Innovation is saying "No" to 1000 things | Hacker News Reader

Innovation is saying "No" to 1000 things

zurb.com

60 pointsezl17 comments

Just because Steve Messiah Jobs says something does not mean that it is correct or relevant. Nike sell very different products to Apple and Nike know more about fashion retail than Jobs ever did.

The problem with sports/fashion retail is that it is very subjective. Furthermore, for some products you need customers to have choice.

I have sold a few Nike products in my time (for cycling, yes, think Lance Armstrong...) and I did not feel they were that competitive on grounds of price, sales margin, fit, quality and so on. By any objective measure they were not that good.

However, what did the customers think? They bought it. Not all of the time, but some of the time. Depending on the customer I would steer them towards known best sellers, quality, value or sale items, however, sometimes they would find the Nike branded products suited them better - fit, colour, taste, the brand or whatever it was made them prefer those products.

Had Nike listened to Steve Jobs (or me) and got rid of all those shoddy cycling products then they would have lost all of those sales. Furthermore, those slightly more 'American sized' customers would not have found what it was that suited them.

I agree with your statement, re: Jobs, but disagree with your overall evaluation: the advice Jobs gave to Parker seems sound. It's important to note you are comparing a company that is 10 years older than Apple yet has a market cap an order of magnitude lower. Your anecdote is not incorrect, but it's not useful either since it doesn't show that Nike's original strategy was more useful. In fact, Nike's market cap has grown significantly (and significantly faster than it was growing before) since taking Jobs' advice, which is not to imply causation, but to refute the opposite. Nike may not have gotten rid of the shoddy cycling products (although we are talking post-2011, when did you sell Nike stuff?) but they did take Jobs' advice (at least according to Parker - I don't have the data on number of products).

Sports/fashion has its peculiarities, but your anecdote is not convincing.

The big reason that Nike is so successful is that they have maintained their status of a premium brand, in a sweet spot a few notches above where the competition is cutthroat and less profitable. In the short term, crap sells and looks good for this year's sales number. In the long term, crap offers competitors too many openings to convince a consumer that Nike is actually overrated/overpriced.

Saying "yes" to crap worked really well for Izod, up until the moment it failed catastrophically.

The genius is in saying no to to the right things. It's in the sort algorithm that puts the right ones in the top 10. The original iPhone was great not because it did not have 3G, and the os did not support copy paste. It was great because it was released early with a pack of "bang". Bang as in the competition is dead, it's already too late for "adapt or die". Cutting features or lineup for the wrong reasons is why some of the space the iphone filled existed: BlackBerry refused to produce a device with wifi because it pandered to the carriers who wanted to sell more gprs packets and sms at 25c a pop.

Innovation is an organic process. It takes time and many attempts to get things right.

"If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward". Thomas A. Edison, Encyclopaedia Britannica

This isn't just for innovation, it's for getting things done. I struggled to come up with a name for the Useless Extraneous Suggestions, and then I heard someone call it "Advice from the Idea Fairy." Perhaps it comes from the military? Idea fairies are never around to help get things done, but they toss around ideas without thinking them through. The ideas are usually useless, but still take some time to run down.

This isn't to say all ideas are bad, but there is a lot of "No" that needs to be said to make things happen.

I'm reminded of the old adage: "You can't prove a negative." While I'm not smart enough to know if this statement is philosophically sound, it occurs to me that when you're working on something, the number of possible suggestions is infinite, and conclusively refuting any suggestion is futile. Thus, endless suggestions of the form: "Why don't you try such-and-so?" are counterproductive -- especially when they come from the person who writes your performance review.

For suggestions, I have a place where I can politely write them down for future use.

fwiw this really resonated for me because i'm a single founder in a semi-crowded space. my strategy for success is to basically have a much smaller scope and very narrow feature set, but to be crushingly better than the competition in everything that i DO attempt.

or maybe i'm just seeking out articles that make me feel good about myself.

I'm looking for data on whether Nike trimmed down its product line based on this advice. Has anyone else found anything?

Somewhat off-topic, but I'm curious about this:

> Jobs followed this very advice himself back in 1998 when he shrunk Apple's product line from 350 to 10. So instead of creating 350 crappy products, or 200 mediocre products, or 100 good products Apple focused on creating 10 incredibly designed products.

I'm having trouble imagining how Apple managed to have 350 active products at any one time, ever. Did this include a bunch of software, printers, weird accessories? Are we counting Apple-branded keyrings and beer coozies, or what? Honestly curious.

I'm not really clear on what the ten were, either...

It's all about the SKUs. Variations of all types, including different configurations for devices, modifications for selling certain items through channels, etc. But for Apple, they had all that stuff, and Jobs pared it down.

Google is an interesting parallel to this. The company encourages the development of many different ideas, but it has no issue cancelling (with very short notice) the products that do not take off.

I think strategy rather than innovation is saying "No" to things but if you don't have a strategy the or clarity for the product the innovation becomes a lot harder.

"Complexity is your enemy. Any fool can make something complicated. It is hard to make something simple."

Design is saying No. Innovation is bringing two things together.

we use zurb and it is appropriate to see this in a zurb blog post: zurb has what you need and not a whole lot else, so they clearly subscribe to this philosophy.

less is more.

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