Reflection is never a bad thing. I often criticise myself for being lazy, indecisive, not following through on projects etc (the list is almost endless!), but most of all I have a problem with myself when I am not original or have not at least researched a wide range of possibilities to then decide upon.
Idealistically I want to be an ‘artistic’ leader. An artist, a designer, an innovator, a creator. I want to lead something that is beautiful to the mind of the user. I suppose I tend to be inspired by the likes of Steve Jobs. The extract below is taken from a piece by his former boss/partner via the outstanding Marbury blog.
I remember going into Steve’s house and he had almost no furniture in it. He just had a picture of Einstein, whom he admired greatly, and he had a Tiffany lamp and a chair and a bed. He just didn’t believe in having lots of things around but he was incredibly careful in what he selected. The same thing was true with Apple. Here’s someone who starts with the user experience, who believes that industrial design shouldn’t be compared to what other people were doing with technology products but it should be compared to people were doing with jewellery...
...Sony should have had the iPod but they didn’t — it was Apple. The iPod is a perfect example of Steve’s methodology of starting with the user and looking at the entire end-to-end system. It was always an end-to-end system with Steve. He was not a designer but a great systems thinker. That is something you don’t see with other companies. They tend to focus on their piece and outsource everything else. If you look at the state of the iPod, the supply chain going all the way over to iPod city in China – it is as sophisticated as the design of the product itself. The same standards of perfection are just as challenging for the supply chain as they are for the user design. It is an entirely different way of looking at things...
...What Steve’s brilliance is, is his ability to see something and then understand it and then figure out how to put into the context of his design methodology — everything is design. An anecdotal story, a friend of mine was at meetings at Apple and Microsoft on the same day and this was in the last year, so this was recently. He went into the Apple meeting (he’s a vendor for Apple) and when he went into the meeting at Apple as soon as the designers walked in the room, everyone stopped talking because the designers are the most respected people in the organization. Everyone knows the designers speak for Steve because they have direct reporting to him. It is only at Apple where design reports directly to the CEO.
...Apple is not really a technology company. Apple is really a design company...that’s what makes it different. Look at the stores, at the stairs in the stores. They are made of some special glass that had to be fabricated. And that’s so typical of the way he thinks. Everyone around him knows he beats to a different drummer. He sets standards that are entirely different than any other CEO would set. He’s a minimalist and he is constantly reducing things to their simplest level. It’s not simplistic. It’s simplified. Steve is a systems designer. He simplifies complexity.
As Ian Leslie (the blog author) says,
Most of the world is split into engineers and artists. Artists create or appreciate beautiful things. Engineers make things work. Jobs combined both sensibilities - he saw the whole of the moon.
This of course is what Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google said in condemning the British education system recently in the annual MacTaggart lecture in Edinburgh.
Marbury then links to this speech by Jobs, from which my favourite quote is,
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
How do you do this? How do you marry openness to change and creativity with perfectionist tendencies about standards? The answer seems to be that you design the system and allow the people (the right people) within that system to flourish and succeed. Personally I know I need to develop my artist’s tools and palette of choices. What choices do I make in each given situation? Is it a shade of research, a hint of emotional intelligence, a tint of decisiveness etc? Or is great leadership a blend of all these ‘colour’ choices. What about my tools? Do I have the right canvas? Is it big enough? Is it reciprocal to my choice of paints? Should I be bold and apply strong choices with my palette knife or be more subtle with washes of watercolour?
In the end what I will always aim to do is create the perfect artist’s studio. It will be one with light to offer freedom, ambiance to deliver ethos, materials to give choice and a view to show vision. This way others have the best chance of creating their own picture.
