Author Archives: Mike Shipulski

There’s a natural desire to create comfort because, well, it’s comfortable. The parents of comfort are sameness and familiarity. To be comfortable we naturally seek out familiarity, and since we’re most familiar with what we did last time, we naturally want to repeat the past. Continue reading

There’s a natural tendency to simplify, to reduce, to narrow. In the name of problem solving, it’s narrow the scope, break it into small bites, and don’t worry about the subtle complexities. And for a lot of situations that works. But.. Continue reading

Everything is about speed – speed through process reengineering, waste elimination, standardization, modularity, design reuse. All valid, but not all that powerful. Continue reading

Product costs, without product thinking, drop 2% per year. With product thinking, product costs fall by 50%, and while your competitors’ profit margins drift downward, yours are too high to track by conventional methods. And your company.. Continue reading

There are countless books, tools, processes, methodologies and frameworks for innovation. And cutting across all theory and practice, the biggest fundamental of innovation is fear. Continue reading

Innovation, as a word, has become too big for its own good, and, as a word, is almost useless. Sure, it can be used to enable magical reinvention of business models and revolutionary products and technologies, but it can also be used to rationalize the rehash work we were going to do anyway. Continue reading

The technical stuff is the easy part. Technical systems respond predictably, but people don’t. There’s nothing worse than solving the wrong problem, so before you start solving you better have done a whole lot of defining. Continue reading





