“I don’t believe in process. In fact, when I interview a potential employee and he or she says that “it’s all about the process,” I see that as a bad sign. The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.”
“Because a true sense of purpose is deeply emotional, it serves as a compass to guide us to act in a way completely consistent with our values and beliefs. Purpose does not need to involve calculations or numbers. Purpose is about the quality of life. Purpose is human, not economic.”
Sarah Doody on product development and storytelling:
A product is more than an idea, it’s more than a website, and it’s more than a transaction or list of functionalities. A product should provide an experience or service that adds value to someone’s life through fulfilling a need or satisfying a desire. The ultimate question then becomes: who identifies that value? After the executive or stakeholder identifies the initial idea, who in the organization ensures that the product and experience deliver value to the user? Maybe it isn’t the product manager, marketer, technologist, or designer; perhaps what we need is a new role: the product storyteller.
Story is the context for which we view the world, a framework through which we shape our experiences. A good story connects us to each other and a product with a story will feels more compelling.
Crafting stories is not about assembling facts. Instead, according to [Daniel] Pink, people who understand story have “the ability to place these facts in context and to deliver them with emotional impact.” The impact to story in business is that, “like design, it is becoming a key way for individuals and entrepreneurs to distinguish their goods and services in a crowded marketplace.”.
Story is less about the how and and more about the why.
Khoi Vinh looks back at the design studio he co-founded ten years ago and the lessons he learned in the process. These are valuable insights for any designer looking to strike out on their own, but I especially enjoyed this last bit of wisdom:
Even then, what I had already learned running that business was that saying “no,” was incredibly important, that turning down bad clients and bad projects — the ones that were outside of our expertise, outside of our budget, outside of the kind of work that would make us happy — was the only way to avoid the trap of working long and hard on miserable projects. This doesn’t just go for ‘established’ studios; due to the time, effort and opportunity cost of saying yes to bad projects, I believe it’s also a surefire way to make sure young studios never get to say yes to good projects. In the services business, sometimes “no” is the most powerful, effective and beneficial tool that you have.
Wired has a great, wide-reaching interview with Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. I’m increasingly interested in what Amazon is doing as they ever-so-slowly transition their focus to digital products as well as creating products of their own and building the ecosystem that surrounds them. I was especially interested, however, in his view on customer service.
When asked if Amazon hoped to adopt Zappos’ culture of “happiness and customer service”, Bezos said that idea is not how they view customer service:
Our version of a perfect customer experience is one in which our customer doesn’t want to talk to us. Every time a customer contacts us, we see it as a defect. I’ve been saying for many, many years, people should talk to their friends, not their merchants. And so we use all of our customer service information to find the root cause of any customer contact. What went wrong? Why did that person have to call? Why aren’t they spending that time talking to their family instead of talking to us? How do we fix it?
Reading this I realized I’ve never called or emailed Amazon with a customer service question. Their actual service—providing a seamless buying experience and fast delivery—is top priotity so much that they hope they don’t even need customer service. Everything just works. Now, I’m sure Amazon customer service is extremely helpful if I ever need to call, but this is a fascinating approach that directly relates to the designers: how do you build this site/process that it is impossible to break?
“It’s not just about doing good work, it’s about explaining your work and selling it, about giving it the proper context so that other people can understand it and feel good about it and tell other people. It’s like building consensus and buy-in. That sounds reductionist and cheap, but there’s value to that. Explain your work. You can do it in few words, but you really get to the heart and soul and reason of why you made certain choices in a design.”
“If you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions and you have to, you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win, otherwise good people don’t stay.”
I completely devoured this lengthy profile on Edwin Land, the inventor and founder of Polaroid. Here is what Time said about Polaroid in its cover story on the company in 1972:
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Polaroid is that it has grown huge by creating products for which there was little detectable demand, until Edwin Land thought of them. Each is, as Land says, sui generis—in a class by itself. That distinction makes conventional market research, in the words of one of his marketing executives, “a waste of time and money.” Polaroid did not spend a single dollar trying to discern in advance whether people would actually buy the SX-70.
Reading that, you can’t help but draw a parallel between Land/Polaroid and Steve Jobs/Apple. I’ve long saw a connection between the two and the article goes further in highlighting how Jobs modeled much of Apple around Polaroid:
[F]or decades now, Apple’s founder has used the same template as Polaroid’s co-founder: dramatic unveiling, feature walkthrough, lavish praise, individual demos. Jobs may have perfected the reality-distortion field, but Edwin Land invented it. And they may have been the only two CEOs in tech-company history who could pull it off.
And even more interesting, both Land and Jobs were forced out of the companies they created only to have them falter after their exit. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: the leading minds and visionaries of companies being forced out. Land and Jobs are two famous examples but what about Jack Dorsey at Twitter who recently returned to his company? I’m not really sure what it means but it’s a fascinating topic to look into.
“If this company were to split up I would give you the property, plant and equipment and I would take the brands and the trademarks and I would fare better than you.”
—John Stuart, Chairman of Quaker Oats (1900)
(via)
“Apple reaches for greatness without apology. Market share and profitability are important only as outcomes. They are not its purpose, which is to achieve the “insanely great.” It is as if they are on an ongoing Grail quest. (As Professor Henry Jones said to Indiana: “The search for the Grail is the search for the Divine in all of us.”)”
From a reader comment on Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish.
I love this. Money should never be the goal. The goal should be to do “insanely great” work, whatever that may be for you. I think doing good work is a lot easier than simply trying to get money. If you can do good work, money will follow. Reminds me of one of my favorite Walt Disney quotes: “We don’t make movies to make money. We make money to make more movies.”
Colin Greenwood of Radiohead has written an interesting piece on the band’s decision to release In Rainbows digitally with a pay-what-you-want model back in 2007. Three years ago, this was revolutionary. Now, in 2010, countless bands release projects with this format and there are even sites dedicated to releasing music under this idea. The band has recently completed their next album and are currently deciding how they plan to release it to their fans. With this in mind, Greenwood says:
I am optimistic that if you make good work you can secure the patronage of your fans.
This reminded me of a thoughtful email I received recently from Asthmatic Kitty, the record label of Sufjan Stevens. Stevens has also recently completed a new album, though he will be selling his through more traditional distribution methods. He’ll be releasing his project on his site on October 12 digitally for $8 and on CD and LP for $12 and $20 respectively. Asthmatic Kitty sent an email to Sufjan’s fans stating they have reason to believe Amazon will be releasing the record at a significantly lower price like they did with Arcade Fire’s latest. Regarding Amazon’s release plans:
We have it on good authority that Amazon will be selling The Age of Adz for a very low price on release date, not unlike they did with Arcade Fire’s recent (and really terrific) The Suburbs. We’re not 100% sure Amazon will do this, but mostly sure.
We have mixed feelings about discounted pricing. Like we said, we love getting good music into the hands of good people, and when a price is low, more people buy. A low price will introduce a lot of people to Sufjan’s music and to this wonderful album. For that, we’re grateful.
But we also feel like the work that our artists produce is worth more than a cost of a latte. We value the skill, love, and time they’ve put into making their records. And we feel that our work too, in promotion and distribution, is also valuable and worthwhile.
I’d be interested in seeing a graph of some sort showing how much people payed for In Rainbows or what the average person paid for it. I stand by the idea that good worth deserves payment. I hope as an artist, my work is worth something to the viewer. I’m hoping I’m making good work that is securing the support of whatever fans I may have.
I like Radiohead and I like Sufjan Stevens and I want them to keep making music I can enjoy. Even when I pay for it.
I devoured this article on Sean Parker, founder of Napster and founding president of Facebook, who will be played by Justin Timberlake in the upcoming movie The Social Network:
The real Parker is both more complex and more interesting, despite the considerable skills of Sorkin and director David Fincher. In fact, Parker, a svelte, wavy-maned clotheshorse, is a uniquely quirky figure in the annals of 21st-century business. At age 30, he is already worth close to a billion dollars, thanks mostly to the cache of Facebook stock he still owns. An autodidact who barely finished high school, he is nonetheless almost painfully cerebral. A sickly child whose asthma sometimes landed him in the hospital, he devoured books from a very young age; his father, a U.S.-government oceanographer, began teaching him programming at age seven. There is hardly a topic—literary, political, medical, or technological—about which he cannot offer an informed and nuanced opinion in his rapid-fire patter. (Don’t get him started on Ben Franklin’s role as a media pioneer.)
A great inside look at America’a largest neighborhood grocery store:
You’d think Trader Joe’s would be eager to trumpet its success, but management is obsessively secretive. There are no signs with the company’s name or logo at headquarters in Monrovia, about 25 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. Few customers realize the chain is owned by Germany’s ultra-private Albrecht family, the people behind the Aldi Nord supermarket empire. (A different branch of the family controls Aldi Süd, parent of the U.S. Aldi grocery chain.) Famous in Germany for not talking to the press, the Albrechts have passed their tightlipped ways on to their U.S. business: Trader Joe’s and its CEO, Dan Bane, declined repeated requests to speak to Fortune, and the company has never participated in a major story about its business operations.
This Charlie Rose interview with Millard “Mickey” Drexler, CEO of J. Crew has gotten me all excited. Drexel talks about everything I like: leadership, micro-managing, craftsmanship, the important of information, uniforms, and availability.
After rescuing Gap in the early nineties and turning it into what we know today, he was suddenly ousted in 2002 and quickly moved to J. Crew in 2005 where he has revived another struggling brand. The entire interview is fantastic and full of great quotes and ideas. The interview started me on a journey of articles on Drexler and J. Crew (this Time article is worth reading) and I can’t help but see the parallels between Drexler and Steve Jobs and J. Crew and Apple.
But that’s not surprisingly, really. Drexler has been on Apple’s board since 1999. He keeps getting better and better.
“In a short period of time it became clear that the apparel business is incredibly entrepreneurial—the barriers to entry are really low, probably even more so now. All these stores and magazines are desperate for new, great things. If you have something honest and interesting and personal and cool and relevant and well-made, you can at least get started.”
