Steve was not a spiritual guru or a political leader, but a force to reckon with… someone with both the determination and the talent to change the world.  And, change the world he did. 

Tomes have been written already on the man and his legacy, and a lot more will be said in the years to come.  Sure, he gave the world the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad.  But he did much more than that.  Steve’s work touched millions of lives in more ways that even he could have imagined.  I just wanted to take this opportunity to pen down what he meant for me, and to thank him for the contribution he made to my life…

Thank you, Steve, for teaching us that “Design is how you Think!”

Thank you, Steve, for demonstrating that you can follow your dreams and change the world, without compromising on one or the other.

Thank you, Steve, for proving beyond a doubt that Less is More.

Thank you, Steve, for the learning that we don’t have to choose between Form and Function.

Thank you, Steve, for showing the world that it’s possible to raise the bar so high that you touch the sky.

Thank you, Steve, for having the courage and the conviction to go with your instincts and not ask us – the consumers – what we really wanted.

Thank you, Steve, for making a dent in the Universe…

You will be missed.

Quality – Who can argue with the need to have quality? Total Quality Management (TQM,) Continuous Improvement (CI,) and Six Sigma programs all have been glorified by companies hoping to improve product or service quality. If you’re trying to fix a broken product, or process, these work pretty well at helping everyone do their job better.

But these programs live with the mantra “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. Measure everything that’s important.” If you’re innovating, what do you measure? If you’re in a new technology, or manufacturing process, how do you know what you really need to do right? If you’re in a new market, how do you know the key metric for sales success?

The key to success isn’t to have critical metrics and measure performance on a graph, but rather to learn from everything you do – and usually to change. Quality people hate this, and can only stand in the way of trying anything new because you don’t know what to measure, or what constitutes a “good” measure.

Now, I’ve spent a fair bit of my working life as a Six Sigma / Quality champion, and an even longer tenure developing cutting-edge Technology solutions for organizations.  Given my background, I always viewed Systems and Processes as two sides of the same coin.  In fact, I believed that real success in one depended on success in the other. 

But, Hartung has a point.

If you go by the classical approach, practitioners of Quality typically stick to the “what gets measured, gets improved” argument and, therefore, are unable to get a good grip around ideas that reek of blue-sky thinking and innovation.  How ironic that the champions of Change become obstacles to change itself!

On the other hand, innovators have to contend with uncharted territories and unknown experiences, often-times operating in an environment that does not understand their unique needs.  As Hartung elaborates:

… When you’re innovating, what you don’t know far exceeds what you know. You don’t know the market size, the price that people will pay, the first year’s volume (much less year 5,) the direct cost at various volumes, the indirect cost, the cost of marketing to obtain customer attention, the number of sales calls it will take to land a sale, how many solution revisions will be necessary to finally put out the “right” solution, or how sales will ramp up quarterly from nothing. So to create a business plan, you have to guess.

Everything done to efficiently run the old business is irrelevant when it comes to innovation.

When you think about it, for any organization to succeed, it must achieve a fine balance – between maintaining status quo and forging a new path, between encouraging new ideas and rewarding evolutionary growth, and ultimately, between Quality and Innovation.  Easier said than done, don’t you think?

The amount of digital information created in 2010 (1.2 zettabytes) will equal 75 billion fully-loaded 16 GB Apple iPads, which would fill the entire area of Wembley Stadium to the brim 41 times (via Information-Management.com, May 2010)

The amount of digital information created annually will grow by a factor of 44 from 2009 to 2020, as all major forms of media – voice, TV, radio, print – complete the journey from analog to digital (via EMC)

Twitter is estimated to have 175 million users, generating 95 million tweets a day (via Twitter.com, Sep 2010)

As of mid 2010, Facebook reports more than 500 million users worldwide who share more than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) each month (via Facebook.com)

Shocking statistics, aren’t they? The question really is: How are you gearing up for it?

Here’s what I think.  The problem is only going to get worse in the years to come.  There’s not much you and I can do about that.  What we can do, however, is develop the ability to filter out the noise from the music.

That’s easier said than done, especially when you’re looking at “information overload” so large that no single phrase can adequately describe how BIG the overload really is.  We’ve all faced consequences of it, either by way of a burgeoning Inbox that refuses to quiet down to manageable levels, or via the endless barrage of tweets and status updates we have subscribed to, or even the always-on Blackberry culture that keeps us tethered to the office.

For some, it may mean reducing the number of xml subscriptions in their newsreader, reviewing the number of twitterers to follow, or even unfriending some folks from their FB list, even if it means risking some “social quotient” in the bargain.  For others, it may mean changing their complusive habits, and slowly but steadily, learning the art of focusing on the essentials and ignoring the rest… 

Whatever be our approach, we’re all going to have to make some tough choices.  It’s the only way out.

P.S. For good measure, let me share with you a link to an incisive TED talk [video] on achieving the balance we so desperately need. Highly recommended.

A couple of years later, hungry for some large-scale enterprise experience, I would find myself joining an organization with more than 7,000 employees, and growing at the rate of more than a 100% each year.  I left that organization four years later, after I’d helped scale up business processes impacting more than 30,000 employees, and delivered solutions for a channel/partner network that was 4x the size it was when I’d first joined.  I would soon move to a sister company within the Group that was, at least in some respects, at an earlier point in evolution than the one I was moving from.  This, new, organization employed nearly 3,500 people, but dealt with a hugely diversified range of product & service offerings within the Financial Services space.

My associations with all of these, ranging from small boutique firms to very large enterprises, has been a very rewarding experience in more ways than one. 

Over the past few years, when I looked back on all those stints, I could not help but ask myself : Is there a sweet spot for me, personally?  The answer I came up with was, “Yes!”

As of last month, I have accepted an exciting, new assignment as “Head – Business Solutions & Innovation” with a dynamic, highly respected and diversified provider of Financial Services.  While it has a rich past that goes back decades, it also stands poised to leverage new ideas and breakthroughs, offering me the opportunity to be a part of its growth story, in the years to come.

Here’s to a new beginning…

Here are some of my favourite ones from the list… 

- Who are you trying to please?
- Are you trying to make a living, make a difference, or leave a legacy?
- Is it more important to add new customers or (engage with) existing ones?
- Are you prepared to actively sell your stuff?
- Which: to invent a category or to be just like Bob/Sue, but better?
- Choose: teach and lead and challenge your customers, or do what they ask…
- Do you want your customers to know each other (a tribe)?
- What does busy look like?

 These questions may just mark the beginning of a journey for you.  And, an important one at that…

Beginning to think about design by exploring the tenets of the Zen aesthetic may not be an example of Lateral Thinking in the strict sense, but doing so is a good exercise in stretching ourselves and really beginning to think differently about visuals and design in our everyday professional lives…

Kanso – Simplicity or elimination of clutter
Fukinsei – Asymmetry or irregularity
Shibui/Shibumi – Beautiful by being understated
Shizen – Naturalness; Absence of pretense or artificiality
Yugen – Profundity or suggestion rather than revelation
Datsuzoku – Freedom from habit or formula
Seijaku – Tranquility or an energized calm (quite), stillness, solitude

As Reynolds explains, “The principles are interconnected and overlap; it’s not possible to simply put the ideas in separate boxes”.  But, his post does a fine job of making these timeless principles available to us, so that we can use them to change our thinking on a number of things, not just design-related challenges.  Read the entire post.

No one is rational all the time. In fact, somewhere along the way we made ‘irrational’ into a bad word, but it shouldn’t be.

If you’re running Adwords on Google, I hope you’re making rational decisions based on clickthrough and conversion… (But) Irrational passion is the key change agent of our economy. Faith and beauty and a desire to change things can’t be easily quantified, and we can’t live without them.

There’s room for both rational and irrational decision making, and I think we do best when we choose our path in advance instead of pretending to do one when we’re actually doing the other. The worst thing we can do is force one when we actually need the other.

I’ve seen this manifest countless times, and I couldn’t agree more.

As luck would have it, just yesterday, I encountered an enlightening post by Seth Godin that listed most of the essentials.  Here is the stuff that made sense to me:

If you can’t write down clear ground rules about which rules are firm and which can be broken on the path to a creative solution, how can you expect the innovator to figure it out?

Simplify the problem relentlessly, and be prepared to accept an elegant solution that satisfies the simplest problem you can describe.

After you write down the ground rules, revise them to eliminate constraints that are only on the list because they’ve always been on the list.

Hire the right person. Don’t ask a mason to paint your house. Part of your job is to find someone who is already in the sweet spot you’re looking for, or someone who is eager and able to get there.

Demand thrashing early in the process. Force innovations and decisions to be made near the beginning of the project, not in a crazy charrette at the end.

Pay as much as you need to solve the problem, which might be more than you want to. If you pay less than that, you’ll end up wasting all your money. Why would a great innovator work cheap?

Cede all issues of irrelevant personal taste to the innovator. I don’t care if you hate the curves on the new logo. Just because you write the check doesn’t mean your personal aesthetic sense is relevant.

On my part, I’d also add the following…

• Do your homework on what the canvas is all about and what your specific need is, before you meet prospective vendors.  e.g. If you’re out to get a website for your business and know “nothing about website design”, spend some hours surfing the web and noting down the sites you like and the ones you don’t, including why.  That way, when you talk to prospective vendors, you can have a more informed discussion.
• Know the kind of customer you’re trying to attract, and how they are likely to behave.  There is just no substitute for that clarity, and it’s not an area that requires technical expertise from you.
• When you ask someone for a recommendation of a vendor, specify that you’re looking for someone you can trust not to cheat you, nothing more.  The evaluation of their competence in relation to your need, should be entirely up to you.
• There will always be a way to get all of it (or some of it) done at no cost or low cost, but there will also be tradeoffs.  Take that approach if you can live with the tradeoffs involved.

Print this list out and check against each item.  You’ll surely be better off, no matter what your endeavour.

So you have your passion picked out? Here’s how to turn it into a living.

1. Learn. Read up on it, from blogs to magazine articles online to books to ebooks. Look for the free stuff first… Find others who are doing it well and study them closely.

2. Do. Do not put this step off for months and months while you learn. You’ll learn most by doing. Start doing it for free. Do it for friends, family. Find clients who’ll pay a small amount. Start a blog and write about it… Continue to do step one as you’re doing this step.

3. Get amazing at it. This is just more doing and learning.

4. Start charging. As soon as you can do it well enough to charge, do so. You can start low — the main thing is to keep getting experience, and to get clients who can recommend you to others. You want to work hard to knock their socks off. Slowly raise your rates as your skills improve.

5. Keep improving. Never stop learning, getting better. Use client or reader feedback to help.

6. Build income streams. This is where the money starts coming in. You can start this step at any time — don’t wait until you’ve done all the other steps. Build as many income streams as you can, one at a time. (Examples included in the original writeup)

When you think about it, that’s all you really need to do!  Yes, it takes some doing.  But it can help you go from dream to reality, no matter what your passion is.  That’s pretty powerful, isn’t it?!

The ZenHabits writeup also offers helpful pointers on issues pertaining to quitting your job, investing in office space, etc.  So, if you have ever kindled that entrepreneurial fire within you, get cracking on it…

The data shows, for example, that texting while driving is more dangerous than driving drunk. It doesn’t feel that way, of course, but will you respect the data and stop, cold turkey?

The data shows that the vast majority of wine drinkers can’t tell the difference between a $20 bottle and a $100 bottle. Will that keep you from buying the fancy wine? How much is the placebo effect worth?

The data shows that famous colleges underperform many cheaper, friendlier, smaller colleges. How much is your neighbor’s envy worth?

As his post reminds us, “these are just a few of the millions of examples of counter-intuitive data-driven findings”.  The real question is this:

What are you going to do when your hunches don’t match the data that’s now pouring in?

Something to think about, isn’t it?