“We are such spendthrifts with our lives,” Mr. Newman once told a reporter. “The trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.”
Aljean Harmetz, "Paul Newman, 83, Magnetic Hollywood Titan, Dies," NYTimes.com, 27 Sep 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/movies/28newman.html.
One of the giant steps in maturing and acquiring knowledge and experience is when we learn for the joy of being edified rather than for the pleasure of being entertained.
Robert D. Hales, "The Journey of Lifelong Learning," BYU Education Week Devotional, 19 Aug 2008, speeches.byu.edu/?act=viewitem&id=1788.
Everyone knows that innovation is risky, and it’s rare that you arrive at your expected destination. But maybe that destination isn’t so important. Maybe what you should be paying attention to are the little detours you take along the way: It’s down those back roads and byways that the real payoff usually is found. Maybe, in fact, the biggest risk in innovation lies in sticking too closely to your plans.
Danny Hillis, "Stumbling into Brilliance," Harvard Business Review, Aug 2002, harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbsp/hbr/articles/article.jsp?value=BR0208&ml_subscriber=true&ml_action=get-article&ml_issueid=BR0208&articleID=R0208L&pageNumber=1.
But the key thing was to be clear about where we were headed. I’ve certainly seen R&D groups, typically funded by large corporations, where they bring together a lot of smart people and nothing happens. And the reason nothing happens is that they don’t have a clear goal.
Ed Catmull interviewed by Gardiner Morse, "Innovation, Inc. (Pixar)," Harvard Business Review, Aug 2002, harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbsp/hbr/articles/article.jsp?articleID=F0208C&ml_action=get-article.
The odd saga of Microsoft’s nascent $300 million rebranding campaign brings to mind this nugget of genius from Paul Rand:
“A logo is less important than the product it signifies; what it represents is more important than what it looks like.”
This holds true not just for logo marks specifically, but also in the broader, more abstract sense of brands in general. No brand is better or stronger than the products and experiences it represents. A good brand is strong because it is true, not because it is clever.
John Gruber, "There's Nothing There," Daring Fireball, 18 Sep 2008, daringfireball.net/2008/09/theres_nothing_there.
Stop defying time and put time to work. Evolutionary design is healthier than visionary design.
Stewart Brand, Part 1 - Flow, How Buildings Learn, BBC series, 1997, www.truefilms.com/archives/2008/08/how_buildings_l.php (quote is at 22:52).
I learned that the series was available on line via Adaptive Path. How Buildings Learn is a great book.
When it comes to user interface, Firefox and Safari have both struggled to balance the desire for new features with the simplicity that contributed to their early success. As the version numbers increase, this kind of pressure is inevitable. What's the best defense against this sort of thing?
Google Chrome makes the argument that Safari and Firefox did not go far enough in their subtractive design approach....
Google's approach with Chrome is different. Rather than removing features from existing web browsers, Google has taken its brightly colored forearm and swept the table absolutely clean. Forget about menu separators; why even have a bookmarks menu? Hell, why have a menu bar at all? Start with nothing. Assume nothing. Add features only as needed, and only in service of a well-defined design concept.
John Siracusa, "Straight out of Compton," Arstechnica, 2 Sep 2008, arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits.ars/2008/09/02/straight-out-of-compton via Rich Goade.
One strategic direction after another -- many of which seemed unlikely at the time -- was embraced with vigor and intensity by Jobs, and his ability to at least briefly convince others that it was right and certain to work (using his famous reality distortion field) is interesting and impressive. But in many ways, I am more impressed with Jobs' ability to quickly drop an old strategy when there was good evidence it was failing, and then turn to the next one with equal enthusiasm.
This may sound sort of crazy, but I also think it is how skilled strategists act when what they are doing carries a huge risk. You need to build enthusiasm about what you are hoping to accomplish, as energy and the self-fulfilling prophecy increase the chances that a risky idea will succeed. But you also need to be equally skilled at pulling the plug when your current tactic is failing
Bob Sutton, "The Pixar Touch: A Great Book by David Price," Work Matters Blog, 1 Sep 2008, bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/09/the-pixar-touch-a-great-book-by-david-price.html via Lynn Monson.
Then again, if we aren’t always at least a little scared, we’re not doing our job. We’re in a business whose customers want to see something new every time they go to the theater. This means we have to put ourselves at great risk. Our most recent film, WALL·E, is a robot love story set in a post-apocalyptic world full of trash. And our previous movie, Ratatouille, is about a French rat who aspires to be a chef. Talk about unexpected ideas! At the outset of making these movies, we simply didn’t know if they would work. However, since we’re supposed to offer something that isn’t obvious, we bought into somebody’s initial vision and took a chance.
Ed Catmull, "How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity," Harvard Business Review, Sep 2008, harvardbusinessonline, via Adaptive Path
What was the last experiment you did at work?
Experiments fuel creativity and change. Experimenting means you are intentionally going off the map and pushing beyond the status quo: you are doing something for which the outcome is uncertain, and doing it on purpose. It's that uncertainty that creates the potential for big positive change.
Scott Berkun, "Do You Experiment at Work?," Harvard Business, 24 July 2008, http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/berkun/2008/07/do-you-experiment-at-work.html