>> Amy Draves: Thank you for coming. My name is Amy Draves and I'm here to introduce
Matthew May, who is joining us as part of the Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker series.
Matthew's here today to discuss his book The Laws of Subtraction, six simple rules for
winning in the age of excess everything.
Most of us may feel that the simple life is thing of the past. There are endless choices and
options that we are each faced with daily. Matthew argues that success demands a skill of
subtraction. When you remove the right things in the right way, something very good
happens.
Matthew May is the author of three award winning books, The Elegant Solution, In Pursuit of
Elegance and The Shibumi Strategy. He is an advisor on innovation to several companies
and is a regular contributor to the American Express open forum idea hub. He also is the
founder of Edit Innovation and Ideas Agency based in Los Angeles. Please join me in giving
him a very warm welcome.
>> Matthew May: Thank you. Well, happy new year.
>>: Happy new year.
>> Matthew May: Right? It's probably your first -- well everybody's first full week back at
work, so what better way to start off a new year with perhaps a different way of looking at the
world and that's really what I'd like to do today is to talk about something that's very near and
dear to your heart. It's in your -- it's in your tag line, turning ideas into reality, which is ideas.
And I'm an ideas guy. I -- I can't stop thinking about ideas my often wife accuses me of being
too much in my head because I even love the idea of ideas, so I guess that makes me a meta
idea person.
And I want to talk today a little bit about ideas that -- of a certain breed. You heard it in some
of the titles of previous books, but there are ideas that answer particular question. And the
question is this: How do you -- and it's something that we all face. Whether we're a parent,
whether we are president of a company, whether we're just, you know, run of the mill
professional trying to make it through the workday world of -- of corporate life. How do you
stand out and stay relevant in what I think all of us could admit is a fairly distracting and
disruptive business environment and world?
We hear all the time about disruptive business models. Certainly all of us are deluged with
text messages and push notifications and social media that we can't keep up with. I think ten
years ago I saw a study in social demographics magazine, this was ten years ago now that
the average workers in a fairly large organizations gets upwards of 250 interruptions a day
between emails and meetings and voicemails and people popping in your office, that was ten
years ago. That's before we had all the texting and the push notifications and the social
media and the tweets and you name it. So I can only imagine that is probably quadrupled
that today.
So how do you stand out and stay relevant when the world is changing so fast, when the
signal to noise ratio is not that good is far more noise than there is signal, how do you cope
with all of that? And the simple answer, I think, to the question or the quick answer to the
question is this: You've got to consistently design and deliver elegant solutions.
Elegant solutions. Now that begs another question. What the heck is an elegant solution and
how do you make them work and how do you create them and how do you create an
environment, a corporate culture that consistently produces them? So the deeper question,
the real question that I want to tackle today is this one: What are elegant solutions, why do
they matter, and how do you create them?
And this was actually my challenge several years ago. Ten years ago, as a matter of fact,
and by the way, I spoke about this topic in this very part of of Microsoft, I don't know if any of
you were here in the audience at the time six years ago. This is my second -- my second visit
here. And I was still struggling with this question of what's an elegant solution? And so let me
take you back ten years and bring you up to speed and give you a little sense of the context
and the back story that prompted this question.
At the time, this was 2003, I was midway in an eight-year run as a full-time advisor to a
company by the name of Toyota down at their U.S. headquarters in southern California,
Torrance, California. Interestingly enough, 2006 was when I was here, speaking to -- to
Microsoft, that was the year the first book that I wrote came out. That's when I left the
partnership and I've only just recently in the last couple of months begun advising them again
in the marketing world at Toyota.
But what made my life so difficult was that they had this internal mantra, and it went
something like this: People don't want our products and services; they want solutions. And
when it comes to solutions, simple is better. Elegant is better still.
The problem was that nobody bothered to define for me what an elegant solution really was. I
knew by virtue the fact that looking at certain ideas that were rejected what elegance wasn't.
By the way, I looked up in the dictionary, you can't -- if you look up elegant solution in the
dictionary, you're not going to find it. You're going to find elegance, which will say something
like cleverly apt simple ingenious, as in an elegant solution which sort of gets you right back
to where you were in the first place, and it certainly doesn't tell you how to craft an elegant
solution and implement it and make it actionable.
I knew by virtue of the facts as I said, what wasn't elegant. Anything that was excessive,
confusing, wasteful, unnatural, hazardous, hard to use, or ugly. And I tried to find an image
that captures all seven of those sort of deadly sins, this is what I came up with. There's
nothing elegant about that. I don't know how to make heads or tails out of that, it's probably
life endangering for those of us who aren't used to looking at that kind of thing.
So I knew what elegant wasn't. But I didn't know exactly was elegance was. And it really
struck me because midway in that eight-year run with Toyota, I ran up against a project that I
had nothing, I had no idea what to do with. I mean there were -- I was hired to help them
develop fresh ideas, not because I'm an especially smart person or a great designer or
anything, I'm good with people, and I'm good with facilitating creative teams.
And -- but I was out of ideas which is not a good thing. When you're hired for ideas and you
run out of them, this is not good, and I was so frustrated. I did not know what to do, I did not
know what to tell them, this project had me up against a brick wall and I was ready to walk out
the and say listen, I cannot help you any longer, it's been a great four years.
And I came into -- I guess I wasn't doing a very good job of hiding how frustrated I was,
because I came in to work and I didn't have an office or anything like that, I had a -- you know
I worked at a conference -- conference cubby, if you will -- and taped to the back of the chair
that I sat in usually was a little piece of poetry. That poetry happened to be as I found out
later 2500 years old, circa 600 B.C. by a gentleman philosopher, Chinese philosopher by the
name of Lao Tzu, and it goes like this.
Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub, it's the center hole that makes it useful, shape clay into a
vessel, it's the space within that makes it useful -- and I'm sorry I'm reading to adults, I know
you can understand this -- cut doors and windows for a room, it's the holes which make it
useful. Therefore, profit comes from what is there, usefulness from what is not there.
And my first reaction, quite honestly, was that someone wants me gone. I'd be more useful
that way. And I -- I stopped and it made me think, and a number of things happened all at
once. And I shouldn't say all at once. It wasn't one of those epiphanies. It was sort of an
emerging awakening that there's another way to look at a problem.
The first thing it made me do was to figure out who this guy Lao Tzu was and what else he
had to say on the topic. And lo and behold, I found another little piece of philosophy from him
that remains and you see it in those of you happen to have a copy of The Laws of Subtraction
in front of you, this is sort of my go-to mantra. To attain knowledge, add things every day. To
attain wisdom, subtract things everyday.
And I began to think about the problem in front of me, and I was doing what comes naturally,
at least to the western mind, which is to think about what to do, not necessarily what to not
do. And as I did that, certain information, you know, my radar screen was sort of
enlightenment if you will, certain pieces of information sort of came to me. It's sort of
interesting. When you're out of options, alternatives and you consider other ways of thinking,
all these things that were already out there that you just had ignored because it wasn't a
problem to you sort of come front and center, and that's really what happened.
I happened to read and was just this time, 2003, just before the new year, actually, happened
to read an essay in USA Today, and I was traveling at the time, and it was about the new year.
And it was by Jim Collins. I'm sure that's a name that's at least somewhat familiar to you.
He's written a number of best-selling -- mega best selling books, Good to Great probably
being the one that stands out for most people. But he had in this, in the USA, in the forum
section of USA Today, an essay. And it was called -- and I don't know if you're familiar with it,
but best new years resolution, a stop doing list. And I thought huh. A stop doing list. What
the heck is that all about?
It's just a 600-word essay but as I read it -- and he told a story. He told a very interesting
story, I thought, and he concludes it with this: A great piece of art is composed not just of
what's in the final piece but equally what is not. That was a conclusion to a story that he told
about his own life and how he came up with the strategy of creating a stop doing list
whenever he creates a to do list. Whether it's a daily task list or even at this time of the year,
when it is you're setting your stretch resolutions for the year. He told the story of how he left
Stanford University as an MBA back in the day, and he did what every sort of upstanding
young MBA does, which is to take a job at a big company and start, you know, scratching and
clawing your way to the middle.
His chosen company was Hewlett-Packard. And he a Stanford, was want to do, they had
people come back and do guest lectures, and the course that had him back was his favorite
course. It was on creativity and innovation in business, and he came back and he gave a talk
and his professor, one Rochelle Myers, pulled him aside after the talk, and said listen Jim,
spent a lot of time with you while you were here, and I have to tell you, I think you're going
down the wrong path in life. Let me give you a little thought exercise to go away with.
And this is what good teachers do, right? They create learning moments out of things that
seem wrong to them. Imagine that you're given 20 million dollars free and clear, but you only
have ten years left to live. What would you do, and more importantly, what would you stop
doing?
And guess what rose to the top of his list? His job. His job. I mean he hated -- she was right.
He hated his job. What he really wanted to do was to study the best organizations, the best
companies out there, try and distill and decode the things that made them so successful and
write about it, to be a management educator on the professional side of education, if you will,
not necessarily the academic side.
He left his job. He took his car. He drove down to southern California, camped out on the
doorstep of one Peter Drucker and banged on his door and said I really would like to follow in
your footsteps. Peter Drucker was a sort of a, you know, a thought starter, a thought leader
around management -- and how can I get started? And he concludes the essay this way,
but he -- but -- here's how he describes creating a stop doing list.
And it's incredibly difficult. It's going to sound simple when I describe it, but it's hard.
Whatever your to do list is, whether it's a daily task or your big resolutions, you put them down
as you normally would. Step one, nothing different than how you do it now. Step two, nothing
different than how you do it now. Prioritize them as you normally would. But now here's step
three. You take that list, then you take a pair of scissors, and you cut out the bottom 20
percent and you throw it away. That becomes your stop doing list. Throw it away. It doesn't
appear on any other future to do lists, it goes in the circular file, forever.
It's incredibly difficult to do. We don't want to let go of that. We think we can do all of these
things, but the truth is when we get down to that bottom 20 percent, we don't give it the
attention that it deserves anyway, we sub-optimize our performance on that bottom 20
percent, and this provides a little bit of focus, which is slightly different than prioritization.
And he goes on to say here, that it's the discipline to cut out what may have taken years to
build and to create that marks, that, you know, really truly marks a work of art. Whether it's a
symphony, whether it's a book, whether it's a business, most important of all, a life. That
came to me, and it stopped me and it reinforced this message that had been taped to the
back of my chair.
Then I read a quote that I still love to this day, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, and it went like this:
I would not give a fig for simplicity this side of complexity, but I give my life for simplicity on the
other side of complexity.
Now that sort of struck me as something akin to this notion of elegance that was floating
around Toyota. It wasn't that -- that it was something dirt simple, it's that there's a very
complex thing that Toyota was creating. A car, very, very complex piece of machinery, but
how do you make it simple for a user? How do you make it intuitive? How do you hide that
complexity? How do you exploit it, make it invisible, make it usable? That's the simplicity on
the other side of complexity, and that's what Oliver Wendell Holmes was talking about, and
that made me stop and think.
And the reason I have a picture here of a chess board is that it's the different -- the simplicity
on this side of complexity versus simplicity on the other side of complexity is the difference, I
think, between chess and checkers. Both games, same number of players. Both games,
played on the same board. But if you had to come up with one word that marks the
distinction, the difference, between checkers and chess, what would it be? Strategy, right?
Chess is far more strategic.
I've been playing checkers with my daughter, who's now ten, since she was about four. It's
basically single moves, or multiple moves, but it's the same move. It's about adding, because
you're trying to accumulate the other person's army. It's very quick to play, it's fun the learn
and play. It doesn't take a lot of thinking in advance.
But if you were going to watch a master chess tournament, which I'm not sure why you would
want to do that, because you look at them up on the stage, and what are they doing? And I'm
not talking about the kind in a park where they're like bing bing with the clock, but the
masters, right? Where they're thinking for days, and it's just -- there's no action whatsoever.
They're thinking one, two, three, four moves in advance, what's my opponent going to do?
And the whole thing is about winning the game in what number of moves? Most moves, least
moves? Least number of moves. And what are you trying to do? Immobilize. Checkmate
your opponent's king, right? It's a completely different fundamentally different way of looking
at a game board.
I think in our organizations -- and I don't know if you're experience is the same, but sometimes
I don't even think we get to checkers. I think a lot of times we're playing whack-a-mole. Do
you know this game? Any of you with kids and you've gone Chuck E. Cheese, and the little
mole pops up, and you whack it with a hammer. That's our life. The fire pops up, we got to
figure out a way to have squelch it. So that struck me.
Then I saw a connection between simplicity and subtraction by John Mida [phonetic]. You
know, he had a website out at the time, at the time was at the MIT media lab, and this was
before he became the president of the Rhode Island School of Design, and he had these ten
laws of subtraction that he wrote about, and his tenth law is simplicity, is about subtracting the
obvious and adding the meaningful. All of these things sort of were different ways to recast
that Lao Tzu wisdom, and I thought huh. I got to solve my problem not by thinking about what
to do, not about adding, but subtracting.
And it -- it allowed me to solve the problem. It allowed me to remain at Toyota for four years,
but most importantly, it sent me off on a quest. A quest for elegant solutions everywhere.
Elegant solutions sort of became my life and has been for -- for the better part of ten years.
So to me, subtraction really is about a new skill, it's a new way of looking at a problem.
Generally speaking, every time we come up with a decision, an important decision, whether
it's a business idea a business strategy, a life decision, generally speaking there are three
important choices that we make: What do you leave in, or what do you put in, versus what do
you leave out, what do you pursue versus what do you ignore, and what do you do versus
what do you not do or don't?
Most of us by nature are hard wired to focus on the first half of each of those choices. What
do I put in, what do I pursue and what do I do, we are not trained. We are not disciplined in
the second half of those choices. But that's where the power is, and this is where the thinking
differently comes in, and this is where ideas that become great innovations, I think, by and
large often live, and this is what helps us cut through noise and disrupt other businesses, if
you will.
And if you don't think that I'm, you know, if you think I'm making it up about this being after
different way of thinking, it quite literally and scientifically is. Subtraction lights up the brain
slightly differently under functional magnetic resonance imaging than addition does.
As a matter of fact studies have shown, they've studied accident victims that have had brain
injuries, and interestingly enough, many times, after that accident, you're not able to both add
and subtract. You're able to do one or the other, oftentimes, but not both. They're in the
same general region of the brain, but the wiring is slightly different as you can see here.
Slightly different way of thinking. And it certainly is in the west, something that we're not really
disciplined or even soft wired to do.
But what I'd like to do then is to take you on that journey in the lessons that I have gleaned
over the course of especially the last six years, when I've been out in the world all over the
world collecting ideas that I think are are impactful and look willing at them and trying to distill
them into laws if you will a heuristic if you will. So I can't claim any credit for coming up with
these. They're just simply common elements that I've seen out of about two thousand of what
I consider to be very very impactful and compelling ideas. There are six of them and I'll tick
through them very quickly by way of story, and then we'll open up the floor to some discussion
and some some dialogue.
Lesson number one. I'm going to go one better than Lao Tzu. I'm going to go one better than
Jim Collins, who said that there was -- both of them sort of said that it's a mix of what's there
and isn't there. I think that sometimes, and oftentimes what isn't there can trump what is.
And that's the overarching lesson for me in all of this. All of the others are sort of derivative of
that.
So here's an example of this. What you are looking -- by the way, if you know what this is,
don't shout it out, but raise your hand, just a quick survey. Okay, a few of us, a few of us. So
what you are looking at these three pairs of perpendicular lines, three settings of
perpendicular lines represent something that's so ubiquitous, you couldn't make it through the
rest of the day without using it at least one, probably multiple times, but there's a lot of
information missing here, and I'm going to give you a hint, and once I give you that hint,
you're going to be able to decode this in a different way, and you're going to see it in an all
new light. What you're looking at here is the uppercase version of the most widely used letter
in the English language. It is, everybody shout it out, an E. Everyone pretty much sees it. If
you don't see it right now, that's fine, not everyone sees it all the time. But where does it,
what do the black lines represent?
>>: The shadow.
>> Matthew May: The shadow, right? And the E exists in the white space. Did I create that,
or did you create that? You all created it, right? Your brain -- I gave you a piece of
information, your brain recognized a pattern out of that data point, and it changed your mind.
It actually changed your mindset.
And let me prove it to you, because here's the tough part and the "a ha" part of this little
diagram. You might think well, that's just an optical illusion, a parlor trick. Well no, it isn't.
Because what I'd like for you to do right now is to unsee the E, and let me know how that
goes.
>>: [laughter]
>> Matthew May: Very difficult to do. It's very difficult to go back to the way you saw it when
you were innocent. Before I gave you that little piece of information. Very very difficult to to
go back when you were looking at it every different which way to try to come up with well,
what the heck is it that I'm looking at?
Now, is there application to this in the real world beyond a paper exercise? Absolutely. So let
me give you a few of them.
One that seems to be very, very direct correlation an application of this is the very famous
FedEx logo. We see it every day. It's ubiquitous, you know, you've probably seen it a dozen
times today already. This is thought to be one of the most creative and impactful corporate
identities ever. And it's not because of the bold fonts. It's not because of the purple and the
orange coloring or whatever graphics they happen to use. Why is this thought to be so
impactful? The arrow. The arrow.
How many people have not ever seen the arrow until this particular time in your life? Okay.
For those of you who haven't seen it, rest of us, tell them where it is. Between the E and the
X, and that is there purposefully.
I got to speak with Lindon Leader, who was the designer of that, because he was messing
with a couple of different fonts. This was back in the mid-1990s when Landor associates took
on the roll of taking the old Federal Express logo which had become -- the Federal Express
had become -- we started calling it -- customers started calling it FedEx and using it at a verb
and their brand had changed because, you know, customers had sort of done that. But most
people didn't know that FedEx shipped globally. They thought it was just a domestic
operation. They wanted something that connoted forward speed, forward speed,
acceleration, and -- and progress.
And he came, this out of two hundred logo designs was the winning logo. Out of 22 senior
executives that saw a number of presentations at FedEx, Fred Smith was the only one who
asked the question, is there a white arrow in there? Because they didn't tell them going into
the presentation, and they said, yes, absolutely. And he said, sold.
And you know what all the other folks wanted to do immediately when they saw that white
arrow? Guess. Fill it in. They wanted to call attention to it. What makes this so compelling is
that there's a little bit of mystique and intrigue here. And once you see it, the only thing you
really sort of pay attention to is the white arrow. You sort of ignore the rest. So here's a good
application, I think, of -- of the law, the lesson what isn't there can often trump what is.
Okay, so that's fine. That's still sort of a paper exercise, a graphic illustration. Matt, give me
something that's a little bit more tangible. Fine. Here's my bicycle seat. I spend ten or twelve
hours, when I can, on a bicycle. Allow me to tell with you and share with you that the
lifesaving part of this feature is not what's there. It's what isn't there. Okay, for obvious
reasons.
This is a three hundred dollar item. It's less than three hundred grams. It's made up of
carbon and leather and some cushioning. All the rest of the world except for Selle Italia in
Italy was thinking about how to pump up the padding on a bicycle seat to make it more
comfortable. They thought about taking material away, because it's all about pressure in all
the wrong spots. So, and they've made. That's all they do. That's all this company makes is
bicycle seats, and they make a very fine living at it, and it's mostly about what isn't there.
This is another example, all right, from my Toyota days. This, if you don't know what it is, well
I'm sure you do, what is this. It's a box. It's -- talk about thinking outside the box. This is -this is the first generation of the Scion xB, and I remember when I saw the prototype of this,
design sketches of this, and I guess I was showing my age, who in their right mind would, you
know much less buy one of these things, want to be seen in one of these things? I mean it
just looks like a toaster got together with a milk truck and had babies.
But this saved Toyota. They realized at the end of last century, the year 2000, 1999 couple
years after I came on, that their customer base was aging, and that they need to do
something to attract Gen Y because if not, by 2020 they're going to be out of business.
They're really going to be out of business.
And guess what? They had tried marketing the Toyota brand to Gen Y folks. It fell flat. They
even had a special group inside Toyota called the Genesis Group. The average age was like
38, and they were trying to reach an 18 to 24 graphic -- demographic.
Not a great idea, right? Had no concept of that target market. And the kids were saying
there's no -- I don't care if you stick it -- your advertising on my cell phone, doesn't matter to
me. Put it in the magazine, don't care. Any of your alternative marketing strategies. It's still
the car that mom and dad have in the driveway and in the garage, and I don't want to really
own a Toyota.
So what they realized was that marketing wasn't enough, they needed an innovation. And
they went back out into the marketplace, as Toyota is known to do, I don't know why they
didn't do it in the first place, but they practiced one of their disciplines, which is genchi
genbutsu, it means go look, go see. And this is was all great designers do. They get out and
they do what you probably saw 60 Minutes last night on design thinking and they used a
word. Those of you who happen to see it empathy. Empathy is a fancy word for going out
and living in the shoes, living in your customer's experience for a while to become that user, to
infiltrate them and understand the problems they're trying to solve.
Well when, they did that, an "a ha" moment came. Toyota marketers went out into the field,
did their genchi genbutsu, and interestingly enough where they did it is kind of curious and
funny. Here's the visual: Toyota marketers attending raves. You know what a rave is, right?
Underground hip-hop, techno kind of party, Toyota marketers? Okay. Maybe that doesn't
strike you as funny. Struck me as funny.
And they went to extreme sporting events, and they went to urban art shows, and they got
this predominant theme coming out of new millennials especially which was personalization.
It wasn't so much about their stuff, it was about what they could do to their stuff. You know,
you saw it in even their bodies. You could see it in the a tattoos and the piercings. You know,
it wasn't the pair of genes, it's what they could do to that pair of genes.
Once they got that theme of personalization, they thought what we really need to do is to
provide a completely spare vehicle, and Gen Y hates advertising. We're not going to
advertise the things. This product was never about the car. It was completely about what
was left out of it, marketing, advertising and the hundred plus standard options and
accessories. Fifteen thousand dollar car, the kids were snapping it up off the dealer lot as
quick as it landed and they're putting another 15 grand into the car. Carbon fiber dashes, flat
panel TVs, where I live in southern California there was a dirt lot, I remember very distinctly
any Saturday morning, I could go and I'd see 15 to 20 of these things lined up. No one was
looking at the car. They were looking about what they had done to the car. Hatchbacks open,
how they had tricked out the interior of their vehicle. What isn't there can often trump what is.
I happen to think this saved Toyota.
Now, next generation of this: They forgot that what brought them to the party. It got bigger, it
got softer, it got less edgy. And it didn't have quite as much success.
So lesson number two. Law number two, if you will. The simplest rules create the most
effective experience. What you are looking at here happens to be something called -- an
intersection in Holland that is designed under what's called a shared space concept.
And I don't know if you're familiar with that shared space is. It began as an experiment in
European towns a dozen or more, I think actually 20 years ago, 25 years ago, and what they
would do was to take high traffic intersections, because they didn't have a lot of money for
traditional traffic controls and lights and signs and all of that, so they said, well, let's redesign
the space so that it's completely ambiguous and it's self-organizing.
And when you come into these intersections -- and by the way, the way that I found out about
this, is I was in Sweden in 2007 the year after I left Toyota. I was giving an all-day
presentation and I was collecting ideas that part of the world. I asked my sponsors, you got
anything in this part of the world where something has been removed and greater impact has
occurred because of it? And they said well, you could go to Finland and study their school
system, and you could go to Holland, take a look at what they're doing with traffic in town.
And okay, what are they doing? They're getting rid of all their traffic controls. I said excuse
me? This is 20,000 plus vehicle, pedestrian, bicycle, laurie, you name it, coming through
these intersections.
When you come into these intersections -- and I had to go and look -- when you come into
these intersections, it's completely ambiguous. The curbs have been taken down to street
level to be, you know, completely level. They've replaced asphalt and concrete with, as you
see, cobblestones here. There are trees and fountains and sidewalk cafes seating out right in
the middle where you think you should be driving. And there looks to be absolute chaotic, but
it works. Let me show you.
>>: Oh my god.
>>: [laughter]
>>: There's no roundabout either.
>> Matthew May: Not a roundabout. Yeah. So this is crazy, right? Why would you do that
on purpose? It's one thing to live, you know, in a third world or developing country where you
don't have that in the first place and you just get used to it, but to go back and redesign on
purpose something to remove all those things that are supposed to protect our lives? That's
just nuts.
No, it isn't. Traffic flow is doubled and the number of accidents cut in half, often taken down to
zero. Why? Because risk is transparent. Risk is there. There's only one simple rule in play:
First in turn with all due respect to those most vulnerable. In other words, be careful. Cover
your ass, if you will. Right? Just be careful.
So when you come into these intersections you have no choice but to do what all of us do
when we come the to an intersection when the power is out, which is what, you slow down,
you start thinking, and you look at people. You become much more human. Because the
accidents happen in intersections when we think that our risk has been taken care of by some
-- something or someone else, and we stop our thinking. They deprive us of the intelligence
that we're born with.
And interestingly enough, you know, you say well, that's just small towns, it won't work in a
metropolitan town. Not true. For a metropolitan city, not true. This is Exhibition Road.
Anyone here go to the Olympics last summer? Anyone anyone? This is, three years ago,
this is what Exhibition Road looked like. Exhibition Road, if you don't know, in London, is sort
of a cultural mecca. This is where all the great academy, academies of history and dance,
and this is -- this sees, you know, 11 million visitors a year.
Well, that number was going to be, you know, doubled for the Olympics, but take a look at it.
It's not user friendly. Not at all. Pedestrians, it's just not -- it's cold. It doesn't allow you to get
between buildings and share experience with others, and so the same people that were
designing those shared spaces in Europe in outlying areas of the United Kingdom had a
three-year contract and put Exhibition Road -- redesigned it to be a shared space, and this is
what it looks like today. Completely friendly, completely open, the same kind of thing.
Pedestrians and bicycles and cars and motorcycles all share the same space. And the order
and the effectiveness of the organization is emergent. It's self-organizing, and that
self-organizing behavior is far more powerful than any traffic controlled substance could be.
So, the simplest rules create the most effective experience.
[34:40] Lesson number three, law number three, limiting information engages the imagination.
Too often we think that we need to provide every single piece of information, every single
product feature, every technical specification, when in fact the opposite is true. You need the
Goldilocks strategy. Too much, people tune out. Not enough, people ignore you.
So, I tried to track sort of the evolution of this notion of creating intrigue and the ability to get
people to lean in to whatever your message is, and I traced it to one Leonardo da Vinci.
We often hear about how intriguing and compelling and changing the Mona Lisa's smile is.
And how mysterious it is. Is she smiling? A lot of people argued about that. I read it in
history books. I happened to be in Europe in 2007 and since I wasn't getting any of that from
the books that I had seen with the reproductions in it, I went to the Louvre. Anyone been to
the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa? Okay. So you know she's pretty small. You can't get really
close to her. Right, but there is something rather compelling about seeing the Mona Lisa in
person.
And so I looked at her, and she looked normal the first time there. Kind of a casual smile, I
was with my family, we took a turn around and I said I'm going to go back and take a look at
the Mona Lisa. They grumbled but they came with me. And this time she looked rather tired,
and I said bear with me, you guys. Hang out here, I'm going to take another turn, you know,
I'm going change my brain to get a different space. And when I did the third time when I
looked at her, I swear to god she was mocking me. Perhaps because I had done three turns
just to see the same painting.
But here's the history. And here's the technique. Before Leonardo da Vinci came along,
paintings were thought to be not very lifelike because they were too precise, they were too
accurate and they were too perfect. Therefore they didn't leap off the page as having any
vitality to them whatsoever. So what Leonardo da Vinci did and the secret to the Mona Lisa
which has nothing to do with a code or conspiracy with the Vatican or anything like that, is he
simply removes something. And he removed this, he removed lines from around the corners
of her mouth and the corners of her eyes. It's a technique he called sfumato, smoky or blurry.
Those are the two most expressive parts of human facial anatomy. When they are missing,
guess what we do, we provide the solution. We provide the part that's missing here and she
takes on whatever mood, whatever feeling whatever thoughts that we happen to have and
that's what makes her so mysterious, that's what makes her so changing and dynamic and
compelling.
Well, is there an application to that in the business world? In the real world if you will, yeah.
Absolutely. And let me but you know before I -- let me make the transition from pure art to
business, here's a huge business behind comic books. Anyone here a Comic-Con goer?
Comic fan? Okay.
What's interesting, and I spent some time with -- with a gentleman by the name of Scott
McCloud, does that name ring a bell to everyone? Understanding Comics. And I actually
took his comic workshop, and fascinating gentleman. And what the magic of comics lives not
in the panel. Yes, you can be the greatest artist in the world, and the greatest comic graphic
artist in the world, but where does the magic actually live in comics? What keeps us our
imaginations engaged? Anyone know, comic lovers? Yeah, it's the space between the
panels, which is called, anyone know? The gutter, it's called the gutter. He's tried to change
that because it's just sort of a negative kind of thing.
But the gutter is really where the brain takes two separate images and composes the story.
Because there, take these two panels here which come directly from his book Understanding
Comics. You see in one panel a guy with a raised ax, and -- you die, and the other one, no,
no -- and then all you see in the next panel is a scream. Yet you don't know who's streaming.
You don't know where that action fell, you don't know how hard it fell.
Well yes you do, because you're the where you know who supplies all of that investigation.
The real criminal in this particular two panel sequence is the audience. They're the artist,
they're the audience and they're the creator, and that is the magic. It's the ability of the brain
to take two dots, if you will, and connect them in a compelling story that you created and it
becomes that much more powerful.
My favorite story of this particular law is the story of Sopranos. How many of you watched the
Sopranos when it was -- okay. So what was, those of you what were Sopranos viewers and
actually before I ask that, for those of you who didn't watch the Sopranos, it was an HBO
series. Won numerous Emmy awards, eight year run on HBO. It was the story of one Tony
Soprano, a slightly organized criminal in northern New Jersey. And the big deal about the
Sopranos, those Sopranos views was what? The ending. The way it ended, right? There
was a two year run up to the ending.
David Chase who was the creator and it ended in 2007. I don't know what it is about 2007 it
was a magic year for subtraction. He announced in 2005 that he was, that it was going to end
in two years and in 2007, June of 2007, he was going to direct and write the last episode,
which he hadn't done since the very first season.
We were going to find out the answer to a very very serious question that everyone really was
hanging on their seats about. It was Tony Soprano going to get whacked mob style?
Because he was a bad guy, he was a really bad guy. But the problem was David Chase had
a really sticky problem a wicked problem to solve. If he killed off Tony Soprano, half the
audience would be alienated because half the audience, irrespective of the fact that he was a
bad guy, loved Tony Soprano. The other half hated him. It was a love hate relationship. And
if he killed Tony Soprano off, guess what happens to his chances for a full length Hollywood
feature film? Out the window. Right?
So what does he do? He has to solve that problem and how does he do it? Well Sunday
night, June 12, we're all tuned in those of us who were Sopranos watchers, and it's the last
episode and gosh you're looking at your watch and it's right at the end and he's still alive, he's
gathered there with his wife and his son and his daughter in this diner, and there's unsavory
characters around, and there's music playing and there's weird lighting and all kinds of things
happening. And just when we think something's going to happen, just when we think the
whole thing is going to come to a great close, what happens? Nothing. The entire screen
goes absolutely stark black.
And everyone, everyone in the United States watching this yells down the hall, did you pay
the frickin' cable bill? No one, no one saw as the ending to the series until the credits roll.
And had then we went berserk. Are you kidding me? You're not going give me the ending?
Here I got to come up with the own end -- are you kidding me? Eight years I've been
watching this show and I don't know what's going to happen to Tony Soprano?
The media went nuts. The next day, New York Times, Washington Post, television, The Daily
Show, you know did a spoof on it. Everybody, everybody said cop out, that's just that's fraud,
you've defrauded the audience. The whole world sort of went berserk on David Chase.
But by the end of Monday afternoon, he came out and he said, listen. Everything you need to
know about the fate of Tony Soprano is in that episode. Ba da bing, people went back and
they watched it again, HBO made that very easy to do, and we all had DVRs right? So we
watched it not once, not twice, but three times. The initial 12 million viewers turned into 36,
48 -- 36 by Wednesday, 48 million by Thursday and what's really interesting is that by the end
of the week, three endings had emerged on the internet in blog -- blogosphere went crazy -blogs with very detailed logical cases supporting their ending, whether he died or not. Even a
YouTube ending was supplied.
You see, David Chase had done the letter E thing. He had done the Mona Lisa thing. He had
made it a little bit ambiguous, but he had supplied the clues. He had pasture [phonetic]
references, he had lighting references, he had stuff stuck on people's jackets, clothing, and
people were able to connect the dots that he very carefully put there, and he tripled if not
quadrupled his impact because of it. Limiting information engages the imagination.
Lesson number four, law number four, creativity thrives under intelligent constraints. We hear
a lot about thinking outside the box, but I'm here to tell you there's a lot of room inside that
box for creativity, as a matter of fact, the right kind of box, the right kind of constraint will make
you more creative. Study after study shows that children play most creatively, where? In a
sandbox with one toy or an entire yard full of multiple toys? Where they most imaginative,
most playful, most make believe? In the sandbox with one toy. Right if I were to say to you,
for example, come up in the next 30 seconds with 20 white things. You'd probably get
through five or six very quickly and then start looking up and scratching your ahead and
looking around for the remainder. But if I said to you, think of 20 white things in your kitchen,
put a little constraint around it, you'd be able to do that very exercise with little to no difficulty.
And intelligent is the right word. The ability to have a stretch goal that's achievable but is
intelligent and drives a kind of creativity and the new thinking that you want is is what you're
after.
Asking someone to work five or ten percent more or having a goal of five or ten percent
improvement, often, for the real world, for those of us on the front line, what that often
translates to is working harder not not necessarily more innovatively or more -- more smart, if
you will. But if you make, give me a 25 percent or 30 percent improvement goal, I really need
to think, rethink entirely how I'm going to achieve that goal.
One of the my favorite stories is something that took place years ago down where I live in -- in
California in Los Angeles, remember, you probably heard about it. You maybe even lived
there at the time, the Northridge earthquake. Huge, huge earthquake toppled many freeways.
One particular freeway, there's an interesting case study because I think it's the notion of how
creativity thrives under intelligent constraints.
There's an artery in Los Angeles that runs from downtown to the beach. To Santa Monica. At
the time 350 thousand people traveled that artery every single day. Well, when the
earthquake happened it toppled a section right in the middle. 350 people were stranded and
California transportation authority, Caltrans, as it's known, put an early estimate of combined
cost of a million dollars a day and a year and a half worth of time, a million to get it back up
and running. 18 months, a million dollars a day.
A commercial construction company by the name of C. C. Myers in San Francisco bay area
said -- read that in the the paper and said that can't possibly be right. That can't be right. I'm
going to the mayor. He went to the mayor of Los Angeles and he cut a deal. He said, you
know, I think I can get that up in under six months. I can take two thirds of that time out of the
equation for you. And the mayor said fine, let's talk about this. They came up with a contract
the actual contract was for four months, 120 days, and it was a 15 million dollar contract and
C. C. Myers put up his own money a lot of risk involved because there was a performance
attachment to the entire contract. He said you know if I come in under that 120 days I want a
bonus, a performance bonus, and it was 200 thousand dollars a day. The mayor said fine.
Every day you come in past that 120 days, I'm docking you 205 thousand dollars. Okay.
I don't know if you know, anyone who lived there or know the story, but do you know how long
it took to get the Santa Monica freeway up and running again? Wild guess? 120 days? Year
and a half? 66 days. 66 days. Were they running on the job? Yeah. Were they working
24-7, yeah. But the interesting thing that they did -- and they used some special quick setting
concrete. The interesting thing they did required no technology. They simply took the fat out
of the process. Fat in terms of waiting. Waiting for what? Waiting for the gosh darn
inspector.
You see, traditional construction is you finish the work, you know based on a specification and
you wait for the inspector. You wait a couple weeks, you know. You got to schedule him to
come out. The inspector comes out, looks at your work, says nope, that's not to code, and
you've got to rework it. Then you've got to wait again to have him reschedule.
So they made a very very quick adjustment. They said listen in order for us to do this, you
need to have an inspector on the job, with us 24-7, realtime, so that we get our work
approved or not as we go. Just in time. That's what made the whole thing work. That -- that
120 day constraint allowed them to surpass it by a large margin, and it made a career for C.
C. Myers. He replicated what he did in the San Francisco bay area a few years back when
one of the bridges toppled.
Anyone familiar with In-N-Out Burger? What do we know about In-N-Out Burger? The secret
menu. What you are looking at? In-N-Out Burger for those of you who don't know, it's a
southwestern delicacy. I don't think they've -- it's made it to Washington yet, I think they're in,
what, California, Nevada, Arizona, and I think they've moved into Texas as well. But what -and they were actually the innovators of the drive through burger stand. I don't know if you
know that, back in 1946.
This sign is -- what you're look at here is the original menu. And it's never changed. Four
food items, right? You get a double double which is two slices of cheese, two beef patties and
a bun, cheeseburger, hamburger, French fries, then you've got beverages. It hasn't changed.
At least the company hasn't changed it. Because they have a very simple rule in place: We'll
do anything you want to a burger. That's it. But we're not changing our menu. That's the
constraint.
Who's changed it? For those of you who know about the secret menu? Customers. What's
compelling about that is that the number of items on the secret menu, and it's not so secret
anymore, you can just get on the internet and you can find out what's on it.
But what's compelling to me about it is that this goes beyond the Starbucks thing where
there's a plethora of items on an already complex menu. It's a very very simple menu it stays
simple. If you go to any In-N-Out establishment and ask for say a Flying Dutchman or a
protein style or an animal style or a grilled cheese, it shows up on your receipt, on your ticket
as that. They standardized the customer created menu that's got three dozen or so items on
it, and there is nothing in-and-out about In-N-Out Burger. The lines are always long, the food
is always good, and they made quite a career out of that kind of constraint.
Lesson number five. These next two, these last two lessons laws, if you will, concern the
concept of break. And there are two kinds of break. There are the kind that you make, and
there're the kind that you take. So let me take the kind that you make first.
What you are looking at here is a Zen rock garden. Anyone ever been to a niwa garden, a
friendship garden? They fascinate me. Because it's all about patterns, grooves, and the
interruption of those patterns to create what I find to be compelling new patterns, and it
always astounds me, I mean I don't know how -- where are the frickin' footsteps in this -- in
this thing, right? How do you do that?
There is a concept, a Zen aesthetic design concept called datsuzoku, which means break
from routine. Break from normalcy, break with convention. And that's what I'm talking about.
When I'm talking about break as an important part of breakthrough. Breaking a pattern,
whether it's a business model, disruptive business model, whether it's simply a new idea, a
spinoff, what have you, when you break that pattern, that's where creativity and innovation, I
think, lives.
Think about it in your day-to-day existence. You start thinking far more resourcefully when a
pattern that you are accustomed to breaks. For example you're in your car, it's raining and all
of a sudden, bam, you get a flat tire. What do you do? If you're like me you -- curse. Right?
Curse. Right? You're like grr! That curse is a signal that things are out of whack. That things
are now not normal.
And all of the things that you took for granted before now come into play. You start thinking.
Your brain is on fire. You're thinking about oh my gosh, how am I -- it's raining, it's slippery,
people are already kind of out of control, they don't drive that well anyway, and now it's
raining, how am I going to get safely over to the side of the road? All of a sudden you're
aware of everyone around you. You're aware of your inability to maneuver your own vehicle
in quite the way that you want to, you start thinking about the tools at your disposal, do I have
a spare? Is the spare -- does it have air in it? Do I have the tools to change the thing? All of
those things that you took for granted now come into play, and they're all the things that you
need to solve the problem, but it was the break that brought them to the fore of your brain,
and that's what I'm talking about here.
And one of my favorite stories here, and this is -- this is sort of the air that that I think you're
breathing here, because, are you familiar with the terms Skunk Works, you must be.
Microsoft Research Development has a lot in common, I would think, with Lockheed's Skunk
Works which is their advanced development projects division. How many of you are familiar
with the history of Skunk Works, though? A few of us, okay.
So quick history lesson because I think it's kind of interesting. We use the term a lot, Skunk
Works, to mean what? What does it mean? To those of you who, you've heard it, what does
it conjure up? Yeah, sort of a secret project, right, secret sauce project, killer app kind of
thing, you're sequestered, you know you're a little bit more autonomous, you've broken away
from the main operation with a singular focus to do something by a certain time.
Well, all of that came about in 1943. And in 1943 we were in World War II. And all of a
sudden Germany had a jet fighter plane. We didn't. We had prop planes called the P-38.
Watch any World War II black and white film and you will see Lockheed's P-38. That was our
de facto fighter plane at the time. And it was designed by one Kelly Johnson. Clarence Kelly
Johnson, who was Lockheed's sort of maverick designer, and Lockheed at the time was down
in Burbank, California, right next to the airport.
Well, the war department as soon as Germany had that jet fighter plane knocked on
Lockheed's door. They wanted one man and one man only: 33-year-old Kelly Johnson,
because he was the genius had, had designed the P-38. And they gave him -- they did the
freeway thing, okay, six months to come up with a working prototype that competes or bests
Germany's jet fighter plane. And Kelly Johnson said well, where am I going to get the time to
do that? We're now 24-7 trying to crank those things out the door. How am I going to do that
and do -- with all the other things that I've got to do?
His -- and he used the constraint to drive his creativity. He said okay I know that there's no
space, at all in this building in the main manufacturing plant, I'm going to break away. He took
with him 30 of the best designers and engineers. He spent his afternoons in a new location.
That location happened to be a rented circus tent next to a very stinky plastics factory. It was
so stinky that it reminded everyone working there of the Li'l Abner cartoon and the Skonk
Works factory in in Dogpatch. Skonk with an O, Skonk Works.
Right, and we never knew exactly what they were cooking up in that factory, they put shoes
and skunks and everything else, some kind of moonshine but it reminded everyone, it smelled
so bad that one day, one of the engineers actually answered the phone Skonk Works, and it
stuck, much to Kelly Johnson's chagrin. And it stuck for 20 years until the publisher of -- of Li'l
Abner, Al Capp's publisher said, you can't use that anymore.
So they came up with a very close cousin, Skunk Works, right? They changed one letter, and
that's the actual logo. That's the actual building out in the Mojave Desert. I've tried to get in,
you can't. I've tried everything. I've tried numerous calls. I think only one person has gotten
in there, one reporter they've let in there.
But the notion of Skunk Works is that notion of break, and how sometimes that you need to
break the pattern of the normal everyday operation the de facto way of doing business to
break apart, break away and create a new pattern.
Taking a break. We'll conclude with this. Doing something isn't always better than doing
nothing. And why do I have a picture of a hippopotamus? Because I learned a very important
lesson from one Boyd Matson [phonetic] who is a National Geographic adventure journalist.
We were speaking at the same location the same event a few years ago and the title of his
talk floored me. I loved it. It was how to stand still when the hippos charge. I thought what
an elegant solution, all right, who's going to think to do that? We're hardwired to run, right?
To fight or flight.
If you run when momma hippo decides that you don't like the -- you're look -- she doesn't like
the way that you're looking at her calm with that big old long telephoto lens and she charges,
two thousand pounds of mad momma hippo, if you run, you will die, end of story. I don't care
how fast you are. I don't care if you're Carl Louis, who, you know, run the hundred in eight
flat, she will mow you down. Your only choice is to stand still. He wouldn't share with me
exactly how he figured that out, but there's a direct application to this.
If I were to ask you to do nothing right now, you'd be hard pressed to do it. Unless you are
disciplined in something for example like meditation, in other words trying to absent your brain
of all thought to stop thinking, it's very difficult to do nothing, but you can sort of take a break
from your workday routines.
And interestingly enough, there was an experiment run by Boston Consulting Group a few
years ago which has now become company corporate policy, what they did was they took a
dozen of their consulting teams, four or five person teams, and they mandated one night off
from work. And you know consultants, right? They -- they -- they love -- they thrive on
working all week long and they were all bragging about how hard they're working, right? And
they're connected to their smart phone all the time.
Well, they said no. You've got to have one scheduled night off where you are not allowed to
contact in any way any of your teammates, anything related to work. No email, no snail mail,
no phone, no smart phone, no nothing.
And it drove the consultants nuts to begin with, right at the start. Why? Well they thought
they were going to miss out on the good project, they thought oh my gosh, if I can't work that
one night, I'm going to have to work the weekend, extra hours, and it made everybody really
tense. But they started to get used to it, and they were -- Boston Consulting Group was trying
to make the point that sometimes, the most productive thing that you can do looks to all the
world to be unproductive.
There is certain mechanisms and processes in your hippocampus in the right part of your
brain that you cannot speed up and those are the things where creativity lives. It's the ability
to make connections between seemingly disparate things that your brain require a quiet mind
for. It's why you get your best ideas not necessarily when you're working on the problem at
hand, but when you are taking a hike, taking a long languid shower, you're taking a nap,
you're driving. That's where all these great, you know, insights, happen, because you have -you've steeped yourself from the problem, the solution isn't forthcoming, you step away from
it, step away from the problem, take a break, and boom, all of a sudden the connection is
made and sure enough, the experiment proved to be a success. Teams according to their
clients produced better more creative work product, better solutions for their clients,
inter-team communication became more efficient because they had slightly less time to say
the same thing.
So doing something isn't always better than doing nothing, and there are a lot of ways to do
this, and I don't know if Microsoft has adopted this notion of meditation at work or teaches it,
but I know other organizations are doing it. Some of them are your competitors. I know that
Larry Ellison does it, requires all of his senior executives to do it. I know that Salesforce.com
does it. I know that Google does it, and they teach it at Google University.
But there are other ways. I couldn't do it. I can't do it. I can't meditate. I've tried it with
music. I've tried it with all kinds of things, and I can't do it. There are others things that I can
do though. You can travel, you can pulse your work. Every 90 minutes, take a break. Stretch
your legs. Get away from your screen. Just remove yourself, take that break, and even if it's
for ten minutes.
I wrote this book that's in front of you in six weeks because I pulsed my work versus six
months, my previous book which was actually longer. Now I kind of cheated because I had
50 people help me write this book, and put little essays so I subtracted some of myself from
the book, but still six weeks versus six months because I change the way I work.
Pulsing. It's a very, very solid technique. There's neuro feedback that you can do. There's all
kinds of techniques to help quiet the mind because there's a lot of research around a certain
kind of brainwave preceding that sudden creative insight, which is a gamma ray burst, and
you need an alpha wave kind of quiet mind to to produce it.
So all of those things allow me to answer the real question that I teed up right at the
beginning, which is what's an elegant solution? How do you create it? Why do they matter?
I think I've answered all those except what the definition of an elegant solution is and it's here.
It's an idea, a strategy, whatever form it takes, a product, a service that achieves the
maximum effect that the minimum means.
And there's a visual metaphor that I love. It's a diamond. Diamonds are elegant, no question
about it, they are the kind of simplicity that's found only on the far side of complexity made
from the simplest compounds on the planet, carbon and oxygen, carbon dioxide, right? You
take a raw gem, a raw stone to create a piece of jewelry that you want to put on someone's
finger.
Do you add material to it? You subtract material in a very careful way. And when you
subtract it, it actually becomes more complex in structure and appearance. It's the hardest
thing we know it's cutting edge. Literally, it withstands heat and pressure like no other
substance that we have, but the overwhelming feature the overwhelming characteristic of a
diamond that makes it so valuable and its clarity. And that's what an elegant solution is. It's a
clear solution to a compelling need, a compelling problem.
So -- and I'll leave you with this final thought. And you heard it at the beginning as well.
When you remove just the right things in just the right way, something good happens. In a
nod to Michelangelo who said, you know, I just took the block of marble and crafting the
perfect man, David, I removed everything that wasn't David. Okay, so thank you very much.
A little bit of shameless self-promotion there.
Thank you. I think we have some time for for questions, and I know there are a lot of people
online as well, so do we have any -- we'll field some from here, we'll take some online, as
well, we've got, ten 15 minutes or so, anyone have a question or thought or comment or "a
ha" or wondering about, yeah?
>>: So thinking about subtraction I think Michelangelo's a good example but what I thought of
was Kevin Flint as portrayed in the movie Tron Legacy, where he was an example of do
nothing, sometimes doing nothing was more important than doing something, and I guess my
question is how do you do you know when to run for the portal? How do you when is the right
time for action and inaction?
>> Matthew May: Yeah, in my case it was, is -- it was because I didn't have any other
alternative. I had to almost literally try a different way of thinking because it doesn't come
naturally, and I wouldn't suggest that this is easy, natural or intuitive, at least not in the
western world. It comes a little bit more naturally to the eastern ways of thinking because
silence and pauses is -- is and emptiness a much more exalted characteristic.
There's no easy way to know but if you focus on the second half of those three choices, so
any time you've got a choice in front of you, also consider what to not do. What to leave out.
What to or restraint from adding in the first place and what to ignore.
A good way of -- and I'm always asked how do you get started with this? How do I know what
to subtract? Easy. Ask someone who is in direct receipt of what you do on a daily basis,
what's the one or two things that you would love for me to remove eliminate or stop doing?
And you may just need to interject and shut them up. Because they will go on. There are a
lot of things that we are doing -- ask your spouse, ask your partner. Ask them, you know,
what is it that you would love for me to not do anymore? They'll go on and on. There's a lot
of room for subtraction in our life, and if you want to think about it business wise, think about
well, what would my competitor really struggle with if I were to stop doing? That's another
way to think about it. Yeah.
>>: So I don't know if you know or not, Microsoft's in the middle of a big cultural change in
how they design [inaudible] for Chrome and simplification. As a designer and a developer,
though, one of the challenges we're seeing in implementation are that I'm seeing in
implementation are saying just as an engineering it's bad to over-engineer, or maybe
pre-optimize too early. A lot of people as they're trying to implement this are oversimplifying
too early, where they're trying to find the simple before they work through the complex, like,
change all fonts to Sega 42 and put everything in a magenta box and it's good to go, right?
And that's horrible design, right?
So how do you, how do we help the educational efforts to get the laws of subtraction out but
not have people fall in the first obvious trap of simplifying too early or mistaking elegance for
bare bones, right too simplify all the life out of it, basically simplify until there's nothing else
and no more?
>> Matthew May: When -- when minimalization becomes the goal, you're in as much of a trap
as the other extreme. So you need to think about what's not necessarily the way to minimize
things or simplify, but what's the essence? What is the essence of the solution? And I spent
a lot of time with teams in rapid iteration loops. Very lean, very low fidelity prototypes, where
you have haven't invested a lot of time, and you find out really quickly whether you're
oversimplifying things or over-complicating things.
And you do that in a couple of days where you challenge your assumptions you think very
scientifically but you build something whether it's out of paper and you very quickly test it with
the potential user and get feedback on it and so that you know you're on the right track.
It's -- it's -- to use the the lingo at IDO [phonetic], it's enlightened trial and error, right, I think is
the best way to go. So sometimes you can over-think simplification. So if that becomes the
ultimate goal, then I think you're almost on near side simplicity. Which is not where you want
to be.
>>: Actually I -- the question response is just yesterday, I was talking to a friend of mine who
works with kids building Lego robots and he's teaching them robots. And they -- the task
they're trying to do they created this big old one they kept adding things onto it, onto it and
onto it, and it's getting incredibility complex, and it wasn't working that well, and he just went
and deleted everything. And the kids all went [gasping sound].
>> Matthew May: [laughter]
>>: And freaked. They said what are you trying to do? And they like 14 blocks down to
three. Just by -- they went through the I think they had to do that exercise of learning the
complex thing and then saying okay, let's throw this all away and start over now that we
understand the problem we're trying to solve.
>> Matthew May: Listen, there's a reason why Costco's successful, right? I mean we are
hardwired to add, to horde and to store, right? 36 rolls of toilet paper makes us feel pretty
good about ourselves, right? But you know it -- so we got to fight that, that that common
instinct. You had a question?
>>: Yeah so you're -- you're selling subtraction to us. Sometimes subtraction in the work
environment is a bit of an outlier. People may be in addition kind of organization you're in.
How much is the selling of subtraction or that that approach part of the actual doing of it and
should one do it the same way you're doing it?
>> Matthew May: I don't know that there's any one way to do it. I have learned the hard way,
let's sort of how I learn by nature is the hard way unfortunately, but I, I do things one at a time.
One of the things that I learned at Toyota was the notion of lean thinking and sort of one piece
flow.
So for example, in an organization that wants to -- hey, Matt, can you come and teach the
whole organization subtraction? No. I can teach one team. I can work with one team and
see how well, if it works in this particular kitchen, right in this particular environment and go
from there. And what we do is to very simply get all of the work that we do very visible.
Whether it's a customer facing problem an internal problem but we make it very visible. And
once you make things visible. It's like those shared space street concepts there's a lot of
waste. There's a lot of all of those seven things. There's a lot of excessive stuff, confusing
stuff, and that's where we start picking off very surgically. And so that's that's how I do it. One
team at a time, very organically, and then people go, what, something's different with that
team that's kind of cool because now my life is better and now we're leaning it and then we go
that way, so.
>>: You go through the complexity part in order so that they can appreciate the --
>> Matthew May: Yes. There is -- yeah. There is no reason to even talk about simplicity or
subtraction without the concept of complexity. If you ignore -- there's no reason. It's like why
talk about light if there's no dark, right? Why talk about trust, if there's no vulnerability?
Right? There's no reason to talk about simplicity or subtraction without complexity.
So you've got to live that complexity, and the best way to do is is by those on the receiving
end. To become somewhat on the receiving end of whatever complexity you're delivering.
And we all do it. It's just the complex and it keeps getting more complex.
So yes, you got to live through that, and it's painful, right? And it's messy. If there's anything
clean about this and right to be doing it, there would be no reason for me to stand up here
talking about it. So, you -- there's a question online? One last question? Sorry. Okay, let's
do it from online then.
>>: One last question from online user: Have you used Windows 8? And --
>>: [laughter]
>> Matthew May: Have I used Windows 8? What was the second half?
>>: And does it fit your thesis?
>> Matthew May: [laughter]
>>: [laughter]
>> Matthew May: I'd love to say no comment -- sometimes doing nothing is better than
saying something.
>>: [laughter]
>> Matthew May: I played with it and I played with -- I wrote a -- here's how I can answer that
question. Go to fast company design on Halloween day I wrote sort of a tongue in cheek
article about the feature creep, as the creepiest creep of all is the feature creep, and I left a lot
of folks unscathed. Apple folks, Microsoft folks, you name it.
So it wasn't -- wasn't you know, bad, it was just poking and prodding at the things that we
often think are -- I mean even the -- the, you know, I got the iPhone 5, it's bigger than my
iPhone 4, what happened, you know? Steve Jobs goes away, and all of a sudden things are
getting bigger and not necessarily better, right? The whole maps -- and I could go on and on.
Just beware of the feature creep, it's the creepiest creep of all, and that's how I'm going to
answer that question. Thank you very much.
>>: [applause]