we can work harder than anyone

NYT:

At the end of his deeply affecting memoir, the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy writes about his grandson “Little Teddy” — the son of his son “Medium Teddy” who delivered such a heartbreaking eulogy at the senator’s funeral on Saturday — and his difficulties mastering the family tradition of sailing. The senator told the 10-year-old “we might not be the best,” but “we can work harder than anyone,” and Little Teddy stayed with it, grew eager to learn and started winning races. That, the senator writes, “is the greatest lesson anyone can learn”: that if you “stick with it,” that if, as the title of his book suggests, you keep a “true compass” and do your best, you will eventually “get there.”

the wonderful world of eye-dee-oh

Tim Brown:

More importantly, we realized a couple of years ago that most of our best thinking was emerging from within the firm, not from the senior executives. So we built what we called the Tube: a distinctive knowledge-sharing platform. It’s built around collaborating.

At the core is a Web site where every individual at IDEO has his or her own page. On my page, for example, you’ll see all the projects I’ve ever worked on, the experience I have, what I’m going to be doing for the next three months, and my blog. For every project and client, we post stories: how we tackled a question, what we’ve learned from it, who worked on it. Then, in wikis, people who are interested in certain topics share ideas and prototype them together. Our internal discussion group on the social impact of design has tens of thousands of pages…

In another experiment in collaboration, we set up a series of global Rube Goldberg–type machines — virtual exercises in which each action had to trigger some other movement far away. In Palo Alto, a Tickle Me Elmo doll might nose-dive into a mouse, which would click on a print server in Shanghai, which would print out a piece of paper that knocked a ball off the printer, which would trigger a cell-phone signal in London. People had to work together across long distances to get these things to work.

nobody could have planned

NYT on the director Mike Nichols:

The point of all the preparation, he said, is to get to the point where you’re surprised. And, he added, “You want to keep doing it until you get to the thing nobody could have planned.”

The famous ending of “The Graduate,” for example, came about because as it came time to film the scene where Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross get on the bus, Mr. Nichols found himself growing unaccountably irritable. “I told Dustin and Katharine, ‘Look, we’ve got traffic blocked for 20 blocks, we’ve got a police escort, we can’t do this over and over. Get on the bus and laugh, God damn it.’ I remember thinking, What the hell is wrong with me? I’ve gone nuts. The next day I looked at what we’d shot and went, ‘Oh my God, here’s the end of the movie: they’re terrified.’ My unconscious did that. I learned it as it happened.”

you’d better

Martin Scorsese on Michael Powell (via Some Came Running):

He reassured that in me most of all: You believe in an idea, a concept, a story, a statement you want to make, and that’s the foundation of the film. You do not waver from it. Whether it takes you all the way down, whether it takes you to the edge, then pushes you off, even to the point of not making another film for thirty years, you do not waver. You’d better make that picture, even if you know it’s suicide.

Apple design meetings

Businessweek.com:

Every week, the (Apple design) teams have two meetings. One in which to brainstorm, to forget about constraints and think freely. As Lopp put it: to “go crazy”. Then they also hold a production meeting, an entirely separate but equally regular meeting which is the other’s antithesis. Here, the designers and engineers are required to nail everything down, to work out how this crazy idea might actually work. This process and organization continues throughout the development of any app, though of course the balance shifts as the app progresses. But keeping an option for creative thought even at a late stage is really smart.

Danny Boyle

To be a film-maker, you have to lead – you have to be psychotic in your desire to do something. People always like the easy route. You have to push very hard to get something unusual, to get something different… you have to be almost psychotic to do that.

waiting doesn’t pay

Seth Godin:

In my experience, leaders don’t need to wait. There’s no correlation between money, power or
education and successful leadership. None. John McCain was fifth in his class (from the bottom)
at the Naval Academy. Howard Schultz sold kitchen gadgets and ended up at an underfunded
three-store coffee bean chain before he turned it into Starbucks. Ghandi was a seemingly powerless
Indian lawyer in South Africa during apartheid. Waiting doesn’t pay. Saying yes does.

words to use in a press release

NYT:

first, most, fastest, tallest, money, fat, cancer, sex, safe, easy, secret, trick, breaking, toxic, green, environment, foreclosure, baby, breakup, marriage, divorce, Madonna, Jessica Simpson.

but don’t use -

world renowned, once in a lifetime, solutions, leading edge, cutting edge, state of the art, mission critical, and turnkey.

Léon Krier

You must build in such a way that you and those dear to you will use your buildings, look at them, work in them, spend their holidays in them, and grow old in them with pleasure.

(via City Journal)

Jason Fried and his colleague David Heinemeier Hansson

Less is more right?

No, less is less—because more is not better! Everyone tries to do too much: solve too many problems, build products with too many features. Our goal is to do less, to build half a product rather than a half-assed product. So we say ‘no’ to almost everything. If you include every decent idea that comes along, you’ll just wind up with a half-assed version of your product. What you really want to do is build half a product that kicks ass.

(via Bill Taylor)

effortlessly not

Richard Sennett:

The slowness of craft time serves as a source of satisfaction: practice beds in, making the skill one’s own. Slow craft time also enables the work of reflection and imagination — which the push for quick results cannot.

(via Julie Lasky)