment all products and services based on what customer need they serve on the Maslow hierarchy. Though I’ve seen Maslow discussed in the marketing/sales literature, I’ve never seen a graphic like the one below, that actually draws the famous Maslow triangle with areas sized to represent dollar value of corresponding markets. I include in my broad notion of “market” the demand for things supplied by governments and organized religions, rather than private enterprise. Here we go. Should be self-explanatory. I’ve sized the areas in this example roughly based on what I think the market sizes are in a developed economy, and included examples of businesses that deliver products and services to that level in the hierarchy. Some explanatory comments follow, for tricky bits.

Maslow-Based Segmentation for Markets

Maslow-Based Segmentation for Markets

[Read more…]

How We Fly: Aircraft as Career Metaphors

August 24, 2008 By

If you visualize your career (or your entire life) as the piloting of an aircraft, what sort of aircraft do you see? Modes of flight work as great metaphors for your life and career. The story of Icarus, of course, is the best known flight-as-metaphor parable. On the abstract side of the metaphor, you have Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. On the pseudo-spiritual parable side, you have Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingstone Seagull. In this piece you have a very literal-minded aerospace-engineer take on the subject (mostly stolen from other people; back story at end). Here’s a chart of major aircraft-choice personality types for you:

Aircraft as metaphors

Aircraft as metaphors

Take a moment to classify yourself (if you know enough about aircraft, you can of course pick one not on the list, and get specific beyond generic labels like “fighter.”)

[Read more…]

Some Pointers to Thinking Styles

August 13, 2008 By

Okay, I couldn’t resist that bad pun in the title. I was idly wondering today, while taking my evening stroll to the coffee shop, about one of the most powerful visual icons in our world  — the arrow. It is simple, yet supremely expressive. Take a look at this quiver full of twisty arrows I made up, to represent thinking styles. I had some more, but they wouldn’t all fit in this graphic, so if I collect enough more, I’ll make up a part two. And to think we invented the physical artifact merely to kill.

Some pointers to thinking styles, feel free to use, with attribution.

Some pointers to thinking styles, feel free to use, with attribution.

The Next Level of the Game

August 5, 2008 By

The coach tells the high-school star athlete, you’ve got to take your game to the next level to compete in college. The executive coach tells the young hotshot, at the next level, EQ matters more than IQ. What does this mean? The metaphor of levels is pervasive but obscure. It illuminates many things — sports, education, careers, personal-life stages — but very few things illuminate the metaphor itself. In fact I can think of only one: a certain class of video/computer games. Games that are somewhere between the elemental, abstract ones like Tetris and over-engineered MMPORGs. A great example, that I’ll use, is the neoclassical vertical shooter, LaserAge (think ‘modernized Space Invaders). Here is a screen shot of Wave 1, Level 1.

Ingava LaserAge, Level 1

Ingava LaserAge, Level 1

What makes this game just right to illuminate the “levels” metaphor is that it is in a Golidlocks sweet spot. Unlike, say, Tetris, you don’t get sucked into a realm of mathematical abstraction. But neither do you get sucked into complicated mythologies and narratives that obscure the mappings to real life. Playing a lot of Tetris or World of Warcraft makes you better at Tetris or World of Warcraft. Playing LaserAge makes you better at life.

[Read more…]

Acceleration as Strategy, Urgency as Doctrine

July 23, 2008 By

Three things happened today that created a sort of nuclear reaction in my head. The result was a rather blinding flash of insight concerning a set of knotty problems I am wrangling with. The first thing was a reaction, from a colleague, to a whirlwind burst of activity I put in last night to react to an opportunity. The second was an unusual compliment from another colleague. The third was a pre-release review copy of John Kotter’s upcoming A Sense of Urgency arriving in the mail today (check out the HBP site for Kotter, which includes a video)

Somehow the raw material brought me one of my increasingly rare moments of clarity (my last Aha! of comparable magnitude was 2 years ago). Condensed to a sound-bite, my insight can be summed up as follows: for your business to win today, you must adopt acceleration as your strategy, and urgency as your doctrine. Let me explain, via some bigger bite-sized thoughts.

[Read more…]

Work-Life Chemistry and How to Measure It

July 13, 2008 By

Let’s say you go on a business trip to the city where your favorite cousin lives, who you haven’t seen for a decade. You enjoy a nice dinner together one evening. In utility terms, this is positive work-life chemistry – your company doesn’t pay anything extra, and you essentially got a freebie family visit. Or maybe you’ve been meaning to read a book, but haven’t been able to find the time. Then the book suddenly becomes critically relevant to your work, and your boss demands that you read and present a summary at the next team meeting. So you spend a few afternoons at your desk, at work, reading it. Work-life chemistry happens when episodes of work-life blending lead to a non-zero sum outcomes. I made up a way to measure and visualize your work-life chemistry. Here is what it looks like. If the arrow in the diagram below is in the reddish zone, as in this example, you are blending work and life positively. In the blue zone, work-life chemistry is draining you (thinking “dampening” if you like). Let me explain how this works, and show you how to sketch out your diagram and arrow.

chem1.png

[Read more…]

Dipity, Or, How to View Time, 2.0

July 7, 2008 By

For history buffs like me, a rich understanding of the temporal structure of the world is very important, almost more so than its spatial structure. Timelines to me are in some ways vastly more interesting than atlases and maps. More generally, I (like I suspect, many others), have been watching jealously while creative programmers have been making up great “2.0” style visualizations, and wishing I could use their tools. Today, a startup named Dipity made my day by creating a fantastic time-line visualization tool, which I used to create this visualization of the history of my employer, Xerox. I absolutely love it when a company does just one thing, but does it really well. Wikinomics.com has a great interview with the co-founder, Derek Dukes. I hope this is the start of a whole new ecosystem of startups that creates a riot of visualization tools for everybody to use. Next request: somebody create a tool for user-generated cartograms please.

[Visualization here; temporarily un-embedded]

The Three-Leaps-of-Faith Rule

June 20, 2008 By

ABDs agonize far too much about finishing, and not enough about finishing right. A successful Ph.D. experience, as opposed to a merely completed one, is one that leaves you with self-assurance, confidence in your own abilities, and full of the creativity and energy required to go after more ambitious pursuits. A completed but unsuccessful Ph.D. experience, on the other hand, can leave you cynical, broken, and effectively ruined for further research work. Many, of course, acquire “successful” mindsets via postdoctoral experiences, but you should aim to get it right the first time.
I have a magic formula for a successful Ph.D. Through the course of your doctoral work, you must make at least 3 significant leap-of-faith decisions, that turn out to be right. Here is a picture of what a leap of faith looks like:

Leap of faith

[Read more…]

How Geniuses Think

June 9, 2008 By

Guest post by Michael Michalko

How do geniuses come up with ideas? What is common to the thinking style that produced “Mona Lisa,” as well as the one that spawned the theory of relativity? What characterizes the thinking strategies of the Einsteins, Edisons, da Vincis, Darwins, Picassos, Michelangelos, Galileos, Freuds, and Mozarts of history? What can we learn from them?

For years, scholars and researchers have tried to study genius by giving its vital statistics, as if piles of data somehow illuminated genius. In his 1904 study of genius, Havelock Ellis noted that most geniuses are fathered by men older than 30; had mothers younger than 25 and were usually sickly as children. Other scholars reported that many were celibate (Descartes), others were fatherless (Dickens) or motherless (Darwin). In the end, the piles of data illuminated nothing.

[Read more…]

Context-Switching Metaphors for Work-Life Blending

June 3, 2008 By

I have previously written about/drawn cartoons about the evolution of work-life attitudes. I also drilled down into the issue within the Gen X framing of ‘balance’ using the surfing, juggling and spinning plates metaphors. Let’s now try and visualize the ‘work-life blending’ framing. Blending inevitably involves very frequent context switching, so we need metaphors for both the blending itself, and for understanding the context switching. Let’s talk about it with two graphics. For the blending, the communications-technology metaphor of time-division multiplexing is probably the easiest one to start with. For context-switching, we’ll use metaphors like unwind and unplug.

worklifeblending.jpg

[Read more…]