WASH HANDS WHEN VISIBLY SOILED! OTHERWISE, USE HANDRUB

There are two problems here:

1. Is the WHO seriously communicating that the only thing people should worry about is visible soiling on their hands? Most of what causes infections spread by skin contact are invisible to the naked eye - bacteria and viruses. Your hands can look completely clean, but be carrying infection. Telling people to only wash their hands with soap and water when their hands are visibly dirty seems completely counter-productive
2. When you don’t have visibly soiled hands you’re supposed to “use handrub”. The poster doesn’t explain what this means at all, so it’s left up to you to imagine what it might be. I assume it means rubbing your hands together to clean them, but that is an extremely ineffective way to clean your hands. So who knows? It’s a mystery.

I’d love to hear more about the thinking behind this poster, because as it’s currently done it sends exactly the wrong messages.

PDF of the WHO poster >

This is especially problematic when companies decide to innovate. If you don’t have a clear understanding of why you are pursuing an innovation, you risk being wasteful and ineffective, and could lack strong differentiators from incumbents. On the other hand, clear, deep, relevant insights help you stay one step ahead of competitors who may try to imitate your creations. If they can’t replicate the thinking driving your innovations, they’ll be doomed to “me too” status.

I call these types of insights core insights, a concept which I first introduced in my book, Innovation X. Core insights are a complement to the familiar notion of core competencies, which were first advocated by Gary Hamel and the late C.K. Prahalad. But whereas core competencies are about know-how, core insights are about know-why.

Continue reading at Harvard Business Review >

In my first job out of college I worked at Sun Microsystems, and I became friends with a group of people who regularly played Hacky Sack (or footbag to use its generic name) at lunch. The game is played in a circle with up to a handful of players, and you take turns at “juggling” the bag with your feet. The ostensible goal is to keep the footbag off the ground for as long as possible.

But looking back on it, I also absorbed some good lessons in how to work in teams. As a young person just starting out my career, this was a critical workplace skill to learn, as it’s not stressed enough in typical in K-12 or college education. Hacky Sack is all about exploring the balance between “I” and “We”, and mingling them together seamlessly.

Here are some of the things I learned:

It’s OK to make yourself look good, but not at the expense of others

 Hacky Sack offers an object lesson in how to manage self-expression within a group. It’s perfectly fine to show off a bit when you have the footbag, juggle it a few times between your feet, do a trick or two, and try and improve your skills through play. But after a certain point this becomes selfish. You want to stop just before you get to that point, and pass it on to another player. To translate this into work terms - you should seek to be creative and innovative, and you can have your time in the limelight, but this shouldn’t come at the expense of others being able to do the same.

Corollary: Help the rest of the group look good

By extension, you also want to set your team-mates up for success by giving them managable and interesting shots to continue with. Passing off to another player with a kick that is too difficult, or where all they can do is get one kick in to recover it into play and must immediately send it to another player, is considered rude. On the other hand, always passing off with kicks that are boringly easy means they don’t get to show off with a nice trick. In work terms, share ideas freely, creatively build on other peope’s ideas, and don’t claim sole credit for ideas.

The group rules emerge of their own accord

Each group self-defines its own boundaries about acceptable behaviors. This happens without a designated leader and without explicit rules. It is an experimental and iterative process, but it also has a touch of Darwinism. If you’re not a good team player, after a while you just stop getting the footbag, and therefore you’ll either change your behaviors or withdraw from the group. Again, rarely is anything explicitly said, but the message comes through clearly in the group’s actions.

Sacrifice when necessary

When another team-mate kicks one way off kilter, help them out by trying to recover it, maybe with a big lunge. You may fall on the ground, and you may get it back into play or not, but at least you tried for the good of the group. This builds trust within the group, the sense that you’re all in it together, and will watch out for one another.

Be flexible

There are no roles or positions in Hacky Sack, as you find in other team sports. There’s no quarterback calling the shots. Everyone plays the same role, and must pitch in equally, and adhere to the norms of the group as they emerge.

Keep the bigger plan in mind

Hacky Sack combines enjoying the individual moments and tricks, with trying to keep the footbag in play for as long as possible by not letting it touch the ground. Being clever shouldn’t come at the success of the longer term goal.

Hacky Sack is often looked down on as a game for slackers. But get past the stereotypes and it teaches some valuable collaboration skills and attitudes in a more concentrated way than you find in a lot of other sports or so-called team-building activities.

Related:

Inventing the Collaborative Workspace

This is especially problematic for products that rely on ongoing usage and revenue (e.g. through recurring fees or advertising), and sell the up-front product for little or no cost as a loss-leading carrot. Inability to sustain interest after the initial value has been sated is the nightmare scenario for products like this - which include virtually all mobile apps that want to be actual money makers.

Bryce Roberts offers a cautionary tale of his own making:

For years I told anyone that would listen how much I wanted an app that let me snap a picture of my meal and would tell me how many calories were on the plate….

So when Meal Snap was announced last year, I was thrilled.

I quickly paid my $2.99 and downloaded the app before heading out to breakfast with the kids. I decided to take it for a spin and snapped this picture to test it out. The app worked as advertised and within a few minutes of uploading the image, I got the results back….

And I never opened the app again. 

Here was an app that I was so vocal about wanting, nay, needing. Yet when I actually had exactly what I’d been wishing for, I found it didn’t do much for me.

What turned this seemingly great app into one that he just used once? “Turns out I’d developed a good enough sense for calorie counting that my estimates were just as accurate if not more so than the magical app of my dreams.”

This is obviously a one-off, anecdotal case, but it reinforces the caution we have to use when listening to customer input. Things that seem intuitively right and useful at first can turn out to be just the opposite, as Bryce’s example shows.

This is why I’m sanguine about Clayton Christensen’s “jobs to be done” approach — fundamentally it’s a good concept, but it doesn’t get close to the level of predictability that is sometimes ascribed to it. There are many nuances about how to interpret a given a job, and whether you can actually build a business off a job even if there appears to be demand for it (there are lots of jobs to be done that don’t get addressed for financial reasons — just ask anyone suffering from an obscure disease that won’t get a hit drug like Lipator).

With present day research and analysis methods, there remains an irreducable amount of uncertainty about new product success, even when customers have told us loud and clear what they want.

A computer is a lite-brite for bad fucking ideas. So stop searching for answers on google with that glazed-over look and use your sketchbook to start asking questions.

From Good Fucking Design Advice - who have plenty more humorous and maybe NSFW merchandise.

Should we stick to our traditional values or press forward into an uncertain future? Should we hew to the familiar, or be experimental? 

I’m not talking about the current political climate, but about the digital camera market.

After years of mostly bland incremental design evolution, the digital camera market has suddenly exploded with a diversity of products that we haven’t seen since the early 2000’s. But many of the new products — even some of the most technologically innovative — are clothed in retro styling that harkens back to film cameras made some half century ago. This is disappointing. While the cameras are undeniably attractive, they are patently inauthentic, undercutting the soul that they wish to capture from the bygone era. I would prefer that they find their own voice, one that finds a way to be beautiful and evocative while still being forward-looking. Using the past as a crutch is not a path for sustainable success when it comes to technology-driven, expensive products.

The Old Fashioneds

Fuji and Olympus have been the pioneers of this retro movement. Fuji has always been known for its rangefinders (I used to have one of their medium format ones), and with the launch of a series of rangefinder-esque digital cameras Fuji has catapulted itself from also-ran maker of ho-hum digicams to the top of the desirability heap.

Robert Plotkin put it best: “When the Fuji X100 was announced at Photokina 2010, the trade show held in Germany, it was as if a supermodel walked into a Japanese lederhosen convention. Mouths gaped, the band’s instruments clattered to the floor, and hands collectively grasped at the Fuji’s shiny dials.”

Put one of these into the hands of one of the great mid-century photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson or Gary Winogrand, and they’d probably be able to start shooting right away.

Fuji has in fact been doing some very interesting under-the-hood innovation, such as a hybrid optical/electronic viewfinder, but has chosen to wrap the innovations in metal designed (I imagine) to appeal to empty-nest Baby Boomers with disposable income and a nostaligic frame of mind. This would be like the Tesla coming out with a cutting edge electric drivetrain and then giving it a body that mimicked a Ford Falcon (something which I’m sure many would find appealing).

Before Fuji, Olympus sparked the retro trend with digital cameras inspired by their small Pen film cameras from the 60’s:

(Old on top, new on botton, in case you can’t tell….) Again, the newer camera is innovative even within the digital realm, being one of the first “mirrorless” interchangeable lens cameras that do away with the swinging mirror that is characteristic of traditional SLRs. This allows great image quality in a body that is smaller, lighter and quieter than could normally be achieved. More recently, Olympus released the OM-D E-M5, an homage to its much-loved OM SLRs of the 1970s.

Like the original OM, the digital version has a prominent hump above the lens. In the case of the film version, this housed the prism necessary for the SLR functionality. But the new one is mirrorless, like the digital Pen above, and so doesn’t need the hump. But it has it anyway.

We’ve Seen This Story Before

Digital camera manufacturers aren’t the first ones to use nostalgia to move product, not by a long shot. The car industry went through a similar phase a while back, starting with the VW New Beetle and then reaching its aesthetic peak with the Mini Cooper, both of which are undoubtedly attractive cars (though not particularly innovative in any other ways). Along the way many vehicles jumped on the bandwagon, such as the Chrysler 300 and the Chevy HHR.

Thankfully that trend is largely over. In part it was done in by the question, “What next?” There’s a reason that the new Beetle and Mini barely evolved - how do you update an icon without ruining it for the people who flocked to it in the first place? VW recently updated the Beetle to make it more masculine and sporty, and failed miserably. Mini introduced the Crossman SUV and Coupe, both of which fell out of the ugly tree and are devoid of the original Mini spirit.

More recently we’ve seen a similar retro urge playing out in an unexpected place - Apple. Apple has received considerable flak for its use of skeumorphism, such as laboriously mimicking the look of old address books, blotters, and tear-away calendars, even at the expense of functionality and ease of use afforded by touch interfaces.

Apple is going hog-wild with a mish-mash of aesthetics in both its mobile and desktop operating systems that run starkly counter to its history, and to its physical products. I hate it. And in this day and age, do people really need these backward-looking cues in their technology anymore? People are perfectly happy using their iPhones, even though these slabs bear no resemblance to the old Ma Bell rotary telephones. Quit using the “new user needs help” explanation as an excuse for lazy design. These days, most new technology users are 3 years old, not 60, and they wouldn’t know a blotter pad if they saw one. 3 year-olds just assume that any illuminated surface is swipable.

Ironically, it is stereotypically stodgy, artless Microsoft that’s cutting the opposite way and embracing design that is wholly digital in its orientation. Its Metro design language for mobile and now Windows 8 is a radical break from the past, and trusts that people no longer need the cushioning of skeumorphs.

The Digital Native

Is there anybody taking the Microsoft Metro route in digital cameras? Well, it’s not Microsoft’s counterpart in digital imaging, market leader Canon. Heck, their current SLRs look barely any different than the classic T90 of almost 30 years ago.

Instead, it is Sony that has picked up the digital native banner and run with it. Sony has made its fair share of ho-hum point and shoots, and has a rather good line of SLRs. But what’s really put it on the map are its NEX mirrorless cameras. These pair tiny, well-made bodies with large, extremely good sensors, and almost comically large (by comparison) lenses. The camera de jour that’s got everyone drooling is the NEX-7:

Like Microsoft’s Metro, the NEX-7 tears up the rule book and sets it on fire in terms of form factor and control layout and makes absolutely no concessions to traditional styling.

But that’s not to say the NEX-7 is without precedent. In fact, it bears a striking resemblance to another Sony camera, the F505, which eventually led to the fabled F717 of 2002 (below). In fact, the 717 was even more radical than the NEX-7 — you could tilt the entire body relative to the lens for shooting above and below eye-level, and it could shoot at night using infrared. But the L-shaped small body with large lens, which leads to a very different way of holding the camera, has reappeared with the NEX series.

The F717 appeared at a time of great experimentation as manufacturers tried to understand the possibilities of this new digital technology. It’s sad that in the end they settled into very conventional form factors - your point and shoot, your SLR - and have only recently begun experimenting again after a decade of same-old same-old.

Camera makers: please get this retro fad out of your system, and get on with making products that look forward into new possibilities, and not backward into old paradigms.

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Economist Innovation Conference, held at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. It was a fast-paced (almost too fast), jam-packed event, with lots of good speakers and a heady flow of ideas. The downside to the 1-day format was that there was little time for networking, however they did make sure to get Q&A from the audience in almost every session, which was good.

Here are some of the ideas that came up during the presentations and discussions (assume that these are paraphrasings, not exact quotes):

Daniel Franklin (Economist Executive Editor) had some thoughts on what the world could look like in 2050, including some somewhat jokey company names:

• ExxonHydro (oil and water both will be the valuable resources)
• TataSoft (Indian IT company becomes a full software powerhouse)
• Google Goldman Sachs (since financial knowledge makes sense to become rolled up into Google’s storehouse)
• Shanghai Automotive (Chinese car manufacturers have taken the world stage)
• GSKPfizerNovartisAstraZenica (the logical endgame of the pharma business)
• Oxbridge Harvard (Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard combine forces)
• BollyDis - Bollywood meets Disney

Laura Tyson (Haas, UC Berkeley): On appropriate role of government in fueling innovation: Don’t forget that it was a government grant (National Science Foundation) that funded Larry and Sergey while they were at Stanford, leading to Google.

Naveen Jain (World Innovation Institute): The Kahn Academy is an interesting idea, but still a primitive version of what virtualized education could be like. It’s akin to radio stations decades ago getting into the TV business, by simply sticking cameras in front of the talking heads/actors - they hadn’t yet realized the full value of the new medium.

Stewart Brand (Long Now Foundation): We’ve been terraforming the planet for a while now. The choice we have now is not to stop terraforming, but to figure out how to do it well rather than badly, as we have been. This is a big mental shift for the environmental movement, which has historically focused on humans getting out of meddling in nature to have it return to a pristine condition. Brand argues this is no longer the best path if we want to keep the planet sustainable for our species and others.

Beth Comstock (GE): Cannibalization is a big fear for companies considering reverse innovation, where low-cost/resource innovations and brought from emerging markets into developed markets. The barriers to successful reverse innovation are not just R&D/technology, but incentives for internal adoption (will people be willing to embrace and sell the new solutions?), and the different business models required to optimally sell them.

Vijay Govindarajan (Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College): People in poor countries don’t want cheap products. They just have a very different perception of value. To succeed in these markets you have to dramtically shift the value/price equation. For example, someone in Thailand was able to develop an artificial limb for US$35….for an elephant!

Vijay G: Companies must create value before they have permission to appropriate (take) value. This was the breakdown that occurred in 2008 - companies were taking value for themselves before others were seeing the requisite benefits.

Carl Bass (Autodesk): The rise of desktop manufacturing will undercut China as the workshop of the world. The historical equation of mass manufacturing equalling lower cost is breaking down.

Carl B: Design thinking is bunk! It’s a marketing term dreamed up by design consultants, but it has no basis in reality.

Clayton Christensen: The problem for innovators is, how do you reach consensus on a counter-intuitive notion?

Clay C: I’m not ready to call Facebook or even Google innovative companies yet. They have both had very good ideas to get started, but what they have not shown yet is that they can consistently follow those up with winning new ideas. That’s the hallmark of truly innovative organizations.

James Quigley (Deloitte): How many people here think innovation is a bad idea? [show of hands, very few!] How many have been able to get their organizations to innovate successfully [again a show of hands, a similarly low number…] Everybody wants to do it, so why are so few successful? (Incidentally, this was the question that sparked my book)

Colleen McCreary (Zynga): At Zynga, our executives are required to spend 20% of their time thinking about people [contrast with Google’s famous 20% spent on new projects]. Zynga also uses an employee net promoter score (asks, would you as an employee recommend Zynga as a place to work for a friend?)

Gina Bianchini (Mighty Bell): You know what I need as an entrepreneur? It’s not funding. It’s customers.

What happens when there is a mass loss of confidence in the financial system? This very contemporary question was put in unexpected historical context for me this Christmas by a book I was given, A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum. It is based on one hundred radio lectures given by MacGregor (which can be heard here) about items from the Museum’s collection, each chapter discussing a specific artifact. Some of these are mundane, such as an arrowhead or a drum, while others are grand, such as the Rosetta Stone or a Welsh gold cape. For someone like me who has spent his life designing products and thinking about how objects acquire personal and cultural meaning, it was a perfect gift.

One of the first artifacts I thumbed to, a 400-year-old Ming banknote, has striking parallels to today’s world, where there is broad disillusionment with the financial system and a lack of confidence in its future.

The Ming note is an early example of paper money, something that today we take for granted. But if you step back and think about it, paper money represents a remarkable act of faith that we carry around with us every day. It’s an abstraction of coins made from precious metals, which are in turn an abstraction of goods such as crops and livestock. This pattern of abstracting further and further away from “real” things and “real” value has continued to the present day, giving us credit cards and collateralized debt obligations (not to mention casino chips).

MacGregor writes, “[The] ability to convince others to believe in something they can’t see but wish to be true is a trick that has been effective in all sorts of ways throughout history. Take the case of paper money: someone in China centuries ago printed a value on a piece of paper and asked everyone else to agree with them that the paper was actually worth what it said it was…The whole modern banking system of paper and credit is built on this one simple act of faith.” 

Paper money is certainly more convenient than barter and gold coins, but the abstracted leap of faith requires something to back it up in order for sufficient quantities of people to buy into it. MacGregor quotes Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, who jokes that “I think in some way the right aphorism is that ‘evil is the root of all money’!” since trust in whether the money would be properly backed was the key problem, leading the state to become the issuer of money. King continues, “And then the question is, can we trust the state? And in many ways that’s a question about whether we can trust ourselves in the future.”

The Ming note is printed with the statement that it is “To Circulate for Ever” — quite a vote of confidence from the treasury, and presumably one necessary for such an innovative approach to payment and livelihood. Paper money was part of a larger overhaul of the financial system by the first Ming emperor after the previous dynasty — the Mongol Empire — had collapsed. Similar to how fiscal innovations in recent years were justified by statements about economic growth and prosperity through home ownership, Ming’s new financial instruments were described as being for the social good (in their case, funding education for children).

But the new system didn’t work very smoothly and eventually the whole thing collapsed, though not without an early experiment in quantitative easing (i.e., printing more money) which led to devaluation of the currency. Mervyn King says, “Once people realized the link had broken down, then the question of how much it was worth was really a judgment about whether a future administration would issue even more, and devalue its real value in terms of purchasing power. In the end this money did become worthless.”

From Bernie Madoff to derivatives to the housing bubble to dubious AAA credit ratings, we continue to find new ways to encourage people to make financial leaps of faith. Have we reached a breaking point where the abstraction has gone too far, and is too complicated for 99% of people to understand what they’re signing up for, that we must backtrack to more conventional methods? And has the level of trust in private and state financial institutions sunk so low that most people now feel there is no accountability or responsibility for the promises made, or that sound decisions will be made to guarantee “circulation forever”?

I believe that we have. As the Ming dynasty shows us, a properly operating financial system is both symbolic and symbiotic. It doesn’t matter if the ones driving the system trust it and the artifacts representing it, if the majority of the public doesn’t, the system will crash. The well of trust is so poisoned today that it’s hard to see how we can continue forward as is, though unfortunately, relatively little has been done at a structural level to make the necessary changes. 

Can we pull ourselves out of a Ming nosedive, or will we ignore history and repeat it?

Most corporate buildings don’t do a good job of supporting collaboration, brainstorming, and innovative work methods. They tend to be dominated by cubicles or offices which are suited for individual work, or by hard-to-book conference rooms that teams can use but only for short periods of time. What’s needed is a more flexible space that better supports teams and inspires more open thinking. These are common at design firms such as frog where I work, but rare in corporate settings.

I recently saw one such space when I was invited to give a talk at Citrix, the Silicon Valley-based maker of GoToMeeting and virtualization and cloud software, as part of their Design Salon speaker series. The talk was held in the company’s recently completed design collaboration space, a large open area where multiple disciplines can come together to innovate. I asked Catherine Courage, VP of Product Design at Citrix, to talk more about how the space came about and how it’s working in practice:

Why did you create the collaboration space?
Citrix is a company with a unique mission: “Create a world where people can work and play from anywhere.” This means enabling remote collaboration and empowering people to work from any location. But it also means supporting the many different work styles of today’s workforce. Citrix is very serious about this mission for our customers as well as for how we work ourselves, so serious that we are adopting design thinking as a company-wide strategic imperative from our CEO, Mark Templeton. Opening the design collaboration space was a big milestone on our design thinking journey. It’s already played a key role in fostering a more collaborative culture that involves less over-the-wall processes, fewer silos, more and earlier collaboration, and better integration of design into the product development process.

We needed to create a shift in behaviors, and realized this would be best achieved by having people live the change, not just being told about it. The space facilitates this.

Describe the space, and what are some of its special features?

Physically, it’s a 2000 sq. ft. open and sunlit space with large windows that frame the beautiful mountain views. Everything in the space is on wheels and is configurable by teams as they need it. They can move tables and whiteboards around to create mini collaboration spaces. There are stacks of markers, Post-Its, and every “quick and dirty” prototype material under the sun…from construction paper to pipe cleaners. On the surface it might look like a child’s paradise…but in fact it’s heaven for designers.

Instead of being closed-off and secretive, it has all glass walls. We want passers-by to see the action happening and to see how we work. There’s total transparency, literally and figuratively! The space cannot be booked like a regular conference room, since having to make reservations kills the spontaneity. Anyone can drop in anytime and create their own working space.

Every now and then, the business world presents us with a lab experiment that we can observe in realtime. Netflix’s announcement that it is splitting off its DVD-by-mail business from its streaming business is just such an experiment. The DVD business will now go by the name Qwikster, and the streaming business will stay under the Netflix brand. It isClayton Christensen’s innovator’s dilemma incarnate, and Netflix is very publicly trying to solve it. Like its 60% price increase did earlier this year, this move is understandably causing consternation amongst some customers. It’s a bold move, one that will cost them in the near term, but Netflix I’m sure has done the calculus and is looking at the endgame 5-10 years out, not 5-10 months.

In his blog post about the split, Hastings says:

“For the past five years, my greatest fear at Netflix has been that we wouldn’t make the leap from success in DVDs to success in streaming. Most companies that are great at something — like AOL dial-up or Borders bookstores — do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us) because they are afraid to hurt their initial business. Eventually these companies realize their error of not focusing enough on the new thing, and then the company fights desperately and hopelessly to recover. Companies rarely die from moving too fast, and they frequently die from moving too slowly.”

Hastings goes on to acknowledge, “It is possible we are moving too fast — it is hard to say.” This is frank admission of the complexity of the strategic landscape. The media content and distribution business is in a period of massive flux, and while we can say with near certainty what the end state will be, near-term predictions are hard to make.

About five years ago I did this somewhat tongue-in-cheek “timeline” of pivot points for a client in the TV business:

Click to Enlarge

 Half-jokingly it made the point that there is a giant hairball of complexity, consolidation and confusion that the industry is going to have to go through, but if you can survive that, the obvious end state will be that any piece of media will be available whenever an individual wants, wherever they are, on any device they like. (We’re about half way through the hairball at this point with DVD Rental vs Video-on-Demand being the current pivot point. I over-estimated the speeds at which changes would settle out, but it was never meant to be a precise timeline, just directional.)

Now consider this: there are over 200 job openings at Netflix headquarters alone (compare this to 61 openings at competitor Hulu, at all its locations.) The vast, vast majority of these are for software development of one sort or another to support the streaming business. Netflix is building a platform for the streaming/cloud end game; it is not building for the near term, or DVDs by mail.

On top of the technical skills, Netflix is building an organization tuned to the needs of a disruptive environment. This presentation on Slideshare (embedded below) paints a fascinating picture of Netflix’s culture (the Slideshare account is under Reed Hastings’ name, but I doubt it’s actually his).

Several things are worth pointing out from this lengthy document:

1. Netflix focuses on increasing “talent density” more rapidly than business complexity increases. This means demanding high performance standards of new hires, paying top dollar for them, and then giving them freedom to use their own judgment in a highly dynamic competitive and service environment.

2. It notes, “Sometimes long-term simplicity is achieved only through bursts of complexity to rework current systems.” This is exactly what Netflix is going through at this point, introducing additional complexity for a period in order to bring longer-term simplicity (i.e., focus only on streaming).

3. Netflix’s focus is on “rapid recovery”: recognize problems when they occur and fix them quickly, rather than try to predict every outcome ahead of time. This mirrors Hastings’s statement about possibly moving too fast. The presentation goes on to say, “We’re in a creative-inventive market, not a safety-critical market like medicine or nuclear power. You may have heard preventing error is cheaper than fixing it — Yes, in manufacturing or medicine…but not so in creative environments.” Music to any innovator’s ears. Some will call this naive, and certainly there can be downsides if not handled well with customer service (and Netflix has stumbled in this recently, which Hastings admits, then proceeding to clumsily talk about business models and cost structures in his letter to subscribers). But overall it’s the right approach for this context.

It’s hard to know if this document reflects reality. But I give it the benefit of the doubt for a couple of reasons. First, it’s so thorough and consistent in its message. But more important, when it comes to execution Netflix is an outstanding company (the attention to detail put into its user experience is fanatical), that it is clearly getting the best and the brightest, even though it is not the sexiest of tech companies. Netflix has set itself up with just the right type of smart, nimble, curious, and fearless organization that it needs to thrive and outwit competitors in the challenging times ahead.

Netflix will be roundly criticized from many quarters for its bold move, and it will upset and probably lose many customers. But it’s the long-term endgame that Netflix is playing for. No one ever said self-cannibalization is painless.