Sublime

Jobs’s basic operating principles have become the stuff of legend: (1) imagine a product that is “insanely great,” (2) assemble a small team of the very best engineers and designers in the world, (3) make the product visually stunning and easy to use, pouring innovation into the user interface, (4) tell the world how cool and trendy the product is

McDonald’s is an excellent service provider in their niche, not so much because they are excellent at service delivery, but rather because they have reduced their promise to a very narrow window, reducing variety in their inputs and controlling the environment as much as possible.

Making a choice that is 1 percent better or 1 percent worse seems insignificant in the moment, but over the span of moments that make up a lifetime these choices determine the difference between who you are and who you could be. Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.

Over time, those one-page summaries became the de facto standard for settling product arguments throughout the organization.

However, even these habits are delicate. When a fast food restaurant closes down, the families that previously ate there will often start having dinner at home, rather than seek out an alternative location. Even small shifts can end the pattern. But since we often don’t recognize these habit loops as they grow, we are blind to our ability to contro

David Brooks, “The Moral Bucket List.” Nir Eyal, Hooked. Anything by Kevin Kelly, most recently The Inevitable.

Richard Koch richardkoch8020@gmail.com

What happens if we turn the old model inside out and have the audience/customers in charge? They would be Toffler’s prosumers—consumers who were producers. As innovation expert Larry Keeley once observed: “No one is as smart as everyone.”

Page named Harris to the newly invented position of “product philosopher.” But then: Nothing much changed. In a 2016 profile in the Atlantic, Harris blamed the lack of changes to the “inertia” of the organization and a lack of clarity about what he was advocating.