Advice from Porsche x Airstream on Collaboration, 'Grand Challenges', & the question SXSW left me with
South by South West (SXSW) kicked off a few days ago in Austin. Yesterday I got to attend some talks so I wanted to share my quick takeaways and the big question SXSW left me with.
Let’s get into it!
I. The Art of Collaboration: Porsche x Airstream
Just announced last week, Porsche and Airstream joined forces to design the next airstream. The panel discussion about the collaboration and their creative process had some good reminders:
Collaboration is a muscle - if you don’t use the collaboration muscle, it will weaken and atrophy over time. Making it increasingly difficult to work effectively with others.
Honor the brand history but don’t be bound by it - stretch the boundaries and leverage advancements, in this case manufacturing advancements.
Leverage outside thinking - bringing in outside thinking helped Airstream go further and see through ideas they’d had in the past as well as explore new ideas.
On the panel was: Ingo Bauer-Scheinhütte (Porsche), Steffen Ganz (Porsche) and Bob Wheeler (Airstream)
More about the Collaboration:
II. Grand Challenges
The idea of grand challenges came from attending a discussion with Gaurab Chakrabarti, CEO and co-founder of Solugen, called Building a Tech Unicorn. Gaurab spoke about how he used the framing of grand challenges to grow his business and determine what to prioritize. There’s the urgent and the important, and there’s figuring out which problems if solved would have greatest impact.
Q: What are 3 things that if we solve them we unlock the next level of growth?
A great question to ask yourself and to help manage your team and stakeholders.
III. My HMW Question
Conferences are inspiring and thought provoking. Working in tech and seeing all the advancements I keep thinking: we can build this or that, but should we? On one panel an AI expert said, “it will be like black mirror but without the bad parts”. I appreciate the optimism but haven’t we already seen that’s not the case? Tech will always have pros and cons, the bad goes with good.
The day left me asking this “How might we” (HMW) question:
How might we balance the speed + time AI (and new tech) give us with the importance of time spent wrestling with ambiguity, mastering a craft and working with people vs machines?
Like all things in life, we get to choose what we use and what we don’t. Where we take shortcuts, where we take the scenic route and where we climb the mountain.
That’s it for today! Thank you for reading. Please consider sharing this issue via LinkedIn, social media, or email. And give it a like! 💛
Until next week,
raika