YouSaid · the spoken record

David Kelley

lines on the record: 35
first: 2022-07-28
most recent: 2022-07-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, if you want to change from where you are or you want to improve your situation or you want to come up with a bigger idea, then I really believe you have to bring in more brains, more thoughts. The problem is the isolation of not having a person who has had a different experience or from a different country or a different culture. And so the notion of getting more diverse ideas. You talk to a bunch of people who are quite different from you. They're going to have ideas that you would have never dreamed of because of their different experience. And so it's the diverse thinking. It's, you know what it is? It's really being positive that I can adopt a mindset that will spawn new ideas and new innovations.”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I always think it'll be different. We're always evolving. But, you know, I've spent my life hanging around 20-year-olds, young people at Stanford. And, you know, they are different. I couldn't be more enthusiastic about the future, mostly because young people care so much about social practice and doing social good that by the time those people are in charge of the world, I'm very excited about it. But the world's never been more polarized. Possible solutions to complex problems, and we're trying to give them those tools, you know, and so I see my role as building capabilities and giving young people tools that they can use on these very complex problems.”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Working on that. And so by definition, they're going to butt heads. They're going to have some conflict. But it's more a question of does the conflict feel like it's on the direction of having the best possible outcome? Or is it just a personal thing? You're actually in conflict with the person, not in conflict with their ideas. So as long as it's about idea meritocracy, then conflict is helpful, useful, and inevitable.”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'm afraid it does. I mean, it's not, I wouldn't call it conflict, but a meritocracy of critiquing each other, meaning that when I say I think that this idea doesn't work because of this and this and this, the person receiving that critique has to think, oh, he cares about me. That's why he's saying that rather than to be mad that I'm saying their idea is bad. So there's a way to do constructive critique in a meritocracy kind of organization, but the conflict has to be there. I mean, if the conflict's not there, you're not working at the edge. We're working at the edge of what's going to be the best possible solution to things and just can't come up with that off the top of one person's head. There has to be a bunch of different brains and minds and diverse thinkers.”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it's not about consensus. It's about how excited you can get the people, what we call the central persona. What's going to be meaningful to them? So the boss can say, this is the right way to go, and I can say this is the right way to go, and Idio can say this is the way to go. But it's pretty clear when you start going out and showing the vision that you have for the future with the people that you've been, hopefully, been working with them all along, that you can see that that's really what's resonating with them. So, you know, the process is not linear. It's just really a set of tools. People get enthusiastic, you know? Yeah.”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“started this we didn't know we were doing it all and we built this school system which is just beautiful now it's been 10 years we're now to the point where people are graduating from that school system in Peru and getting admitted to Stanford Amazing. And so that just feels so good to have those kids in my office hours and talking to them about their experience at Innova schools, which is what this is called.”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“force like I want to make this country the best place in Latin America for the family then the projects just kind of fall out of that right so the one that I'm most involved with is the school system so Peru sadly is consistently rated one of the worst educational systems in the world unfortunately and so Carlos gave us and this innovation facility that we built together staffed by both of us to design a new school system and so we designed every aspect of the school system the curriculum the physical buildings the business models and i'm happy to say today you know we have 63 schools up and running uh 51 000 students and you know 99 of those kids end up going to higher education but for me it's more personal because”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, you give me a chance to talk about my favorites, but one of the best examples, I think, to answer your question is there's a company in Peru called Intercorp. And Intercorp is run by a really lovely man named Carlos Rodriguez-Pestor, who's very, you know, he's a very successful businessman. And early on in working with him in order to transform his company, which he asked us to do, that was his ask, was to make him a more innovative company. We built a thing called La Victoria Labs, which was his people and our people together in a facility in Peru. And in there, Carlos and them came up with the notion to make Peru the very best place in Latin America to raise a family. So if you can get to the point where you've got an innovation engine and you've got people who care and you can have a drive.”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a good point. There's just something about getting somebody enthusiastic about an idea. And so it doesn't take a lot of space or a lot of resources. Another way to look at it is they have a serious task to do. And if we could come in and generate a little fun around coming up with new ideas, they respond very well to that. I've seen it happen so many times that even though they have a serious mission, if you can get a bunch of really inspiring people together, them and from our side and come up with some pretty interesting ideas that could result in improvement or an exciting project that they could do, they'll find a way. They'll find the time that build that small idea into something big and we'll help them. I mean, maybe that's why you need a consultant at some of the time.”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“on some level that this thing could exist in the world. That, you know, it makes you feel positive about the future when you see somebody paint that picture in a certain way. And so we win people over by making them excited about the future with our ideas. And then they want to be a part of the team. And pretty soon people say, oh, how did that group do that so fast? I want to be a part of that group.”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're absolutely right. That's a real insight in what's going on in our lives every day as we try to engage with companies. And the real answer is that you just have to have cultural change. And our way of doing that is to first try to get as much leadership buy-in as possible, but then just start doing tangible things. But you have to have a place where people feel like when they walk across the threshold, they can act differently. So how do you make it feel like you're allowed to be a little different? And so the kind of projects, these strategy projects or whatever you want to call them, you allow people to experiment with those and you end up with some kind of prototype, whether it's a service or a system. And it's just intoxicating.”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They work harder. Everything seems to happen. Now, the best thing that can happen, of course, is if senior management buys into this. So we do a lot of leadership transformation projects in order to get people to the point that they'll allow this kind of guided mastery stuff to happen. But it's just the way it's done, is all I can say is letting them feel what it feels like to be a little bit successful. And then you keep going. And eventually, you know, people get to the point where they think of themselves creative and then they build a muscle that is a tool and a creative muscle. And then they use that for the rest of their career. It's amazing to watch.”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's really interesting that the world has tried to put people in those categories, ad agencies in particular, have like a creative group and an administrative group, you know, which I think does us a disservice. And so what we tend to do, which we try to convince companies to do, this management of companies and ourselves, is to convince people that they have that inherent creativity is what we call guided mastery. If you can take the people in your group and lead them through a series of small successes, that's the only way we've seen it happen so that people who doubt their creativity or the team in general has some small successes. You just set it up that way. It's easy to do. And they start to say, oh my God, my team is creative or, oh, I am creative. And you just see such a transformation where they just have more stick to it.”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think so. I think, you know, it's synonymous with being a good entrepreneur. I have to say I'm overly taken by this, but I really do think that it's just taking a human-centered approach to innovation works in all cases. I mean, think about failures and successes of entrepreneurs have a lot to do with did they really have a deep understanding of the user and of the business and of the technology? I mean, all those things require insight, a deeper understanding than the next guy. Otherwise, you don't have a product that's competitive. Yeah.”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's a funny thing. So we started out, it was inspired by, you know, Charlie Brown, how you know how. And so what we were trying to design was a stand so you didn't need Lucy holding it for nerf football, a stand that when you could kick it, but it wouldn't get in the way of the flight of the ball, right? So in the process of trying to design that, we came up with something better, which was a way to make the ball always spiral. And so really happens a lot in design where you think you're working on one thing, but the real innovation is adjacent to that and you pivot to the place where the real innovation is. And that's what happened in this case, and it's happened a hundred times. Now we had a football that you always throw a spiral, which is a hell of a bigger deal than a stand.”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe that it fits somewhere, or maybe that I can rinse it out and use it for something else later in the day. Or, you know, I got no idea what's going to be the big idea that we're going to come up with. And so you need a diverse team of people who can both get to the place of a real innovation and the people who can make it tangible and manufacturable and real.”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so at the beginning of a project, you have to kind of understand the roles that are going to be played. I mean, we design alongside of the client and alongside of the potential user. It's not like IDEO comes up with a big idea and then kind of jams it down your throat or expects that it's going to be the right thing the first time. So we work with the internal people, the manufacturing people, but the team is made up of people that are going to make the whole thing tangible, the people who can build the prototypes, the people who can take it to manufacture, the people who can be really insightful about showing ideas for the prototype to many different people in many different kinds of people. And from that can glean what's meaningful to them. Like in the start, I don't want to put my two cents on it. What's the most important thing? Maybe keeping the thing warm is the most important thing in a coffee mug.”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Being in a place of not knowing is a good place to be until you get to the big idea, patience to wait for the big idea is just not inherent. Well, it's inherent in the design kind of way of being, but it's not inherent in corporate America because you look smart if you have the answer early on. Yeah.”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, if you look at companies today that were innovative in that way, at least companies that were our clients in that way, it is a testament to the fact I believe that a mindset around design or what we call design thinking inherently allows you to come up with ideas and more ideas. It doesn't mean that you're going to be great at picking which the right ones are, but design makes these ideas tangible. When we were building things, we were building prototypes and showing them to people and having the people who were the experts tell us what was wrong with them. Then we go back in our little shop and improve upon it, right? And so that notion of iterative prototyping, making something tangible, and then improving it and improving it is really what was going on there, which would achieve real change. So so often we found that”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, one of the bases of where we start is that we believe that everybody's wildly creative. So we involve everybody. I mean, sometimes the receptionists would come up with the best ideas. So if you believe that the boss is going to have the best ideas, I mean, if you look at a lot of companies and measure what's going on, the boss is speaking more often than anybody else. We try to get everybody to be on an equal plane with respect to innovation. And so in there came the notion of what a guy named Bob McKim called need finding, which was the human-centered design part where you try to understand what people care about. But as far as in the actual process, it really was a place of valuing everybody. And so there was no hierarchy. I mean, I'm actually embarrassed when you watch that thing. I speak out pretty strongly against corporate.”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm not trying to be arrogant, but thousands and thousands of other things. You have four or five hundred projects going in a year. You know, you work across all kinds of different domains and industries. In some ways, that's what makes you better. One of the tools that a designer has is that they have had a broad experience and you can apply something that seems pretty straightforward as a methodology and doing things in one industry and bring it to another industry and look like a genius and all you're doing is doing it the way that other people do it.”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The main thing we did was we make ideas tangible, right? So you're a company and you're thinking you might want to do a new toothbrush, as you say. What are the possibilities and what would make a toothbrush better? What's the new to the world idea around toothbrush? Well, if you want to do that, you have to have a whole bunch of different kinds of people. It says a lot for diversity of all kinds of things, thought, experience. And so by bringing those kind of people in, we'd come up with new to the world ideas in a routine way. It's hard to say innovation in a routine way.”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm going to work with free admission Absolutely. But anyways, we did the wrong product, but it was a blast to work with Etteri and to come up with a product that was so well received by the design world, basically.”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because AT&T was given away phones had about the same feature set as this. So it was on the cover of every magazine and I now still have two cards, lifetime membership to Mom in New York because did you know that that's an interesting story? If you have something in the permanent collection, you get a...”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, sure, sure, sure. Okay, great. They probably don't plug in. But anyway, I had this friend named Etresats, who is a famous Italian architect. And if you're a designer, you were always in Italy and in love with Italian design. That's just the way it was in those days. I mean, you look at the cars from that era, for instance. But anyway, Etria and I both had our own little practices like this. I had David Kelly design, and he had sats a sociati. And we're thinking, you know, we're not making very much money. We're just charging people a little bit. So let's do our own products. And so that's what it was. It was a joint venture between Etre and I. And we just said, you know, Italian design California technology, how can you go wrong? Yeah. But neither of us were much of a business person. And so we designed this phone and had him produced. But it just, as beautiful as it was, it appealed to designers, and so it sold the designers, but it wasn't functional enough to be a big hit.”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, absolutely. Yes, you know, I get a bit emotional about it. Some days you came home thinking he had just praised you and you felt like a million bucks. And sometimes he had told you that was terrible. You know, I'm not paying you for that work, you know, go back and do better. And you felt terrible. But you always felt great in the end.”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was a pain in the ass, yes. But, I mean, he was an exceptional human. And he had a sixth sense of what people really wanted. So he would do things like, you know, we don't need a disk drive in this product or we don't need a fan in this product. And he got those from really understanding people. And we didn't have to do as much work at digging deep because Steve had a sense of it. And he turned out to be right so often that we were more than willing to follow him. But in 2007, the iPhone was announced and I had cancer. I had throat cancer at the time and I was home. Steve showed up on that day and gave me my own iPhone. You know, that's not the kind of person. A pain in the ass”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He cared so much, and you went back and iterated and did better and you and he both knew it was better by the time that we were done with the product and ready for release.”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You betcha. Both of us were single, and I'd get a call three o'clock in the morning, and he'd say to me, you know, I think those screws on the inside should be cad plated rather than copper plated. I mean, he's very intense. But I have to say everyone would tell you who was a designer of any kind that in their career they did their best work for Steve. He was the world's best client because he cared so much. I mean, most of the time you're delivering something, a prototype or a product, and everybody's excited about the thing they're doing, but they're not so sensitive to the kind of nuance that we've just been wrestling with. And so it was really fulfilling to have somebody who cared to the level. He might have cared that much about the software and the hardware and everything else, but certainly with respect to design. And sometimes, you know, it wasn't that fun that he didn't like what you did.”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“David Kelly decides at the time that drove us, right, you know, normally if you're a small company, you have a problem with not having enough work or having too much work because you're so small. But we had so many projects from Apple that we really kept going.”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was a guy in the Stanford program before me who ended up at Apple. It's a guy named Jerry Manak. And Jerry was the only design person in the company, which seems hard to imagine Apple now. But anyway, sometime in 79, he came and found me and said, I got this big client I can't keep up with. Would you come and down help me? Because he had the same point of view about design methodology that he had learned at Stanford, that I had learned at Stanford about the way you go about making prototypes and understanding people and being comfortable in a place of not knowing where you're going, which is hard to do. So I went down with him and met Steve and we ended up doing like 50 products for him. And Steve became a close friend and introduced me to my wife and couldn't have been closer to him. It was really that initial connection to Apple for IDO was called the”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, well, the Stanford program was called product design, for one thing. But at that time, design was a lot about aesthetics. You know, people had all kinds of ideas about when you said the word design, they were thinking, you know, were you a fashion designer? And so we had this kind of worldview of design as an aesthetic thing. And still a big part of design is aesthetics, but that was what people thought that only was that. And so the Stanford program was more about creativity and more about understanding people and what's meaningful to them. But it was still all around products. That's really what it was all about. So we were lucky, you know, we got early involved in Apple and did the first mouse for them and many other products.”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh man, that's an understatement. What a change for me. So I'm an engineer and I don't really know what's going to happen. Am I just going to be in corporate America for the rest of my life and use my big personality to move up through management? Is that what I'm going to do? A friend in a carpool convinced me to go to Stanford. He said, you are perfect for the Stanford career. And he kept bugging me. My grades weren't that good. So I didn't know that I could get into Stanford. So anyway, he convinced me to apply to Stanford. And I have to tell you, since that moment, I feel like I'm the luckiest guy on earth. You know, I'm doing, it sounds weird, but I'm doing exactly what I was put on earth to do, which is this brand of design that Stanford taught then and that I continue to teach now around being sensitive to humans and caring about business and caring about technology all at the same time.”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it was a long time. Years would be the answer to the question really, but that's because of the variation in anything. You know, if you notice, it's not exactly the same in each airplane. And so that's because the laboratory is in a different place and the door opens on a different side or all that stuff. So you spend all your time doing variations of the original design, right? So every time they move a seat on the plane, the drawings for that plane has to be completely redone. This is a big drawing, right? The planes are huge. Anyway, so they move a seat back. Well, then the Boeing engineers have to redesign that whole plane. It's a lot of work. So it's a very detail-oriented job. You're not the kind of job for a kid coming out of a Carnegie Mellon thinking he's going to be designing airplanes, right? Yeah.”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was in what's called the passenger payloads group. That means the interior. And you're a big company, you break it down even further. So I'm in lights and signs. Well, the sign that I am responsible for happens to be one we all know well, which was the lavatory occupied sign.”
2022-07-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT