Author: Robin

Apple and others have demonstrated that one of the best ways to be successful over the long term is to focus on the customer: to prioritize customer needs over all else. (I’ve also called such efforts a focus on quality.) But achieving that requires, by definition, focusing less on other things, including the success of the business itself. For example, you might decide to simplify an existing feature instead of adding a new feature that will attract new customers and new revenue.

That is the paradox: If you really care about succeeding in business, the best way to actually get there is to stop caring so much about succeeding in business (so you can focus instead on the customer needs). The more you want it, the harder it is to achieve it! It becomes a sort of mind trick of fooling yourself into wanting something else, in order to actually get the thing you really wanted.

Prioritizing customer needs, of course, is not sufficient to succeed in business — many other pieces must also fall into place. But I think this basic paradox helps to explain why it has been so rare for other technology companies to imitate Apple’s long-term success.

“Every great creative performance […] has been in some measure a bringing of order out of chaos. It brings about a new relatedness, connects things that did not previously seem connected, sketches a more embracing framework, moves toward larger and more inclusive understandings.”

-John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society

“It may be that the creative individual could not tolerate such a wild profusion of ideas and experiences if he did not have profound confidence in his capacity to bring some new kind of order out of this chaos.”

-John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society

“To be fully free to create, we must first find the courage and willingness to let go:

• Let go of the strategies that have worked for us in the past…
• Let go of our biases, the foundation of our illusions…
• Let go of our grievances, the root source of our victimhood…
• Let go of our so-often-denied fear of being found unlovable.

You will find that it is not a one-shot deal, this letting go. You must do it again and again and again. It’s kind of like breathing. You can’t breathe just once. Try it: Breathe just once. You’ll pass out.

If you stop letting go, your creative spirit will pass out.

Now when I say let go, I do not mean reject. Because when you let go of something, it will still be there for you when you need it. But because you have stopped clinging, you will have freed yourself up to tap into other possibilities — possibilities that can help you deal with this world of accelerating change.”

-Gordon MacKenzie, Orbiting the Giant Hairball

“Being infinite, the whole of reality is too much for the conscious human mind to grasp. The best any one of us can do is to take the biggest slice of Infinite Reality that we can hold — intellectually, spiritually and emotionally — and make that slice our personal sense of what is real. But no matter how broad it is, any human perception of reality can be no more than a tiny sliver of Infinite Reality.”

-Gordon MacKenzie, Orbiting the Giant Hairball

John Gruber, “Apple Watch: Initial Thoughts and Observations“:

The most intriguing and notable thing about Apple Watch’s design, to me, is the dedicated communication button below the digital crown. […] Apple is notorious for minimizing the number of hardware buttons on its devices… The only explanation is that Apple believes that the communication features triggered by that button are vitally important to how we’ll use the device.

I had that same thought when viewing the Apple Watch unveiling and noticing the unusual dedicated button: Apple must consider those communication features vitally important.

It took me a little while to get used to the idea, but it now seems quite natural to virtually tap loved ones on the wrist and send them little drawings and heartbeats. Perhaps in five years we’ll be wondering how we ever got by without that capability.

“Breaking down a complex thing into understandable chunks is essential for understanding, perhaps the essence of understanding.”

-Bret Victor, Learnable Programming

 

I use the term information architecture a lot but have found that its meaning is often unclear. The reason I chose that word is simply that I haven’t found or coined a better one yet. To try to describe what I want it to mean, I started by listing close synonyms and related words:

• Conceptual Structure
• Taxonomy
• Object Model
• Model
• Framework
• Classification
• Categorization
• Hierarchy
• Typology
• Decomposition
• Characterization
• Understanding

In the physical world, most objects are distinguished by physical independence. A pencil, a desk, and a chair are self-contained objects — we can use them and talk about them independently from each other. They also relate to each other — a desk is a helpful aid for using a pencil. But we are not confused about the identity of the pieces (pencil and desk). In other words, the “object model” is concretely in front of us.

We create an analogous world in our minds that consists of concepts and theories. Here, our determination of independent pieces is far more subjective. For example, writing and drawing are usually considered separate concepts, but is calligraphy a form of writing, or is it drawing? Or both? Or is it something else entirely? We are free to create whatever concepts are useful to us as we interact with the world and think about what is happening.

When I say information architecture, I’m referring to an instance of this conceptual world. What are the definitions of each component part, and how do they fit together?

In software design, the component parts are things we call “features”, “pages”, “commands”, etc. The designer’s choices about the definitions of these components are as subjective as the concepts in our minds — but they must be understandable by millions of people who use the software! Though most people rarely talk about it or think about it, the information architecture influences everything about the way we learn and interact with a tool.

And just as we can create new concepts like “democracy” with far-reaching effects, we can create new software concepts like “windows”, “hyperlinks”, and “text messages” which transform the way technologies are used.

“Data is only available about the past.”

-Clayton Christensen (link)

This is an obvious but fundamental limitation that we should not lose sight of! Despite the fact that we typically want to predict the future, the hard data all comes from the past.

One way to deal with this is to assume that what was true in the past will still be true in the future. For example: “If the weather is hot today, it will likely be hot tomorrow.” Of course, the farther into the future we go, the more likely it is that something will change. But the continuity assumption allows us to pretend that the past data also reflects the future. And in many cases, this turns out to be accurate.

The other way to deal with this fundamental limitation is to use the data to form theories of correlation and causality. This is what the scientific method is all about. It allows us to generalize from the specific data and say “any time this happens, this other thing will happen.” For example: “this configuration of high pressure systems will cause the temperature tomorrow to fall.”

In the former approach, the data analyst is very interested in specifics, such as outliers and numeric values.

• “What is the temperature?”
• “Are there any problems we need to fix?”
• “Where are our best successes?”

In the latter approach, the analyst is more interested in correlations, patterns, differences and trends.

• “What time of year is it usually hot?”
• “What causes our successes?”
• “What leads to problems?”

It seems likely that different data analysis tools are optimal for these different types of questions.

Why is it so easy to jump to the conclusion that racists are bad people?

Isn’t that conclusion almost as narrow-sighted as racism itself?

I just listened to an episode of This American Life about a white supremacist speech writer who later changed his whole persona and published a best-selling book about tolerance for others and respect for nature. The radio show asserts that this writer “pulled a 180” – completely changed course.

I don’t see it that way at all. As truly terrible as racism is, the evidence is that racists tend to have just as good intentions as everyone else. The white supremacist speech writer believed that blacks and Jews were the cause of many social and political problems. It followed that the way to improve society and work for good was to promote segregation and white supremacy. The theory turned out to be wrong, but the underlying goal was simply to fix society’s problems, not to cause harm.

An old friend of this writer, who is also a white supremacist and southern conservative, was quoted on the show saying the book was not a change of course at all. To him, the book is all about the problems with big government and the importance of honoring the natural order of things.

The way I see it, the speech writer did eventually realize that the white supremacy theory was wrong. But this wasn’t a change to his underlying values. It was merely a change to one of the multitudes of theories he held – such as “things fall when you drop them” and “people enjoy receiving gifts”. However, there was so much tied up in this supremacy theory, socially and politically, that he felt the need to pretend to be a new person entirely.

Why is it so hard to believe that people can update their theories? If you have any doubt, just listen to the Silver Dollar episode of Love+Radio, where a black man befriends dozens of Ku Klux Klan members and gently, lovingly disproves their theory that black people are the problem. Through this process, many Klan leaders updated their theories, and as a result, entire branches of the Klan were quietly dismantled.

No one wants to be wrong! And very few want to be a bad person. If you treat people with the assumption that they are good, they will tend to prove you right. You just need to provide a graceful way to be wrong, so that everyone has the chance to reconsider and update their theories.