Watch this clip from The September Issue:
Anna Wintour asks two staffers to look her in the eye and promise, “this is our best work.”
Owning your work is the only way it can ever be good.
Diffusing responsibility for your work guarantees that it will be shit.
That’s why the iPhone, with just one logo stamped on it, is better than the phone with four logos.
You can easily imagine the corporate pathologies at work in the creation of a phone with four logos, the same way you can imagine how 50+ icons found their way into the Windows 7 Control Panel.
We’re not all solo auteurs. Collaboration, compromise, and constraints are inescapable when building complicated products. The secret is to make sure that even as work is distributed, ownership of the work’s quality isn’t.
If you’re a software company, your people should have titles like these:
- God of Bringing in the Money
- God of Servers
- God of Programming
- God of the User Experience
Show me a company without a designated (and opinionated) “God of UX” and I’ll show you a company that makes crap.