Within two years the IBM 5100 and Apple I were released, putting MITS out to pasture. Slowly, the need for well designed software came to light. Soon, the Graphical User Interface, Keyboards and Mice, Mac, Windows, and all the rest of it. And now, we have mass-market touch-based computing–Apps. To some they are the dumbest form of technology on the planet. They’re too easy to use. They’re casual. They’re like playing with elastic bands, flicking and scratching, rubbing and pushing. It’s the complexity of full productivity software, with the usability and ‘golly gee stupid simplicity’ of toy blocks.

Why is this the evolution of great software design? Is it just because Apple came out with the first sexy gotta have it touch screen phone? Or is it the goal, the destiny, of all great technologies that,to put it bluntly, idiots can use it.

• A great DVD player is defined by is high quality of picture, as well as its simple clean user interface.
• A great car feels like it’s in park, or barely moving, when it’s cruising as 120 MPH.
• A delicious steak is effortless to easy, and rich with just the right juices and flavors.

Maybe it’s not about technology. Maybe technology is what makes thing possible, but design is what makes them good. The first is about efficiency; the second is about directing some efficiency towards a productive end. I don’t care how fast your car is if it’s too big for the road, or it the roof sometimes flies off (or the heat of the turbo charged engine, heats up the leather seats to a frightful boil).

Yes, I know, there are a few of you out there rolling your eyes at this. I’ve obviously drank the Apple Kool-aid and I’m going to start rattling off all the ways software, technology, and apps should be oversimplified like the Japanese Dojo, with clean white interfaces and Helvetica Neue text. It’s not that there’s something great about white, but there is something incredibly fantastic about unitasking. I’m sorry if all this Zen stuff is putting a cramp in your zafu, but you have to understand just how much of a pain in the ass (for designers and users) complexity really is. Complexity is wasteful. Simplicity is about maximizing utility.

How to bring delight to users? Never ever screw up. Ever. Never bring up a glitch, a bug, never show them all the ugly code that’s under that luscious UI. And for goodness sakes, UPOD! Under Promise Over Deliver. So many people shoot themselves in the foot by not adopting this. Market your software, your project, your lemonade stand, whatever, conservatively, so that users/customers are delighted when they finally try it out.

And in the end, that’s what it’s all about: delight. Delight is picking up your phone, trying out a new app for the very first time, without any instruction, knowing instantly how to use it, what it’s for, and sharing it with all your friends. The writers of this book called it Tapworthy, but I noticed they kept going back to that word ‘delight’, which I love.

What’s the difference between confident people and shy people? Usually the difference between optimism and pessimism. Both groups of people are pretty attached to what they think is a certain outcome. The confident people are attached and expecting a great outcome, the shy people are expecting a terrible outcome. Why? Probably because through the course of their 15-20 years on this planet, they had few bumps and bruises. They may have been picked on in school, or had a bad breakup with a former lover. They may have had strangely abusive relationships with friends, even family, and picked up on certain rules. They carry those rules with them wherever they go, even if those rules haven’t proven themselves to be effective at all.

The cool thing about NLP is that, once you realize that your own personal history is just a mental routine that you go through (eg. you see a pretty girl, imagine her laughing at you, and you give up the thought of talking to her–the girl triggers the routine), you can just… give yourself a new history. It’s true. You can actually reprogram yourself. This book is full of bizarre techniques to do just that.

Think of your lame personal history like a bad TV show. The story’s no good, the jokes aren’t funny, the acting is awful, the ending is disappointing. Now, what if I told you, every time you walk into a board meeting, your brain replays that terrible show, with high volume, bright colors, on a 95 foot display. And people wonder why you’re afraid to speak up.

Fix this, and everything else is easy. Fix the crazy internal beliefs you have, the way you see the world, and shyness/confidence simply evaporates.

The bad TV show has been playing for years because you never got up and changed the channel (probably because we’ve been told since we were born that we couldn’t change the way we were). What if, instead of feeling intimidated in the boardroom, you felt empowered? In your own mind, you can take that show, turn the volume way down, and make it a teeny tiny screen. Then you can take something motivational, like a Rocky Balboa montage, and blast it at full volume, in bright, High-Def Color, throughout your mind’s eye. That’s the difference between super confident, and super shy people.

We just watch different stuff on TV.

To start, I found the title ‘Frogs into Princes’ (though obscure to the casual Barnes and Noble shopper) brilliant in what this book is attempting to do. As any Westerner reading this will immediately understand, the reference is to many a fairy tale about a princess’s relationship with a shapeshifting frog (in some versions, the princess would turn a frog into a prince with her kiss). Presumably, there is supposed to be a lesson in there about how looks can be deceiving (don’t judge a book by its cover etc), but there’s more to it than that. The writers of this book, esteemed NLP researchers and pioneers Richard Bandler and John Grinder, were therapists. This book is actually a transcription of a three day course given to NLP Students who wanted to use the ideas to treat and heal psychologically damaged patients. The idea is that if you can change the way people see the world, you can give them a better outlook, and they’ll go back to being healthy happy productive members of society. Sound crazy? What do you think Tony Robbins has been doing for the last 30 years?

Okay, let’s dig in: Neuro Linguistic Programming (in laymans terms: using language to train/encode the mind) is the process of talking someone (eg. a patient, a friend, a loved one) into seeing the world in a different/new/broader way. Again, if you’ve ever seen demonstrations of Hypnosis, you know exactly what this looks like, and how powerful it is, and how fast it can take effect. But that’s a terrible example, because most intelligent people turn their nose up at Hypnosis and dismiss it as a hoax, or a scam. So here’s my bombshell–my red pill, if you will– to you: what if I told you that you’re performing Hypnosis on yourself and others all the time?

It’s true. After all, if Hypnosis is so powerful that you can ‘activate’ it just by talking, don’t you think you’d be ‘doing it’ all the time? Sure. And you are doing just that. It’s just that, when you do it randomly, the cause and effect is completely missed, and so you think nothing of it. When we feel a little depressed, or ecstatic, we chalk it up to ‘animal spirits’ or a ‘mood’ or a large intake in calories, or certain chemicals (eg. coffee, beer, etc). We find lots of different reasons for our emotions, none of them straightforward, or reliable. In other words, we just accept that our ‘moods’ are largely random, and we try to deal with them ebbs and flows as best we can. We ‘use’ NLP like a youngster swinging a baseball bat at a Piñata. Sometimes you hit something, sometimes you hit others, sometimes you hit yourself. Without even the faintest knowledge of how to use NLP, you end up using it randomly. As a result, you’re skeptical that it even exists.

According the NLP, our emotions and memories can be linked to auditory, kinesthetic and visual cues. Have you ever noticed how you feel a ‘certain way’ whenever you walk into a library, or an examination hall? For some people it’s a positive feeling (the love of knowledge), for some people it’s a negative feeling (the bitterness of academic failure). Maybe you feel a ‘certain way’ whenever you go into a loud dance club. The trick to NLP (and the purpose of this book, and NLP training in general) is understanding how to change these associations to give people more power.

And so the first detractor says,
“But Mike, I feel great in a club because logically it’s a fun place to be.”

And the next detractor chimes in,
“But Mike, I feel nervous in a club because logically it’s an uncomfortable place to be”

How can both be true? The truth is the Dance Club (either the visual stimuli, or the music, or the feeling of being there) isn’t logically or necessarily anything. We just associate it with our previous experiences via visual, kinesthetic and auditory cues that get triggered when we go there. If our associations are positive we’ll look for positive points and highlight them. If our associations are negative (eg. a barfight, rejection, seeing your ex-lover with someone else), we’ll do the reverse. Do you have a love song from your childhood that gives you goosebumps? Maybe your favorite hip hop song from the 90′s that brings back memories. Of course you do. Why do we have these bizarre connections? Probably because that’s the way our brains store memories: linkages between audio/visual/kinesthetic stimuli can protect us for future events. You know, like associating the sound of a lion’s roar with panic/terror.

So in this world, we walk around touching things, talking to people, and logging events and memories, like a huge relational database. Maybe you almost drowned one time in Hawaii, so you developed a phobia of swimming. It’s not crazy, because Logic doesn’t exist. Logic is just a matter of association. Is it logical to be afraid of the dark? Probably. Do monsters exist? Of course not. So why are we so scared to walk around the attic in the middle of the night? Probably because we associate the darkness with every scary movie (bathroom scene, shower scene, being chased through the woods at night scene) we’ve ever watched in our entire lives. The scarier the movie, the stronger the connection.

Boo.

Related Books
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“Introducing NLP” by Joseph O’Connor (Review)
“Mind Lines” by L. Michael Hall (Review)

The thing that you have to understand about Economists is that they’re generally an optimistic bunch, but they’re really annoyed by the complications of…reality. They love models: models are perfect and simple. Because they omit externalities and oddities, they work perfectly. The simplest of models involve but two variables: wine and cheese, money and time, socks and shoes, and so on. As you progress further in your studies of the dismal science, you must heartbreakingly accept that in the real world, there is almost no application for a two-variable model.

It’s heartbreaking because in the sterile simplicity of Economics, the world works perfectly. Everyone who wants a job, has one; everyone who wants to borrow money, can; if you want time off work, you just work fewer hours. In the world of Economics we are all Utility Calculators, and we’re very good at what we do. We scan the job market for opportunities, spot them, and train to be the next Michael Jordan, Bill Gates, or Homer Simpson, depending our utility/salary demands (shockingly, no one ever chooses to be homeless, or a drug addict, or unemployed in this model).

In the world of Economic models, not only do we all have jobs, but we all have jobs that we’re good at, so we make a lot of money. On top of that, we enjoy our jobs. In other words, if you simplify the model enough, you can actually create the conditions for perfect Human Capital Allocation.

My point is this: there are a few differences between the skills in this world, and where they are most needed (likewise, the low-skill human labor, and where that’s needed). It’s just of a pain in the butt that these two groups can’t find each other more easily. If they could, so theorizes Robert Guest, we could solve most if not all of the world’s problems. In a perfect Economic World, every product has the perfect price, there is no Economic profit, and everyone is maximizing their happiness. How adorable.

This is a book about the growing importance of Diasporas, and what it means for all of us (regardless of which country we hail from). So what’s a Diaspora, anyway?

di·as·po·ra 
[dahy-as-per-uh]

1.any group migration or flight from a country or region. Synonyms: dispersion, dissemination, migration, displacement, scattering. Antonyms: return.

2.any group that has been dispersed outside its traditional homeland, especially involuntarily, as Africans during the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

So what happens when the simplicity of Economics smashes head on into the stone cold reality of governments, politics, culture, religion, racism, language, and other barriers? Koreans can work in the USA if they’re willing to learn English and speak it 24/7. No shock there. Americans can work in Paris if they can learn French and take up smoking. Anyone (for example a Mainland Chinese) who doesn’t have the right Passport, can’t leave the country without an invitation letter from Harvard. So, this is the world we live in: some privileged few can re-allocate their Human Capital if they’re willing to overcome real barriers, but many cannot. Robert Guest (big shot at The Economist) is suggesting that if we didn’t have…er…countries, we wouldn’t have all these problems. You could take it a step further and suggest that if we didn’t have ownership/territory/property and all the resulting wars, the world would be a much nicer place. But that isn’t going to happen anytime soon either. Once again, the model, beautiful as it is, crumbles when we touch it with our clumsy human hands.

Real Economic development still comes from the top: great countries with great leaders instilling the big three (education, health and wealth) in a populace in a balanced distribution. But there are a few things we can spread across the world without a visit to the Chinese Consulate: ideas (this might explain why some of the most totalitarian states monitor and block Internet access to ‘radical thinking’). The great thing about Diaspora Networks is that they’re usually made up of the best and brightest. The Mainland Chinese who got into Ivy League schools still make up some of the brightest the country has to offer. With their experience abroad, they represent a fine blend of East and West. They can pick and choose what they like and what they don’t like about both. And maybe, just maybe, they can return to their home country and report, and share, and improve things. For that there are three requirements: first, you must leave your home country; second, you must return to your home country; third, you must love your home country enough to want risk everything (your career, your family, your friendships) to change it.

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“Currency Wars” by James Rickards (Review)
“Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius” by Sylvia Nasar (Review)
“Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World” by Ian Goldin (Review)
“Models.Behaving.Badly” by Emanuel Derman (Review)

Moreover, brands are not only synonymous with ideas, they’re synonymous with colors. Again, this only works if, after decades of promotion, the company has been consistent:Coca Cola is Red. IBM is Blue. John Deere is Green

The list here is short, because frankly, many companies screw this up. They pick the wrong color. They don’t pick a color. They pick two colors. Pepsi, though a very successful company, foolishly picked Red and Blue as their colors when going up against the Red of Coca Cola (the leader in the market). Obviously, they should have just gone with deep Blue. They figured it out eventually, but they’re still stuck with a blue and red logo. Oops.

Not only are companies brands, but people are brands too:

How can a man or woman have a strong brand? Stephen King has a brand (though recently he’s moved away from horror). Stanley Kubrick had one. So did Steve Jobs. Kobe Bryant and Lebron James have brands too (you have to actually have a brand before you can get paid to put it on a shoe or T-shirt, by the way). Anna Kournikova used to have a brand, but she doesn’t play tennis anymore.

These are names. And these are people who at some point in their lives were the first at doing something. They found their niche and they excelled. They achieved tremendous success often at a young age.

And yes, People can have colors. In the latter half of his career, Steve Jobs was almost never seen (even by his family) without his signature black mock turtleneck. Remember Eminem’s white T-shirt and dyed hair? Same thing. When Eminem went away from that, he largely went away from the spotlight. He’s basically a producer now.

How do you build your corporate and personal brand? Surprisingly, it’s not done with ads. In a bit of brilliant irony, most people watching TV (eg. Superbowl ads) assume that advertisements are trying to push a companies products and brands to growth. After all, don’t we hear about a company for the first time, when their new product comes out?

No. Wrong. That might be what some short-lived companies are trying to do, but that’s not possible. The only way to grow is through publicity. And how do you get publicity? How do you get in the New York Times and Financial Post? You get there by being the first and the best. Only when you’ve achieved something of this stature do you start advertising–not to grow marketshare, but to maintain marketshare you already have. Maybe that’s why Amazon.com doesn’t need to advertise. And up until recently, Microsoft Windows didn’t need advertising either. How could these two companies advertise when they seemed to have no competitors?

So look at your own career right now: are you the best in the city at anything? Best in the Country? Best in the world? How can you be number 1 at something? Shrink your focus until you are number one.

So, how do you grow? By always being #1, not by growing so much beyond your niche that you’re no longer number one. Read that last line again. Look at Amazon: they used to be the worlds biggest bookstore. Now they’re calling themselves ‘Earth’s Biggest Selection’. Kinda vague and…is it even true? Probably. But it also means now they’re competing against… Wal-Mart. Was that the original Amazon brand? Buying clothes and electronics? No way. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is very smart, so he can probably pull it off, but it also leaves room for other companies to swoop in and focus on books. That’s probably what the guys at Barnes and Noble are telling themselves.

Hopefully, you don’t have to worry about competitors like Amazon. Hopefully you don’t have to worry about what color their logo is, and what their market share is, because hopefully your company, your product (and your ideas and your personality) are so good that you don’t have to own a current market, because you created a new one and own that.

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“The Expat Era is over, you know. No more hand holding.”

These were the words of my Grad School advisor. Despite her warnings, a few years later, I’m still in China. Now and then people ask me about my first year, and I still look back on that time with fondness: everything was so new, so raw, and so free. If you’re working abroad, or thinking about it in future, definitely check out my true story of getting into, and surviving, China, and all the things I had to learn to make it happen.

21tiger Days includes:

• The real narrative story, as well the critical ‘missing chapter’ Continuum that unifies all the previous books in a whole new light, multiplying their value immensely
• 300+ pages covering all topics in the previous 21tiger books and tons of additional material,including the essay that started it all, and the origins of 21tiger
• Completely redesigned layout and style, perfect for reading on a Kindle or other eReader

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For decades, the United States has been the bastion of great Capitalist Innovation. With the American system, it was thought, you had the greatest chance to take a great idea to tremendous wealth and power. What does that really mean? It means having a great education system, a great financial system, and a great patent system. When you finally take your widget to the market, your accountant might even tap you on the shoulder and ask you about taking the company public. An IPO (Initial Public Offering). Taking the company public is a great way to motivate your employees (they can be paid in stock), and allows the company to grow rapidly in value, based on public perception. A few years later you’re issuing quarterly reports and the stock price is bouncing up and down based on the contents of that report. After a few years, the company begins to stall out: your widgets are more advanced than they ever were, but you latest model hasn’t done so hot in the market. Your loyal customers are content with last year’s model, so the growth prospects are middling, and the stock starts to slide.

What the hell just happened?

The Innovator’s Dilemma reveals the true source of groundbreaking and game-changing technologies, and why the Modern Corporate System works against real innovation. If you can understand why certain companies and entrepreneurs stall out, you can understand how to avoid it.

Notice the word Dilemma in the title. These aren’t failed companies. They’re enormously successful ones. Once you understand that these companies are very smart and very successful (and still subject to this effect), you get a hint of the cause. Having an army of loyal customers sounds like a great place to be right? This book is about how those very same customers, if you listen to them, if you focus group them, if you beg them for feedback, will probably run your company into the ground.

There are two forms of Innovation mentioned in this book: sustaining and disruptive. Sustaining technologies are essentially evolutionary upgrades: taking the same product and bumping up the specs, giving it a bigger screen, or a faster processor. Shallow things like ‘new colors’ also fall into this category. And these sustaining innovations are exactly the kind of things that customers want, and will ask for, if you’re listening. Customers look at the widget and ask, “Can you make it smaller? Can you make it so there’s no noise? Can you do one in gun metal grey?” The technologists in the company declare, “Sure we can! Because it’s been about 9 months since we released a new model, and in that time, the price of those high end chips has come down, and they’re even smaller. Here you go.” And the next version is released. If you listen to your customers, you will keep putting out tiny evolutionary upgrades like this. As we learned in Lean Startup, most of the time focus groups lead you astray. But listening to your actual customers…as a bad thing? What happened to ‘Customer is King’ or ‘The Customer is always Right?’ I suspect those little sayings were actually cooked up years ago by bosses told to their employees, especially in retail operations, to cut down on complaints. That is not a very good mantra for R&D Labs. If the customer was ‘right’, he’d be working at Boeing, Microsoft, or 3M.

The Customer isn’t an expert. Rather than let them boss your around, maybe you should start to take away a little bit of their power. Sometimes the customer isn’t the end user, but the retail store. Retail stores like Walmart won’t be eating the food your company makes, or wearing the clothes. They just want your stuff a dirt cheap prices, and will push you do make uncomfortable compromises to hit those price targets. Are you sure you want to let these guys ruin your flagship product? Sometimes, like Enterprise computing, the customer is the IT department. They want your stuff to be cheap and modular, and they don’t care about the User Experience, because they’re not the ones using the product. To get around this, many companies have done their own distribution channel (open your own retail stores, or just quit retail altogether and go to the web directly), or fired their customers (by killing a product that wasn’t part of the company’s core competency). As a result, these companies are leaner, better branded, and more focused (and more profitable).

So what if you can ignore the customer for a few minutes, and consider developing a disruptive technology. What is that anyway? Intuitively, if sustaining technology is evolutionary, then disruptive must be revolutionary, right? Not quite. Disruptive technologies take a current technology and apply them to a new market. This is like when Nintendo released the Wii. They found a way to make Videogames less expensive, and more fun, to a broader market (everyday people, women, girls, seniors,etc). The result was the most dominant era in Nintendo’s history. Little did they know that they would be disrupted a few years later by … mobile phone gaming. Part of the reason why disruptive technology is so great is that it takes really long to copy. When Microsoft set about copying the Nintendo Wii, first they had to wait a few quarters to see if it was successful (because it was a brand new gaming experience, no one knew if it would take off). For the first 18 months of release the Nintendo Wii was sold out everywhere. Microsoft decided to start copying them. To make up for lost time, they looked around and acquired (link) a company with similar tech, that didn’t even require a controller. While they set about integrating the ‘Kinect’ into Xbox, Sony was doing their own copycat device (Sony Move Controllers). All this time, Nintendo is reporting amazing financial numbers. They were in the Blue Ocean, and making billions. When the Sony and MS devices came out, they were very late, and the response was middling at best: while the Nintendo tech camed bundled with every Wii, the Sony/MS versions would be add-ons, which meant developers had a very small market to develop for this new gameplay. Who wants to sell a game aimed at 15 million users, when they can sell almost the same thing on a Wii, and hit 85 million users? The result is almost no Kinect/Move games are being made, and tech isn’t really being used. Kinect is currently being developed for Windows.

The Sony and Microsoft technologies didn’t fail because management was arrogant; the management team was just being conservative, and smart. They failed because the technology (which had been available for years and years) didn’t make sense until it was too late (when Nintendo showed them the way). You can’t get their by copying, you can only get there by having a visionary leader who looks at the technology and says, “We need to invest in this, even if it doesn’t make sense right now. This is where the industry is going.” The Nintendo Wii, launched in late 2006, had been in development since 2001.

Disruptive technologies can also evolve. This is where you start to see amazing changes in the Industry. The iPod was disruptive at the low end, but eventually evolved into the iPhone, and later the iPad. The iPad sell about 25 million units per quarter now, and is reason both Apple and Microsoft are drastically redesigning their OSes. Mac OS X Lion released this year, has many touch elements, fullscreen mode and even an iOS-style launcher. Many expect Apple to ship iPads running OS X within the next 5 years. Windows 8, due out next year, will be Microsofts answer to iOS for iPad. It will have an App Store and fully touch interface. Can you imagine back in 2001, when Bill Gates first gawked at the iPod, he ever thought his company would redesign their cash cow Windows business because of it’s disruptive powers? Amazon did the same thing with the Kindle. Disrupt at the low-end, fine tune it, then move it up the market (in price and features). In just a few years, I expect Kindle to be putting out some very beautiful Kindle Fires, to give Apple fits.

It’s obvious how the innovators dilemma works for companies. Rather than listen to the customers, ignore them and try to make the best products you possibly can, by eliminating assumptions about what a product should have. I wonder though, if that same lesson can be applied to people. How can people be rapidly innovative and creative? By ignoring the career that makes us the most money, and follow our instincts about what a ideal lifestyle looks like? Why do I have to be married? Why do I have to own a home? Maybe I live in a new city every year, and rent beautiful apartments. Maybe I live with friends and couchsurf for a few years. Maybe I spend ten years mastering my favourite languages and living in various countries around Europe. Or maybe, I’m constantly changing jobs, looking for new work, emulating Howard Roark–an idealist a snob, who falls ass backwards into money and repute? Or maybe, just maybe, following your own path, will lead you to tremendous wealth and power (and just maybe, those white collar guys who told you to get a ‘real’ job, will find themselves sideswiped by disruptive technology).

After all….what could be more replaceable (either by software, or machinery, or outsourcing) than a passionless, unoriginal, hopelessly conservative and painfully average employee?

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The more you try to understand what’s happening to the Publishing industry, the more you start thinking about what’s already happened to the Music and Film industry. It’s all part of the same story.

The Internet = Disintermediation. Taking out the middle man. Here we are, in 2011. Gone are Tower Records and Blockbuster Movie rentals. Many of their competitors have been sold off, and everything (legal and illegal) is going digital, and put up on the web, to be shot between our phones, tablets and connected TVs. This is the dream, right? But if it means Artists aren’t making any money (so they quit making art, and become bankers) then what’s it all for? We need to understand how creative professionals (no matter what form their creativity takes) are going to deal with the onslaught of the Internet.

In 1995 Bill Gates put out a memo to Microsoft Executive Staff, warning that if the company didn’t brace itself for what he dubbed ‘The Internet Tidal Wave’, most, if not all, of their core businesses would be threatened. Microsoft changed, and Artists need to change too. Napster may be long gone, but in its stead is the generation of kids that grew up and went to college with the notion that Media (all media, not just music) should be totally portable and dirt cheap (preferably free).

Not only are publishers being asked to totally change what they do but artists are too. ‘Content creators’ are now asked to use the Internet to:

a) create their own audience and community before the Publisher even thinks about signing you
b) get the rewards of their handwork in a time when almost everything is available on filesharing sites
c) decide between digital and paper/print distribution
d) contend with Environmental effects of their work (eg. paper sucks)
e) contend with the evaporation of major brick and mortar bookstores (and media resellers in general)

Part of the reason for that last point is Amazon, the ultimate online retailer. You can buy anything on Amazon, but at it’s core, they are still a bookseller. And to sell more books, without any experience in hardware design, they decided to build an eReader called the Kindle. With version 4 (and a color version) hitting the… um…Internets this month, not only has the Amazon Kindle legitimized digital reading (just as Apple legitimized legally downloaded music), they’ve inspired copycats (like Barnes & Noble’s ‘nook’ device), overturning the entire Book-buying experience. The Kindle really has become the iPod for books (a faint dream back in 2007), with its own burgeoning line of color cases and accessories, and finally, a big brother Kindle, the Kindle Fire, will expand into the world of tablets. If you were a fan of Steve Jobs for his product designs, and his vision, you can’t help but see a bit that in Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. It’s just a different kind of mastermind.

And what about us, the readers? How have we had to adjust to all this super fast, super convenient, and super cheap media? Well, one quirky drawback to the disappearance of old media (like print newspapers and magazines) is that the Book Review section is getting thinner and thinner. Book reviews are being squeezed on both ends, as the demand for newspapers, and the interest in books in general diminishes (in favour of Youtube, Twitter, Blogs, etc).

Book Reviews in Magazines and Newspapers used to serve a function: An in-depth look at great books was needed precisely because there are so many thousands and thousands of books published each year, and on top of that, they take so long to read that it would be a tragedy to waste your time reading bad books. If you go in to watch a movie and it stinks, you’re still going out, you’re still munching on popcorn, you lean back in a soft chair, mouth agape, and it’s over in a couple hours. Read a bad, boring, stupid book, and you’ve flushed a good 15 hours of diligent reading down the drain. So what do we have now? Well, one of the leftovers from old media is the New York Times Bestseller list.

Speaking of wasting a few bad hours reading bad books, how about burning a couple weeks reading TV hosts rant about Politics (pick your favorite hate-monger). Because the NYT has massively slashed the Book Review budget, they’ve essentially thrown their hands up and said, “Well, I don’t know.. here’s the most popular books this week. Maybe there’s something good in there.” And I don’t blame them: after all, very few people actually read books! (As Steve Jobs once quipped), but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. And it doesn’t mean we have to join in the masses of illiterate zombies. This is what I love about 21tiger and the readers of this site. Not only are you guys reading, but you’re doing it not by abolishing iPads, or websurfing, like some Amish throwbacks, they’re making a point of adding books to their mix of media. Who knows, maybe even in a prominent place.
And you’re doing it in ways that the Internet was built for: by sharing great books, great movies, and great online articles on social networks like Facebook, you’re actually helping your friends find great content and great art–in many ways, the hardest thing to do online, find the very best stuff. And more than just reading great stuff, we should all aspire to create great stuff, whether you’re a writer, design, musician or not. Understanding how to stay relevant and thrive in the 21st Century, when almost everything is being digitized and put on the web, matters to all of us. Surf’s up.

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Years ago, Legendary NBA Coach (recently retired) Phil Jackson started handing out books to his players, to rectify any flaws or hone any mental aspects of the game in the offseason. If a player had a problem with his jumpshot or defense, that could be rectified in practice, but if a player had an overarching attitude problem, or consistency problem, maybe that would have to be rectified with reading, and contemplation. And so, as far back as the Chicago Bulls era, Phil was handing out what he thought were great books, each one suited for each unique player’s game, personality and weaknesses.

A few years ago, I remember hearing he gave “Blink” to Kobe Bryant. Kobe, more than anything, has been known for these insane last second buzzer beater shots. He’s taken tons of them. And if you factor in all the shots he missed, frankly, his hit/miss ratio isn’t even that good. As the leader and captain on the team, he keeps finding himself with the ball in his hands at the end of games, and usually, he can get a shot off. Phil knew that Kobe was under incredible pressure late in games, in moments where every millisecond counts, and that’s why he gave Kobe this book. If Kobe could just stop thinking altogether, he’d know exactly what to do. What could you improve if you could switch off your mind in the clutch?

This review is going to sound like a Coda to the Steve Jobs book from last week. It just turned out that way. Steve, time and time again, relied on his intuition, laying waste to months and months of work, design, coding, budgets etc. What is our Intuition, really, and why is it so damn smart (at some things), if our senses and hunches seem, at first, so vague?

First, let’s go back to early stages of Man’s evolution. We know that at some point, we were moving around, we were mobile, and we probably travelled in packs and tribes. How did early Man communicate? I can only speculate that there were a lot of visual signals (pointing, imitating large animals, etc), sniffing, tasting, yelling, whimpering, and so on. In other words, even if you toss the spoken word completely, you’re still left with 5 senses, and those can still be employed to communicate (as a modern analogue, pro sports works, as does Improv Theatre, as Gladwell highlights in the book). Just look at a baby: the baby doesn’t know what’s going on, but instinctually does certain things to get what she wants. She’s communicating at primitive levels. And we humans, in the modern era, do a weird thing: We teach ourselves to talk, to read, to study. We even learn thousands of very specific words to describe the world around us. Many of us even learn multiple languages. But if you really think about it, from Shakespeare to Stephen King, writing, at its best, is attempting to describe indescribable things. Writing and speaking, are, by their very nature, bastardizations, muddled, rough, approximations of pure thought and feeling. Verbal and written communication is inherently unclear and abstracted. So where am I going with this? Body language and instinctive forms of communication are pure, and it’s that ‘language’ we have to relearn, if we want to read systems and situations holistically. There is holistic communication going on, whether we like or not, it’s just a matter of understanding the signals.

Kobe Bryant dribbling up the floor with 11 seconds on the clock, down by three, isn’t thinking (we hope) logically, but watching the floor for the tiniest of gaps, perhaps even noticing which of the opposing players is breathing heavily, or limping slightly. Where is the weak point?

Why do some electronics companies spend so much time trying to design beautiful packaging, that seems to cradle the device like a precious jewel? Ultimately the packaging is going to be thrown out, right? The answer is that more companies are realizing that the whole experience of using a product contributes to the ‘Customer Satisfaction Rating‘ and if you push up that rating high enough, you get a sense of what kind of high price you can charge. That’s perceived value. Visual, auditory, olifactory (eg. New Car Smell); it’s obvious that all senses contribute, but perhaps those senses about a product, about a person, about a situation, are the most important of all.

Over and over again, we chastize ourselves for ‘judging’ people who dress like hoodlums, or look a little rough around the edges, but ultimately, aren’t we just battling our own inner intuition? When we sit down to lunch with our high school friends, and one of them is wearing a beautiful gold watch, we subconsciously attribute positive traits to him, suddenly our minds start turning: “How did he afford that?”, “What did he say he did for a living? Something financial?” We intuitively know everything we need to know about this person in just a few seconds, as long as we ignore everything we think we know, and listen to what our senses are telling us. Yes it’s tricky. It’s tricky because people often lie to us to improve their outward image/appearance. Toss out the company line, read the body, and the truth is right there, staring you in the face.

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Before I’d even got this book on my Kindle,I’d already written about 3000 words of ‘notes’ for this review. After all, I’d been using Apple products my whole life. Surely, I thought, there’s nothing in the book that’s going to change my opinions. Boy was I wrong. A word of warning: if you love Apple, or its co-founder, or its design aesthetic, or its amazing brand, be prepared to see everything in this book, including things you don’t wanna read. Finding out intimate details about Apple, is kind of like going backstage at a Led Zeppelin concert in the 70′s and seeing your heroes wasted, and babbling like babies, surrounded by bimbos. You might not be ready to meet your heroes, and find they’re human. Maybe that’s what’s so heartbreaking about Steve’s passing. He was human after all. And we wanted him so bad to live up to his image, as a perpetually young, dashing, charismatic genius, who seemingly waved his hands, and showed us the future.

And it hurts because, to some of us, he was a real hero. Maybe because he was creative, in a way that no one else insisted on. Even when the original Mac was a commercial failure, you could tell it was partly a failure because Steve just wasn’t willing to compromise by using cheaper chipsets, hiring cheaper designers, licensing the OS to other hardware makers, and so on. He stubbornly insisted on crafting the minutia of design elements (like nagging the engineers that the chipsets inside the computer, which no one would ever see, were unattractive. It wasn’t a rational kind of design. It wasn’t even perfect. But it was a stubborn insistence on perfection, that kept everyone coming back to the office. It wasn’t the free hand of the market that drove them to improve, it was something else. These guys were driven, sweetly, and relentlessly, by the desire to own and use their own products. That’s how they did away with focus groups. That’s how they broke the mold. That’s how they found flaws, in even their newest and most beautiful, critically acclaimed creations.

That kind of obsession with design– you can’t switch it off. We’re talking about a guy that, for years, refused to have furniture in his house, because he thought the stuff in the store was ugly. A guy who could buy pretty much anything on the market, was constantly unsatisfied by the lack of aesthetic purity in products, in clothes, in architecture and in food, all around him. It’s tempting to picture Steve as some kind of Scrooge figure, but that’s missing the point. Scrooge just wanted money. Steve couldn’t care less. He lived in a modest home and rarely spoiled his children. Steve was obsessed with the products, and just wanted to keep working. What a blessing and a curse to be constantly expecting and wanting perfection. Imagine being Steve’s chef, after working at the best restaurants in the country, Steve spits out your latest dish, and asks for five more, whereupon he would select the best one (based on…nothing in particular, just a feeling). He was almost cartoonish in his kingly fickle sensitivity. Even when he was in the hospital, he complained that the facial masks were badly designed, and ordered the nurses on staff to bring him five different ones and he’d pick the best one. Often, he would complain to his Ad agency that the lasted ads were ‘shit’ and he wanted them to come up with new ones. The ad men would ask what direction they should go in, and he told them he didn’t know– they should just show him a bunch of new ones, and he’d see how he felt about them.

There you get a peek at Steve’s genius and how he operated. He started with the disgust or dissatisfaction with, often, a competitor’s product. At first he couldn’t put in words what was wrong with it, but his intuition was very sensitive (something he claimed to have cultivated during his time in India as a young naturalist hippy). Steve would listen to his intuition, like the beep of a metal detector, he’d try to clasp, out of the ether, exactly how to fix something. He’d know what the ads should be when he saw them. That was all the advice he gave.

To be sure, Steve Jobs is not a lesson in politeness or sweetness or delicate diplomacy. There’s nothing to learn from a man who scarcely gave a thought to the people, the characters in his life (besides the friendships he made through Apple, and of course, his extended family). To Steve, the devices were the characters in his life. They were his children (to borrow an overused metaphor) that often got better treatment than his real-life ones. Steve asked numerous times that Walter Isaacson do this book because he wanted his children to understand him, to understand that his life was filled up with passion, and to understand why sometimes, he was difficult, and sometimes they didn’t see him.

No, the takeaway is not, ‘be a jerk like Steve and you’ll be rich and famous’. Not at all. One of the lessons, in my humble opinion, is that sometimes, rules are meant to be broken. Sometimes it’s okay to drop out of college, if you already know what you want to do with your life. Sometimes it’s okay to get married early (or late) if you found your soulmate. Sometimes greatness, true greatness, not image, or dollar amounts, or marketshare, are what matters. Because when you decide not to play by the rules of the status quo, of the society we live in, that’s how you break free from the rat race, that’s how you win the game.To be a fan of Steve is to be a fan of creativity, in spite of this very consumerist world we live in (the irony was not lost on Steve: Apple contributed consumer electronics to this world, and inspired untold fortunes to be spent on the development and purchase of competing devices). That’s the only way people can love a computer company– a company based on engineering that if casual Apple fan listened to being discussed for more than 30 seconds, they’d be aghast at the dry, even dweeby tech jargon that fills up the halls in Cupertino. We’re not fans of plastic, or the color white, but I think we’re all fans of optimism. We want so damn bad to be optimistic but most of the time we are punished for doing so. Steve broke those rules. Time and time and time again, and employee or business partner threw the status quo of mediocre expectations in his face, and he threw it back at them with a vicious sting. And to his copycats, he was ruthless.

But, maybe we were all copying from Steve. When he was at NeXT, his company was derided, but prolific. At Pixar, he stood toe to toe with the biggest entertainment moguls in the world, and made them beg for his secret sauce. At Apple, as before his exile, the entire PC industry, and now Electronics industry, and then Music, and TV and Film industry, looked to him for ideas. They looked to him for salvation. We were cheating off Steve’s test, his crib notes. We peeked, and copied every single move he made, in a flurry of scribbles, we wrote down every thing he said, without understanding what it really meant or where it came from. And then one day, the worst thing happened: Steve got up, took his exam paper to the front of the room, and turned it in, then walked out the door. We had such a long time with this guy, and yet we still managed to miss the message. We couldn’t copy his genius, we could only copy the tablescraps of his creations. Most of us missed the big picture, and when he ambled out of that room, we knew right away, that we could never fake the rest of the exam. We could never guess what he would have written or what he would have said or done. And if only we’d been listening, we could heard Steve tell us exactly where his genius lied: it lied at the crossroads of technologies and humanity.

From time to time, Steve would taunt his competitors with this Technology and Humanities line, reminding them that they would never be able to create ‘magical’ products as long as they continued to ignore the Humanity in Consumer Electronics, and continued to refuse Humanities Majors from their head offices and research facilities. Apple remains the ultimate Integration Factory, melding the opposites: Hardware and Software, Science and Art, in a way that gives their competitors fits, and their customers wonder and delight.

It is my hope that this book and this review will be the end in what has been, for many, a painful grieving process. Let’s not grieve much longer. Let’s remember with fondness, with love, a hero, who found his calling, and inspired millions of followers, copycats and competitors, to put love into their work. We are all designers. Steve wasn’t a writer, a poet or a painter. He wasn’t a coder or an engineer by trade. Having said that, he was an extremely artistic and technical layman. He was the end user from the future, constantly frustrated and baffled at the clunky technology of the present, who hunkered down and set about fixing the world, one gadget, one button, one pixel at a time.

Finally, to those who fear for the future of the tech industry, and future of Apple, there is a silver lining. A few days ago,Apple held an Event on Campus to remember Steve. For the first time in my memory, at least, Jonathan “Jony” Ive took the podium. Renowned as Apple’s lead Industrial Designer, he was always the quiet genius with the soft English accent. We’d always wanted to know him more, but alas, much of Apple’s genius was using secrecy (just as Led Zeppelin had done) to embolden their creative genius and branding. To hear Jony get up and talk about his best friend was truly moving, and perhaps, to the loyal and brilliant Apple employees (and for the millions of users and fans out there) his voice, more than anyone’s (even Norah Jones’ beautiful tribute) needed to be heard. The message was clear: ‘fear not, the creative genius is not gone’. Jony Ive looks to be, as many have pointed out, the spiritual successor to Steve. Perhaps no one spent more time with Jobs in the last 15 years, and Jony looks poised, charismatic, and unbelievably inspired. In short, he’s not Steve, but he’s another kind of creative genius. And with such compelling and powerful work on the original iMac, iPod, iPhone, Macbook Air and everything else Apple’s done in the last few years, we should all be looking forward to their next creation.

Steve Jobs 1955-2011

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