“Yes, we know you know that in the space of three short years Apple’s iPhone has humiliated the entire cellphone industry. But we bet you won’t FULLY APPRECIATE just how completely Apple has laid waste to incumbents like RIM, Nokia, and Sony Ericsson until you look at these two charts from Goldman Sachs (via FT).”
Remember: 50% of Apple’s revenue this year came from products that didn’t exist 3 years ago. That is some serious change.
Metacool says the first principle of innovation is:
“constantly seek to experience the world instead of talking about experiencing the world”
Certainly learn from others, but it reminds me of #9 in Bre Pettis’s Done Manifesto:
“People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.”
To make real advances, to innovate and to learn, will require that you try, fail, and try again. It’s called experimentation. And as they said at Grumman Aerospace in the 60′s, “1 good test is worth a 1000 expert opinions”.
Amen.
I love this question: “what would happen if everyone on the team did the job they were least qualified for & spent half their time helping others?” @KentBeck
Here’s what I think would happen:
It would be brilliant.
I’ve been reading The Playful World: How Technology is Transforming our Imagination (you’ll have to read it slowly — it’s kinda dense):
“A tendency to overvalue the ends of technology has become one of the most persistent features of these heady times, but so much technology has been piling up for so long that we are now beginning to see how it transforms the way we thing. We are different for using it. This qualitative change can be seen most clearly in the World Wide Web, which grew from a simple, if subtle, idea into a global unification of all human knowledge, and, perhaps, a catalogue of human experience. Confronted with a space of ideas that has grown well beyond the ability of any person to “know” it, we find ourselves navigators in a familiar but impossibly vast sea of facts, figures, and fiction. Every individual who has become a web surfer has changed the way he thinks and the way he uses knowledge. Every business, as it encounters the Web, changes completely.“
[emphasis added]
“Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus groups—a dozen people riffing on something they know little about—to set strategies. And yet, companies won’t experiment to find evidence of the right way forward.”
The same can be seen with fighting fires: They don’t want to try something and fail, and they don’t want to be at fault if they do fail … so hire consultants!
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