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.

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.

I am a computer engineer and a master student in Sweden. I am studying ICT Entrepreneurship at The Royal Institute of Technology. Currently, I am working on an Open Source Project at KTH, Stockholm and i have done a Technology Adoption Life Cycle paper for Open Source, PC-Based Networking in Africa. I would like to share it with people and i am also waiting for your comments.

You can find the document from here

One of my article about a book advice had been published in a magazin in Stocholm. You can find the article from here and have a look at what i wrote about Crossing the Chasm. I think this book is a must book for an entrepreneur.

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.

Indispensable for the Business World, the thematic sections will continue to present innovations and solutions that will shape the future.

CeBIT Bilişim Eurasia, where the “application, product and information” triad comes together in a unique environment, will be the most effective promotional platform to share your own business solutions with the rest of the world.

For more information click here

For a start-up time to market is so important. To decrease the time to market, a start-up must be able to develop their product or service in a reasonable time and price. To do that, Sun Microsystem’s new program for Start-Ups can be a good alternative. Why should we pay a lot for the IT costs just at the very beginning?

Sun and Mashable.com have partnered to present “The Startup Review” on mashable.com which is a daily feature/review of a new startup to help spread the word on unique and emerging ideas throughout the community.  www.mashable.com/startup-review-sponsored-sun-startup-essentials/

Sun is also hosting a free event called “Startup Camp” in San Francisco on May 4-5, 2008 to allow startups to participate in an un-conference networking event to hear from some web 2.0 authorities, meet other startups and apply to Sun’s Startup Essentials Program. The event also includes SpeedGeeking, where startup founders can compete in the Best Startup Contest by presenting a 5-minute pitch of their business to VC led groups of peers. Confirmed guests include: Pete Cashmore, Jonathan Schwartz, David Berlind, Om Malik, Matt Marshall etc. This event is a great way for startups to network and discuss ideas. http://startupcamp.org/

For more info click here

On February 27, 2008 Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL. MySQL is the “world’s most popular database”–whatever that means in marketing speak. In terms of technology it means that Sun now owns the database that many Web companies use for web applications and services. There are few acquisitions that make as much sense. Marten Mickos was the CEO of MySQL. Now he is the senior vice president of the database group within Sun. I caught up with Marten to bring us up to date on the acquisition and future direction of MySQL.

Question: How did the Sun deal go down?
Answer: On the one hand there was always a positive vibe and an affinity. On the other, the deal happened surprisingly and extremely quickly over just a number of weeks.

Six years ago I approached Jonathan Schwartz–whom I didn’t know at the time–with an email titled “All things under the Sun.” My point was that we should do more together. He responded immediately saying “You don’t have to convince us–we love you guys–and want you to succeed wildly.”

But over the years, we didn’t really work that closely with Sun. We were busy on our end, and they on theirs. So when we had dinner again in late November 2007, I wasn’t expecting anything special. But during that evening we saw even more similarities than before, and there was high energy in the discussion.

In the next few days we engaged in a positive and strategic discussion, and soon enough we saw that this could be a great combination. We quickly agreed that we should act fast and not play games with each other. In Swedish hockey language, we agreed to “raka puckar,” i.e. straight pucks–or more precisely, straight shots. This is what made it possible to get the acquisition done in record time. We just focused on the essential.

Jonathan has described this process eloquently in his blog here, and I explained my thinking in this guest column on AlwaysOn.

Question: Were there other suitors?
Answer: We have been fortunate at MySQL to have interest from large corporations to acquire us. But our main focus always was on going public and remaining independent.

Question: What does this deal mean for the small business who is considering using MySQL?
Answer: There are two main types of small businesses. Web2.0 startups are small in the beginning but may grow exponentially over an extended period of time. Facebook and Second Life are such examples. They always need the highest performance and scalability. With the help of Sun’s experts in this field, we believe we can deliver more of that.

The other small business group consists of companies who are not in the technology field themselves. They look for convenience, reliability, and low cost. For them, Sun’s acquisition of MySQL will mean a higher level of comfort because of the reputation, size, and reach of Sun and because they can do one-stop shopping. Additionally, partnerships with other main vendors provide even more choice, and complement the offerings from Sun.

Naturally, all MySQL users will be able to continue to download the product free of charge under the GPL licence. We have the same firm commitment to free and open source software as before.

Question: On a technical level, can there be tighter integration with the hardware now that you know which hardware MySQL will be running on?
Answer: Yes, there can be, and there probably will be over time. Many customers look for convenience and ease of deployment. The main focus of the Database Group within Sun as MySQL is now known is to accelerate the existing roadmap of the product: more scalability, performance, reliability, and ease of use. At the end of the day, those are the main features a customer will want to see improvement in. It is like with sports cars: more horsepower is always appreciated by the customers.

Question: Will we see inexpensive bundles of Sun hardware and MySQL software?
Answer: We are market driven and we will present to customers whatever product and service combinations that have the biggest demand. This could include hardware-software bundles but it could also mean providing databases as a service. We now are part of a company that has all the required pieces, so we can assemble them from time to time as the markets require.

As for “inexpensive,” I’d say that Sun across the board has products that provide unparalleled price/performance. Some cost a lot because they are from the highest end. Others cost less per unit and lend themselves to smaller businesses and to massive scale-out scenarios. The main thing in the 21st century is to give customers choice – because they will make choices anyhow.

Question: Have you had any kind of concerns that MySQL will be run like a “big company”?
Answer: I had those concerns even when we were a small startup! Complacency and arrogance can creep in without your noticing in any sort of organisation. To avoid it, we have taken some specific steps. We have released our software under the GPL thus exposing ourselves to the risk of forking. This keeps us running fast. We have also chosen to serve the fastest paced and fastest growing business in the world such as YouTube, Flickr, Zillow, and Nokia.

This also forces us to run fast. And we have a company culture of no-nonsense and of following The No Asshole Rule by Bob Sutton–pardon my French, but the book by that name is so good. For these reasons, there is no time for complacency. These aspects apply to Sun as well. And if for whatever unlikely reason we would ever encounter some big company behavior within Sun, we will do our utmost to help change it.

Question: What does this acquisition mean for people using MySQL on other platforms?
Answer: We stopped using the words “other” or “rest of world” or “foreign.” We operate all over the world, we serve customers in all languages we can, we run on whatever hardware platforms customers use, and we tune MySQL for a whole bunch of operating systems.

When we decide what to focus on, we look at the volumes. Our number one operating system is Linux. Windows is number two. Solaris is number three, and Mac OS X a very close four. I don’t see this changing by anything other than customer behavior. We will serve our customers on whatever platforms they run on, just as before.

Question: How do you think the folks at Oracle are going to react?
Answer: Sun is one of Oracle’s closest and most long-term partners, and MySQL has been a partner of Oracle for the last three years. You may know that Oracle distributes MySQL within their Linux offering, and MySQL distributes Oracle’s InnoDB component. So I believe that people at Oracle are happy that MySQL is in such a friendly camp.

Overall, it appears to me that people judge companies for what they were several years ago–not seeing where they are heading. Sun has changed its strategy dramatically in the last few years, and so has Oracle. Oracle is today one of the leading application vendors. It has a successful database business, but from a customer perspective they look more like a General Electric of software than a database company.

Charles Phillips, president of Oracle once publicly said that Oracle and MySQL are both in the transportation business. Oracle is a 747, and MySQL is a Toyota. Given the enormous success of Toyota Motor Corporation, I love that analogy! The world definitely needs big airplanes, but more broadly it needs modern transportation vehicles.

Question: Is there a theoretical limit of MySQL in case a small business uses it and sales/transactions/whatever explode?
Answer: Every software product has its limits, but I think we have shown that MySQL can scale enormously. Google runs its entire ad system on MySQL. Nokia runs mobile phone networks on MySQL. Booking.com runs all their business transactions on MySQL. If a small business reaches those limits, it is not a small business any longer–it is an enormous global player.

Question: If the best hockey players from Sun in the US played against the best MySQL players from Finland, who would win?
Answer: Don’t ask this question! I am not sure I can face my fellow Finns once I publicly admit that Sun would most likely win this game. Unless you give me time to recruit Selanne, Kurri, Toskala, and others. Teemu Selanne, by the way, put some money into the Finnish venture capital firm that made the first investment in MySQL, so he has made a nice return. Perhaps I could use that to convince him to play for MySQL.

References:

http://www.sun.com/solutions/smb/index.jsp

http://www.sun.com/solutions/smb/guest.jsp