Ideas I wanted to remember and share.
“Newton ‘understood’ the universe by reducing whole planets to points that move according to a fixed set of laws of motion. Is this grasping the essence of the real world or hiding its complexities? Part of what it means to be able to think like a scientist is to have an intuitive understanding of these epistemological issues and I believe that working with [LOGO] can give children an opportunity to get to know them.”
-Seymour Papert, Mindstorms (p. 117)
“Discovery cannot be a setup; invention cannot be scheduled. Can an adult and a child genuinely collaborate on elementary school arithmetic? A very important feature of work with computers is that the teacher and the learner can be engaged in a real intellectual collaboration; together they can try to get the computer to do this or that and understand what it actually does. New situations that neither teacher nor learner has seen before come up frequently. Sharing the problem and the experience of solving it allows a child to learn from an adult not “by doing what teacher says” but “by doing what teacher does.”
-Seymour Papert, Mindstorms (p. 115)
The modern construction site meets timeless human needs.
“Statistics is about protecting analysts from false conclusions based on data containing random error.”
-Leland Wilkinson
From a recent interview with Tim Cook (Apple’s CEO):
Tim Cook: “Steve [Jobs] felt that most people live in a small box. They think they can’t influence or change things a lot. And more than anybody I’ve ever met, Steve never accepted that. He got each of us to reject that philosophy. Through his actions, way more than any preaching, he embedded this nonacceptance of the status quo into the company. [And] his selection of people helped propel the culture.”
“He’s not given credit as a teacher. But he’s the best teacher I ever had by far. There was nothing traditional about him as a teacher. But he was the best. He was the absolute best.”
Interviewer: Do you fear that your strategy of vertical integration is becoming too complex, too unmanageable, too big a job?
Tim Cook: “No, because we don’t live in the box. We are outside of that. What I see is that we have to continually have the discipline to define the problem so that it can be done. If you try to engineer to the complexity, then it does become the impossible dream. But if you step back and think about the problem differently, think about what you’re really trying to do, then I don’t think it becomes an impossible task at all.”
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Define the problem so that it can be done. See past the complexity. Think differently.
I think that’s a pretty good definition of leadership.
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“Invention fights specialisation at every turn. Human nature and human progress are polymathic at root. And life itself is various — you need many skills to be able to live it.”
-Robert Twigger, Master of Many Trades
“The systems that best exemplify direct manipulation all give the qualitative feeling that one is directly engaged with control of the objects — not with the programs, not with the computer, but with the semantic objects of our goals and intentions.”
-Hutchins, Hollan, and Norman, “Direct Manipulation Interfaces” (1985)
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