Matthew E. May is the author of In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing and the ChangeThis manifesto called Creative Elegance. He spent nearly a decade as a close adviser to Toyota and works with creative teams and senior leaders at a number of top Fortune companies.

1. Question: How do you define elegance?

Answer: Something is elegant if it is two things at once: unusually simple and surprisingly powerful. One without the other leaves you short of elegant. And sometimes the “unusual simplicity” isn’t about what’s there, it’s about what isn’t. At first glance, elegant things seem to be missing something.

2. Question: Why is elegance so important?

Answer: Elegance cuts through the noise, captures our attention, and engages us. The point of elegance is to achieve the maximum impact with the minimum input. It’s a thoughtful, artful subtractive process focused on doing more and better with less. That’s especially important during this economic crisis when everyone is trying to move forward while consuming fewer resources.

3. Question: What is the essence of elegance?

Answer: Elegant ideas—products, services, performances, strategies, whatever—all have some degree of these four elements: symmetry, seduction, subtraction, and sustainability. A great example is Sudoku. First, Sudoku is symmetrical, with its squares inside of squares and mirrored distribution of clues. Second, it is seductive—to the point of being irresistible and craze-worthy.Third, it’s subtractive in design. The Sudoku puzzle designer crafts a complete solution and then symmetrically subtracts filled-in squares to arrive at the starting grid which is predominantly empty. Finally, and as a result of these first three, the game is sustainable in terms of both the infinite number of games that can be constructed, as well as players’ interest in the game. And yet it’s so simple.

Sudoku could not be easier to learn: you do not even need to know how to count, its one rule can be explained in a single sentence, and it takes but a minute to grasp plus it is universal in nature unlike crossword puzzles which are knowledge-based as well as language-specific. And yet, the underlying complexity behind the logic needed to solve a Sudoku puzzle can be incredibly challenging.

4. Question: Which companies are your favorite examples or elegance?

Answer: Toyota is one. With Scion, they refused to advertise, and they drastically reduced the number of standard features to allow Generation-Y buyers to make a personal statement by customizing their cars. The Scion xB flew off the lot when it came out.Another example is the British bank, First Direct. It is branchless and became the most highly recommended bank in the United Kingdom. Then there’s the French manufacturing company FAVI that realized better employee relations when they eliminated their human resources department. W. L. Gore and Associates completely eliminated job titles and typical corporate hierarchy in order to release the creativity of its staff employees. And finally there’s always the usual suspects like the Google interface and Apple’s clean design.

But my all-time favorite is In ‘N Out Burger. a freakishly popular hamburger chain that started in Los Angeles a half century ago, that has built its brand on the “less is more” approach with an interesting twist. The menu offers only five items: a hamburger, cheeseburger, double burger, French fries, and a short list of beverages. By keeping things simple, founder Harry Snyder says he is able to provide the highest quality food in a sparkling clean environment.

In ‘N Out understands that seduction, and that subtraction can simply mean “not adding.” By resisting formal menu expansion they’ve avoided the self-defeating overkill seen in consumer electronics, with its “feature creep,” and the resulting “feature fatigue. ”Their only rule is “to do whatever the customer wants done to a burger.” In fact, Wikipedia shows a photograph of a 20X20, and on a Halloween weekend in October 2004, Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh and blogger What Up Willy ordered and ate—with a team of six others—a 100X100, consuming nearly 20,000 calories in less than two hours.

The twist? There is a secret menu at the restaurant that only regulars are privy to – mostly just different combinations of the standard fare like three burger patties and three slices of cheese. But these special combos have never been on the regular menu, and apparently never will, because they offer the customer a certain “mystique.”

5. Question: Which companies are your favorite bad examples?

Answer: There’s nothing elegant about excess. Open up Microsoft Word and get all your toolbars out in the open. Stuff you’ve never seen, don’t need, certainly never use, and probably don’t even know how to use. Look how much space is left for the primary value-adding function of Word which is writing. And not to beat the downtrodden U.S. automakers, but for all the divisions, brands, and bureacratic layers, you can count on one hand the number of truly compelling models.

6. Question: Why do companies with unlimited money continue to put out such crap?

Answer: I’m not sure anyone has unlimited money at the moment, but even those less worse off than others probably suffer from a dire lack of two things: discipline and descrimination. The enemies of elegance are (1) adding and (2) acting. The notion of subtraction goes against how we’re hardwired which is to push, collect, hoard, store, and consume. We’re natural-born adders which is partly why elegance is so elusive. Whether we’re talking about a product, a performance, a market, or an organization, our addiction to addition results in inconsistency, overload, or waste—and sometimes all three.

And here in the US we have a cowboy instinct, where the bias is for action. In other words, Don’t make me think, let me just do. Doing SOMETHING is deemed better than doing nothing. But that’s not always true. I spent some time with National Geographic adventure journalist Boyd Matson. He taught me how to stand still when the hippos charge. If you act, and run, you’re dead. Stand still, do nothing, they stop charging. But that is fiendishly difficult because it’s so unnatural and counterintuitive. But that’s what happens in business.

7. Question: What’s the first step a CEO should take to get her company on the right track?

Answer: When Fortune named Apple “America’s Most Admired Company” as well as “Most Admired for Innovation,” honors owing largely to the success of the iPhone, Steve Jobs revealed that a “stop-doing” strategy figured centrally into Apple’s approach. What he said was: “We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done.”That’s the mindset.

And step one? Create a solid stop-doing list. Sounds simple, but few do it. Guru Jim Collins says you absolutely must have a “stop-doing” list to accompany your to-do list. As a practical matter, he advises developing a strong discipline around first giving careful thought to prioritizing goals and objectives, and then eliminating the bottom 20 percent of the list. If as CEO you do that, and demand that everyone do that, including designers and engineers with respect to the stuff they’re building, your ugly crap quotient goes way down.

8. Question: Do you think there’s a position for CTOs (chief taste officers) in companies?

Answer: Probably, but then here’s the tricky part: who do you appoint to find and hire them? You have to understand elegance first to find it. Ideally you’d like everyone to develop a sense of elegance in whatever they’re trying to do. I’m really encouraged that schools like Stanford, with the D School partnering up with the IDEO brothers Kelley, teaching “design thinking” to MBAs, and the Rotman school, lead by Roger Martin and his “Integrative Thinking” discipline, are in the mix.They’re teaching people how to balance and master the creative tension between getting it out and getting it right. It takes no discipline or genius to either spend money or to make broad cuts which inevitably tend to put everything on hold and inevitably destroy whatever value might exist.

9. Question: How should companies make engineering and user-interface design work together?

Answer: Study the best: Google, Apple, Lexus, and Ferrari. They understand that complexity is their best friend, not an enemy. They understand it, so they can exploit it. The Google interface is clean and simple though the algorithm is massively complex. Even Einstein understood this. E=mc2 has an easy and immortal ring to it. Can you imagine if he rolled it out with the 40 page proof behind it?It’s about finding the simplicity on the other side of complexity as Oliver Wendell Holmes put it. It’s about playing chess, not checkers. Both are played on the same board yet chess demands more strategic thinking and much deeper experience to truly master the goal of immobilizing—checkmating— the opponent’s king.

Checkers, with its mostly single-step play, is far less demanding, easier to learn, and quicker to play. Chess masters understand the nature of complexity—that it is part of the game, and it’s why they play it. The challenge and thrill lies in the endless search for ways to manage and exploit those complexities. Make it SEEM blazingly simple. That’s elegance. Complexity isn’t the enemy to a chessmaster—without it they’d be playing checkers. But there’s times when we look at the stuff we buy or experience and we swear that the design and engineering weren’t even playing checkers. They were playing Whack-A-Mole.

10. Question: Why do you think the Japanese have such a way with elegance?

Answer: From a practical and business point of view, there’s a historical event. The first helps you understand the second. Culturally, as the Zen philosophy took hold in Japan during the 12th and 13th centuries, Japanese art and philosophy began to reflect one of the fundamental Zen aesthetic themes, that of emptiness.In other words, less is best.

Why? In the Zen view, emptiness is a symbol of inexhaustible spirit. Silent pauses in music and theater, blank spaces in paintings, and even the restrained motion of the seductive geisha in refined tea ceremonies all take on a special significance because it is in states of temporary inactivity or quietude that Zen artists see the very essence of creative energy. The goal is to convey the symmetrical harmony of nature through clearly asymmetrical and incomplete renderings; the effect is that those viewing the art supply the missing symmetry and thus participate in the act of creation.

As for the second reason, it’s kaizen—continuous improvement. It means “no best, only better.” You see the word zen in there right? It’s zen for business, and it came about during the US occupation, 1945-1952, under MacArthur. We flattened Japan. We had to build it back up from the ashes. Their economy was in shambles, and they had just begun to industrialize prior to WWII. We taught them continuous improvement, because they had no resources — no land, facilities, or money. They had human capital.

To stop improving was to stagnate—which was to die. It was a war on all the things that make for crap: overproduction, overprocessing, defects, conveyance, unneccessary motion, inconsistency, and inventory. In short, Japan HAD to get elegant. They’ve never forgotten how they did it, and they’ve institutionalized it.

11. Question: What websites do you consider elegant?

Answer: I’ll make you blush: I love the whole “create your own AllTop page.” It’s subtractive because I select from the universe of blogs. It’s sustainable because the bloggers’ continuous ideas that supply the ongoing content. It’s symmetrical because something is symmetrical if you can do something to it and yet it looks the same: I select my topics, create my own magazine rack, as it were, yet the AllTop site remains unchanged. It’s seductive because you don’t get the whole blog, just a snippet, which whets your appetite for the whole sushi roll. [Matt’s MyAlltop page is here.]

Beyond that: Twitter! I’m relatively new to it, (http://twitter.com/matthewemayhttp://twitter.com/matthewemay) but utterly addicted. Something about those 140 characters mandates creative subtraction. Therefore, a good tweet requires good editing. There’s a certain symmetry…everyone is treated the same. There’s built-in seduction because you always want to know more about who you’re following. Sustainability—they’re working on the financial aspect of the sustainability element, but I doubt with the mounting popularity that that will be a problem.

12. Question: Holy kaw, you are making me blush! Then how do we know features to add to Alltop/MyAlltop and balance elegance against feature requests?

Answer: I spent some time with the late traffic designer Hans Monderman and the UK urban designer Ben Hamilton-Baillie. Together they have designed and redesigned high traffic intersections in the Netherlands and UK to be nearly devoid of traffic controls. I’m talking intersections with over 20,000 vehicles, pedestrians, and bikes daily.

Flow and safety have doubled because they create “shared space” with no right of way. You have no choice but to be cautious and alert—and use your noggin. Ben says this: “Research shows that over 70 percent of traffic signs are ignored by motorists. What’s wrong with how we engineer things is that most of what we accept as the proper order of things is based on assumptions, not observations. If we observed first, designed second, we wouldn’t need most of the things we build.” But it is not quite as simple as the trite cliché “look before you leap.”

What Ben really means is that we should become better detectives. That’s how you keep feature creep in check. The one constant source of elegant innovation is observation. The Japanese call it genchi genbutsu which means “go look, go see.” That allows you to triangulate around the customer: observe them not just by asking them what they want—they don’t always know, can’t always articulate it, and they’ll change their mind tomorrow—but by becoming one yourself.

You have to be a bit of an undercover cop. That way you don’t get too clever and add stuff because you think it’s cool—which is a design bias. Instead, you add stuff that adds value—which is a customer bias. You’ve done that with My.AllTop.com. You’ve added a customer-designed feature without cluttering up your interface. It’s what In ‘N Out Burger does: let the customer do the adding.

I am reading a book called Weird Ideas That Work by Robert I. Sutton. Professor Sutton from Stanford is a unique voice with an urgent message about how to generate and capitalize on new ides.  Since I count myself as an entrepreneurial person, I loved few ideas and want to share them with you. The book has 3 major parts; Why the weird ideas work, the weird ideas and putting the weird ideas to work. I did not like all of the weird ideas in this book and i am a little skeptical about some of them. But, still want to share few of my notes with you. If you are interested in management and innovation, I strongly recommend you to read this book.

Weird Ideas;

1- Hire slow learners

2- Hire people who make you uncomfortable, even those you dislike

3- Hire people you do not need

4- Encourage people to ignore and defy superiors and peers

5- Find some happy people and get them to fight

6- Reward success and failure, punish inaction

7- Decide to do something that you will probably fail, then convince yourself and everyone else that success is certain

8- Think of some ridiculous or impractical things to do, then plan to do them

9- Avoid, distract and bore customers, critics and anyone who just wants to talk about money

10- Dont try to learn anything from people who seems to have solved the problems you face

11- Forget the past, especially your company’s success

I personally did not like the weird idea 3 and 8. But these are for companies where innovation is a way of life. We can not apply these weird ideas in large and established companies. After all, the book is a breakthrough in management thinking, “weird ideas” can help organizations achieve a balance between sustaining performance and fostering new ideas. As a final message; to succeed, you need to be both conventional and weird.

I am trying to find mission and vision statements for a project that I involved in. I just realized that mission-vision statement helps managers to pass the elevator test — the ability to explain the project to someone within two minutes. A good framework from Geoffrey Moore’s book Crossing the Chasm can help you to position your company or product. It follows the form:

For (target customer)
Who (statement of the need or opportunity)
The (product name) is a (product category)
That (key benefit, compelling reason to buy)
Unlike (primary competitive edge)
Our product (statement of primary differentiation)

Once you fill this form out, it will be easier for you to find your vision-mission statements.

This weekend I attended a workshop at Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship about Global Entrepreneurial Marketing. Workshop has been held by Rasmus Rahm, who is a Research Assistant at Stockholm School of Economics and Founder & Owner at Pop n Roll. It was a two days workshop and we have learnt lots of practical things. We watched lots of commercials from different sectors and gained vast amount of tools and methods. As a summary;

1- Customer is the boss

2- Marketing is a complex thing and should not be seen as an isolated event.

3- Big mistake that entrepreneurs do is that; positioning their product or service based on features vs. competitors. But, customers do not buy features. Instead they buy perceived benefits/values.

4- When you make your marketing, until it turns back to profit, there are different steps involved. We can show the steps in this graph and one of the most important part is Communication Effects. When it comes to that step, there are four different categories. Namely;

a- Category Need

b- Brand Awareness

c- Brand Image

d- Brand Purchase Intention

Brand awareness and brand image are somehow always in your marketing. Think about these groups, do you want to create a new category, or increase brand awareness or “encourage”, “force” your potential customers to purchase your product or service. But keep in mind that the final result or ROI will be around %12 (if you can reach this number, normally it is much less)

5.1- If your marketing is for Brand Awareness

a- Recognition Brand Awareness Strategy : Avoid radio, because target audience cant see product

b- Recall brand awareness strategy: All media are appropriate

5.2- If your marketing is for Brand Image

a- Low Involvement & Informational: All media are appropriate

b- Low Involvement & Transformational: Avoid radio because of need of visual content

c- High Involvement & Informational: Avoid broadcast media because of time needed to process message

d- High Involvement & Transformational: Avoid radio because of need of visual content

6- While preparing a marketing strategy, first define your goal, what benefits will you provide to your customers and what are the attributes of your product 7- There must be a balance in between all there points when you are marketing your product. For example, a person’s self image and behavior will create a consequence and you, as an entrepreneur, must carefully think about balance. 8- Selecting media type for your marketing is one of the most important thing. Have a look at this graph and always keep in mind the pros and cons of different methods. 9- Think about your customers motivational and involvement levels. Involvement can be economic or psychological. For some cases product can be cheap but psychologically important for the customer. So, the product will be count in high involvement group. Also think about the motivational factors such as informational or transformational. Informational means, a product to solve or avoid a problem. These problems are already exist and well known. But,  transformational means; products which are emotional for customers. Like happiness, worriers, social people. This is also means, to make your customers emotionally happy or secure and so on. 10- Lastly but not least, think about the customer loyalty. Because this is where you make money or create other customers.  It is hard to find the optimum point, for some cases your extra-active or extra-loyal customers can disturb other potential customers. But it is always nice to have reference customers, who will make your marketing for free.

For the last two years I lived in Stockholm and studied as a master student at ICT Entrepreneurship. In my opinion networking is the crucial part of entrepreneurship. I am not an experienced entrepreneur, who made billions of dollars, but still I have some recommendations for you. These are my stories as a young entrepreneur in Stockholm and may be you will not agree with me. Let’s get started;

Lessons Learned 1: Be active but not over-active

Some friends of mine, who runs after people to collect their business cards and mail addresses, generally see that people only once. I think this is really disturbing and has no value inside. As a young entrepreneur I sometimes feel that people do not pay enough attention to me since I do not have a lot to offer them. But, once you show them the energy and sympathy it will be easy for you to have good connections with them. So, there is no need to run after people to get their contact details. They will never get back to you.

Lessons Learned 2: Don’t play games, be friendly

People are generally too busy. So, no one wants to listen a long story from a person who they just met in an event. So, do not talk about partnership or “your business ideas” right away. When you first meet with people, talk about the general things. You can start with open ended question like; “how is it going”, “what makes you busy these days” or you can talk about interesting facts or statistics. Try to keep the level of attention high, don’t bore people. Also, keep in mind that a person’s name is the sweatiest thing in his/her life.

Lessons Learned 3: Help people

Help people without expecting a return. Help them meet new people and let them talk about themselves. Listen them and ask meaningful questions. Because right questions can stimulate and persuade. It is also a sign that you are curious and caring about what they said. Right questions can make difference between getting what we want or going with nothing.

Lessons Learned 4: Don’t waste peoples’ time

Don’t stick to a person for 30-40 minutes, as long as it is not really important. Because in a networking event, people want to meet with lots of other people and make connections. So, let people go away and find others. Be polite and don’t bore them.

We can define Emerging Economies as those “regions of the world that are experiencing rapid informationalization under conditions of limited or partial industrialization.” It appears that emerging markets lie at the intersection of non-traditional user behavior, the rise of new user groups and community adoption of products and services, and innovations in product technologies and platforms. Examples of emerging markets include Russia, China, Turkey, Taiwan, India, Pakistan, Brazil, Egypt, United Arab Emirates and some more. But, obviously China is one of the most important in emerging markets.

By 2012, total mobile subscribers number will be doubled and about 90% of this increase will come from emerging markets. It means, more telecom operators will need to make business with technology and infrastructure providers and it means more market share for entrepreneurial companies. All of the mobile operators who wish to have customer base and sustainable competitive advantage over the competitors should start working these emerging markets and find local partners and people.
By creating new business models or exploiting new business opportunities in emerging markets is important and timing is crucial. May be after 5 years the market will be matured and it will be even harder to gain market share. So, it is time to pay attention to emerging markets now.

Gartner’s Hype Cycle is a graphic representation of the maturity, adoption and business application of specific technologies. This framework tries to provide opinions, advice and data on the global information technology industry if they should invest in some technology or not at the moment.

From here you can find an example document, where i try to position the PC-Based Open Source Networking business. Download the document.

A hype cycle in Gartner’s interpretation comprises 5 steps:

1. Technology Trigger — The first phase of a hype cycle is the “technology trigger” or breakthrough, product launch or other event that generates significant press and interest.
2. Peak of Inflated Expectations — In the next phase, a frenzy of publicity typically generates over-enthusiasm and unrealistic expectations. There may be some successful applications of a technology, but there are typically more failures.
3. Trough of Disillusionment — Technologies enter the “trough of disillusionment” because they fail to meet expectations and quickly become unfashionable. Consequently, the press usually abandons the topic and the technology.
4. Slope of Enlightenment — Although the press may have stopped covering the technology, some businesses continue through the “slope of enlightenment” and experiment to understand the benefits and practical application of the technology.
5. Plateau of Productivity — A technology reaches the “plateau of productivity” as the benefits of it become widely demonstrated and accepted. The technology becomes increasingly stable and evolves in second and third generations. The final height of the plateau varies according to whether the technology is broadly applicable or benefits only a niche market.

Last week was “China Week” at KTH and in order to celebrate it, students organized lots of different activities. There were many different kinds of public lectures, career days, parties, dinners and business case competition about the Ericsson’s business strategy in China. Ericsson has two biggest competitors in China, which are Huawei and ZTE

The case competition was mainly about the strategy of Ericsson against ZTE and Huawei. They are both growing very rapidly and Ericsson needs some clever solutions to gain more market share in Asia and Africa. To do that, they need to examine the competitors and see the big picture. The term “rapidly developing economies” is now being used to denote emerging markets such as China, Taiwan, Turkey, Brazil, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Poland, Philippines, Russia, South Africa, South Korea and Malaysia that are undergoing rapid growth. In next 5-6 years most of the increase in mobile sector will come from the emerging markets. So it is really important for such a huge company to understand these countries and gain market share.

All in all, it was a great experience and i enjoyed a lot. I would like to thanks to my team mates again. It was a great case competition with full of fun and education.

I strongly suggest to entrepreneurs and start-ups to go to Istanbul/Turkey between 7–12 October 2008 to join CeBIT Information Affair. Uniquely positioned to address the region’s flourishing ICT market, CeBIT Bilisim Eurasia is the ideal platform from which to launch new products and services.The 2008 show will boast a total exhibition area of 27,000 square meters divided up into four main sections: Business World, Digital Life, Telecommunications and Home Electronics.

Are you looking for a guaranteed way to boost your business into new dimensions? Then now is the time to set your compass for Turkey, a nation which is well on its way to becoming the number 1 digital business platform of Eurasia.

CeBIT Bilisim Eurasia attracts a highly global audience year after year, generating unrivalled opportunities for everyone interested in expanding their business base and tapping into new markets.

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Most of the people believe that writing a business plan is just a one way of wasting time. Instead of writing a business plan, we should focus on development,marketing and sales. I do not agree with them. Because if we do not plan some core topics, strategies of our company we will not be able to react the emerging markets or new opportunities in a correct way or timing.

We had a guest lecturer last weeks, who is one of the founder of eviware, Niclas. I really like his example, he said; “In soccer before you go to stadium all the team comes together and talk about the tactics. If you do not do that, while you are in the field there will not be enough time to think about every thing. Your opponents will start to attack you from the left, right and they will develop new tactics and so on. So; before going to pitch you should develop a core tactic, of course you can change it while you are in action. But still there must be a well defined tactic before you start”. In addition, while writing a business plan we should follow this circle; Discuss, Write, Read, Discuss, Rest, Read, Discuss, Write and Finish

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