Why companies need to move away from a “product first” orientation to pursuing innovation based on customer need.In the past, companies found success with a product-first orientation; they made a thing that did a thing. The Inversion Factor explains why the companies of today and tomorrow will have to abandon the product-first orientation. Rather than asking “How do the products we make meet customer needs?” companies should ask “How can technolog...

A roadmap for how we can rebuild America's working class by transforming workforce education and training.The American dream promised that if you worked hard, you could move up, with well-paying working-class jobs providing a gateway to an ever-growing middle class. Today, however, we have increasing inequality, not economic convergence. Technological advances are putting quality jobs out of reach for workers who lack the proper skills and training. In Workforc...

Use eye-popping visual tools to energize your people!Just as social networking has reclaimed the Internet for human interactivity and co-creation, the visual meetings movement is reclaiming creativity, productivity, and playful exchange for serious work in groups.Visual Meetings explains how anyone can implement powerful visual tools, and how these tools are being used in Silicon Valley and elsewhere to facilitate both face-to-face and virtual group work. This dyna...

What Visual Meetings did for meetings and Visual Teams did for teams, this book does for leadersVisual Leaders explores how leaders can support visioning and strategy formation, planning and management, and organizationchange through the application of visual meeting and visual team methodologies organization wide—literally "trans-forming" communications and people's sense of what is possible. It describes seven essential tools for visual leaders—mental mo...

Graphic tools and visual solutions for team building and developmentVisual Teams uses visual tools and methods to help teams—both face-to-face and virtual—reach high performance in today's work environment. As teams become more and more global and distributed, visualization provides an important channel of communication—one that opens up the group's mind to improving work systems and processes by understanding relationships, interconnections, and big pictu...

Building products and services that people interact with is the big challenge of the 21st century. Dan Saffer has done an amazing job synthesizing the chaos into an understandable, ordered reference that is a bookshelf must-have for anyone thinking of creating new designs.”— Jared Spool, CEO of User Interface EngineeringInteraction design is all around us. If you’ve ever wondered why your mobile phone looks pretty but doesn’t work well, you’ve confronted bad interaction desi...

Whether you’re designing consumer electronics, medical devices, enterprise Web apps, or new ways to check out at the supermarket, today’s digitally-enabled products and services provide both great opportunities to deliver compelling user experiences and great risks of driving your customers crazy with complicated, confusing technology.Designing successful products and services in the digital age requires a multi-disciplinary team with expertise in interaction design, visual design,...

Make the Most of QFD and the Voice of the Customer in Six Sigma EnvironmentsQuality Function Deployment (QFD) techniques have helped thousands of organizations deliver higher-quality, more user-focused product designs. Now, Lou Cohen’s classic guide to QFD has been thoroughly updated to fully align QFD with Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) and other state-of-the-art Six Sigma methodologies.Revised by world-class Six Sigma expert Joe Ficalora and his team at Sigm...

This highly focused book approaches quality specifically in the context of project management. It goes beyond the usual descriptions and advice for manufactured products to give project managers a framework of deliberate steps to take in managing quality for the benefit of project outcomes in any domain. This user-friendly guide presents tools and techniques that implement the general methods defined in the Project Management Body of Knowledge, and augments those methods with more detailed...

A compendium of tools and techniques that every innovator needsThe Innovator's Toolkit is an essential companion for every innovator, innovation team leader, operations manager, and corporate change agent who needs to drive organic growth. Written and presented in an easy-to-use reference format, the book helps users understand why, when, and how to apply each technique for maximum benefits and results. The fifty-plus tools and techniques in this book are ...

Most companies know that long-term success does not hinge on any single product but on a continuous stream of value-rich products that target growth markets. Yet many firms inexplicably develop one product at a time, and by doing so fail to embrace commonality, compatibility, standardization, or modularization among different products and product lines. At last, in this timely book, Marc H. Meyer and Alvin P. Lehnerd provide a formula for turning products into profits, ena...

Explore the new design discipline that is behind such products as the iPod and innovative Web sites like Flickr. While other books on this subject are either aimed at more seasoned practitioners or else are too focused on a particular medium like software, this guide will take a more holistic approach to the discipline, looking at interaction design for the Web, software, and devices. It is the only interaction design book that is coming from a designers point of view rather than that of a...