In June, 1998, almost nothing at Seagate was going right. After years in which Seagate had enjoyed comfortable technical leadership in drives for high-performance computers, competitors including IBM and Quantum were catching up. The volume part of the business, hard disks for personal computers, was overloaded with production capacity and glutted with inventory. The largest customers, the computer makers, were demanding not only more storage per dollar–nothing new about that–but also more service, including caches of completed drives near their assembly operations. But Seagate seemed unable to respond expeditiously.
Something had to change–fast. Craig Nichols, an E&Y partner, suggested it was time to go further and “transform the whole operations side of their business.” What Nichols was proposing was a DesignShop, a concept (and trademarked name) developed and worked out by Matt Taylor, an architect, and his wife, Gail, an educator. Their idea is to push–some would say shock–a group to leave behind the conventional and instead collaborate creatively on a new product design, a new process, the solution to a business problem, or even a completely new business strategy.
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