A Serious Disease

A Serious Disease & the 90% Rule -- There's a quote from Steve Jobs (below) about craftsmanship. It's not about how he demanded pixel-perfect design or beautiful soldering no one would see, but about mindset -- a humble yet hungry desire to solve a problem while being open on how you get there.

Of course, ideas are important and they are often the fuel that inspires that first step of transformation. But 70% of company transformations fail because people (and organizations) focus on the WHAT vs. the HOW. The original 20 ideas that will help deliver efficiency or turn you into an AI Powerhouse are likely not the ones that will deliver the meaningful 10X results you expect. But...along the way, as you make your ideas real, you'll evolve too, identifying bigger and better solutions that will carry your portfolio forward.

The lesson? Hold your good ideas loosely, and be willing to watch them grow into something great.

"You know, one of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left John Sculley got a very serious disease. It’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work. And if you just tell all these other people “here’s this great idea,” then of course they can go off and make it happen.

And the problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it. And you also find there are tremendous tradeoffs that you have to make. There are just certain things you can’t make electrons do. There are certain things you can’t make plastic do. Or glass do. Or factories do. Or robots do.

Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.
And it’s that process that is the magic.

Steve Jobs