Hiring. Everyone says it’s the most important thing you need to get right in your company. And yet […]
Let the Right One In
Five Habits of Design Thinking
There are three thinking styles that have transformed how we develop new products today: Agile, Lean (Startup) and […]
Mind the Product Keynote on Teams
My Mind the Product opening keynote on High Performing teams is up. They do a great write up, […]
From the half-bakery: Temporal Landmarks
I am about to start a new habit. I’ve starting writing more and more formal essays, and I […]
Comparative Research Done Right
or, Competitive Research the Creative Founder Way For a long time, I’ve been disappointed by competitive research approaches. Most […]
Keynote for WIAD Boston
Miss me while I’m heads down working on my current book (and beginning my teaching practice at Stanford?) […]
The Context Canvas
I’ve been publishing fully formed essays lately, and I thought I’d pause to share a half-baked idea, to […]
Book of the Week: Peak
I first hard of Anders Ericsson in one of the funnest literary nonfiction books I’ve ever read, Moonwalking […]
Three Writing Frameworks to Get You Through Nanowrimo
If you plan to do NaNoWriMo, you’re going to write 1,667 words a day. That’s a lot of […]
Raising Money to Provide a Meaningful Internship for a Student
I’ve never tried anything like this, but I’m using GoFundMe to provide an internship for a student. Please […]
Supercharge Your Team with Effective Feedback
This is part three of a three-part series on high performing teams. I recommend you start with the first two […]
Designing High Performing Teams
This is Part 2 of a three part series on high performing teams. Part one is of Design the […]
Design the Team You Need to Succeed
Part One: Types of Teams Written to sort out my thoughts for my UXDC keynote. If you’d like […]
A Visual Vocabulary for Concept Models
Part One: Rendering Relationships Sign up to be alerted when Pencil Me In, my book on visual thinking, […]
MicroStories for Pitching
If you want to craft a compelling narrative for a book or a presentation, I recommend the format […]
Podcasting
Miss me while I try to wrap up the spring semester? Catch me talking to Mike Rohde about bad […]
Pencil Me In
Working with Pictures was so well received, I decided to do a “real” book. Eight months later (a.k.a. […]
12 BIG IDEAS from Game Design You Should Know
The massive and mind blowing Game Developer’s Conference is here, and in the spirit of all things gamey […]
Top Twenty Most Popular Posts of 2016
Meant to publish this in January, but it got lost in my drafts folder… ah well. Busy year […]
Drawing Books
I usually try to write up the books I read each year. This year I apparently read 250, […]
Five Models for Making Sense of Complex Systems
In one of the classes I teach at CCA, students were confused by mental models, conceptual models, concept […]
Feedback for Teams
This is a write-up of a key learning from my fall class “The Creative Founder,” open to Juniors […]
Story Secrets for Understanding and Communicating
My Convey UX presentation is up! Live drawing, improv and heaps of storytelling! Learn how to incorporate story […]
Alphabets and Logographs
When I first got into Visual Thinking, I came across a core concept that no one agreed on: […]
One Big Idea
I was enjoying a sazerac with a old friend of mine at a local watering hole. And by […]
Block Your Talk
This one of a series of essays on speaking. Find more here. You’ve written a great talk, you’ve […]
Presenting is Performance
This one of a series of essays on speaking. Find more here. When the Game Developer’s Conference invited […]
Personal OKRs, Three Years Later
Don’t know anything about OKRs? Read The Art of the OKR first, and/or Personal OKRs. Also, personal OKRs are […]
Creative Founder Class is Available!
At California College of the Arts, Creative Founder is that elective that students tell each other “You have […]
After NaNoWriMo
If you’ve never heard the acronym Nanowrimo, it stands for National Novel Writing Month. Each November half a […]