Coming Soon:

Six Strings of Innovation: Leo Fender, Design Thinking, and the Guitars That Changed the World

Leading the Partner Design Studio at ServiceNow has given me a great entrée into the world of Design Thinking. Once you get into it, you realize Design Thinking is everywhere and behind most of the great innovations of our time.

Aside from my work at ServiceNow, music is my passion. I have played an instrument for most of my life. I have played in bands, recorded albums, written books and articles about music and musicians, and worked in the guitar business. Business lessons abound, but one that stands above all is the story of Leo Fender and the instruments he brought into the world. The Telecaster, Stratocaster, and Fender Bass guitars are all still standards of electric guitar design, yet their basic design is unchanged since 1954.

How do you nail design so perfectly that your product 1) changes the entire category, 2) becomes a standard template, and 3) remains in the same basic format for over 70 years? The answer is a textbook case of design thinking, long before the two words were even uttered together.

The guitar, of course, has six strings each tuned to a note of the scale (a bass has just the first four). The idea for this series came to me literally as I was playing. Thus, we tell the story in the following order:

String One: E is for Empathy

String Two: A is for Agile

String Three: D is for Details

String Four: G is for Goals and Gains

String Five: B is for Borrow

String Six: E is for Experimentalism

This series will give you some of the basics of design thing wrapped in a cool story about guitars, music, and great product design. At the end you will be demonstrably smarter, two inches taller, and devastatingly erudite among proper company.

This series will eventually be published as an e-book as well.