{"id":745,"date":"2009-05-24T18:30:28","date_gmt":"2009-05-24T13:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/blog\/?p=745"},"modified":"2009-05-24T18:30:28","modified_gmt":"2009-05-24T13:00:28","slug":"in-pursuit-of-elegance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/2009\/05\/in-pursuit-of-elegance\/","title":{"rendered":"In Pursuit of Elegance"},"content":{"rendered":"

OPENForum recently posted an interview with Matthew May<\/a>, author of “In Pursuit of Elegance”.\u00a0 May has spent close to a decade advising Toyota and other Fortune companies, and brings tremendous insight into what works and why<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Here’s just a small sample…<\/p>\n

Question: Why do companies with unlimited money continue to put out such crap?<\/p>\n

Answer: I\u2019m not sure anyone has unlimited money at the moment, but even those less worse off than others probably suffer from a dire lack of two things: discipline and descrimination. The enemies of elegance are (1) adding and (2) acting. The notion of subtraction goes against how we\u2019re hardwired which is to push, collect, hoard, store, and consume. We\u2019re natural-born adders which is partly why elegance is so elusive. Whether we\u2019re talking about a product, a performance, a market, or an organization, our addiction to addition results in inconsistency, overload, or waste\u2014and sometimes all three.<\/p>\n

And here in the US we have a cowboy instinct, where the bias is for action. In other words, Don\u2019t make me think, let me just do. Doing SOMETHING is deemed better than doing nothing. But that\u2019s not always true. I spent some time with National Geographic adventure journalist Boyd Matson. He taught me how to stand still when the hippos charge. If you act, and run, you\u2019re dead. Stand still, do nothing, they stop charging. But that is fiendishly difficult because it\u2019s so unnatural and counterintuitive. But that\u2019s what happens in business.<\/p>\n

… When Fortune named Apple \u201cAmerica\u2019s Most Admired Company\u201d as well as \u201cMost Admired for Innovation,\u201d honors owing largely to the success of the iPhone, Steve Jobs revealed that a \u201cstop-doing\u201d strategy figured centrally into Apple\u2019s approach. What he said was: \u201cWe tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you\u2019ve got to focus on. But that\u2019s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I\u2019m actually as proud of many of the things we haven\u2019t done as the things we have done.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Why should you know more about “elegance” in the corporate context?\u00a0 In May’s own words:<\/p>\n

Elegance cuts through the noise, captures our attention, and engages us. The point of elegance is to achieve the maximum impact with the minimum input. It\u2019s a thoughtful, artful subtractive process focused on doing more and better with less. That\u2019s especially important during this economic crisis when everyone is trying to move forward while consuming fewer resources.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Go through it in entirety.\u00a0 It’s an excellent read<\/a>.\u00a0 Thanks for the pointer, Guy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OPENForum recently posted an interview with Matthew May, author of “In Pursuit of Elegance”.\u00a0 May has spent close to a decade advising Toyota and other<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[9],"class_list":["post-745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-quality"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/745\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}