There is still so much out there about the gems that Steve said. This is a really good one.

From PED:

You know, one of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left John Sculley got a very serious disease. It’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work. And if you just tell all these other people “here’s this great idea,” then of course they can go off and make it happen.

And the problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it. And you also find there are tremendous tradeoffs that you have to make. There are just certain things you can’t make electrons do. There are certain things you can’t make plastic do. Or glass do. Or factories do. Or robots do.

Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.

And it’s that process that is the magic.

And so we had a lot of great ideas when we started [the Mac]. But what I’ve always felt that a team of people doing something they really believe in is like is like when I was a young kid there was a widowed man that lived up the street. He was in his eighties. He was a little scary looking. And I got to know him a little bit. I think he may have paid me to mow his lawn or something.

And one day he said to me, “come on into my garage I want to show you something.” And he pulled out this dusty old rock tumbler. It was a motor and a coffee can and a little band between them. And he said, “come on with me.” We went out into the back and we got just some rocks. Some regular old ugly rocks. And we put them in the can with a little bit of liquid and little bit of grit powder, and we closed the can up and he turned this motor on and he said, “come back tomorrow.”

And this can was making a racket as the stones went around.

And I came back the next day, and we opened the can. And we took out these amazingly beautiful polished rocks. The same common stones that had gone in, through rubbing against each other like this (clapping his hands), creating a little bit of friction, creating a little bit of noise, had come out these beautiful polished rocks.

That’s always been in my mind my metaphor for a team working really hard on something they’re passionate about. It’s that through the team, through that group of incredibly talented people bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together they polish each other and they polish the ideas, and what comes out are these really beautiful stones.

From Michael Loop, a really good test of a manager or leader.

Over the course of two years, the team and the company exploded to close to 200 employees. This is when I discovered that growing rapidly teaches you one thing well: how communication continually finds new and interesting ways to break down. The core issue being the folks who’ve been around longer who also tend to have more responsibility. As far as they’re concerned, the ways they organically communicated before will remain as efficient and simple each time the group doubles in size.

They don’t. A growing group needs to continually invest in new ways to figure out what it is collectively thinking so anyone anywhere can answer the question: “What the hell is going on?” This is the first question The Rands Test answers. As I’ll explain shortly, the second question The Rands Test helps you answer is selfish. The second asks: “Where am I?”

12 Points

Let’s start with bare bones versions of the questions and then I’ll explain each one.

1. Do you have a 1:1?
2. Do you have a team meeting?
3. Do you have status reports?
4. Can you say No to your boss?
5. Can you explain the strategy of the company to a stranger?
6. Can you explain the current state of business?
7. Does the guy/gal in charge regularly stand up in front of everyone and tell you what he/she is thinking? Are you buying it?
8. Do you know what you want to do next? Does your boss?
9. Do you have time to be strategic?
10. Are you actively killing the Grapevine?

Peter Drucker well understood that the only thing you can measure purely are physical phenomena, such as the rate of a falling stone. Whenever we stray into social territory, “the act of measurement is neither objective nor neutral,” he wrote in Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices. “It is subjective and of necessity biased

From a poor statistic.

An Australian company which got funding for creating a data science crowd-sourcing model:

Kaggle is a platform where companies, researchers and governments can host competitions to help solve huge data-related problems. About 50 competitions have been run to date and members take just days to solve problems that have stumped scientists for years.
“We’re kind of making data science into a sport,” said Goldbloom

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Analytics is going to be very important and that is one of the things that I am seriously working on at Families SA to better understand the business and make better decisions.