Leadership and the Beauty Principle

For Steve Jobs, making objects that were beautiful as well as functional was a cornerstone of Apple’s philosophy. He even insisted that the circuit boards fitted inside the early Macintosh computers looked good. “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it,” he once said. “You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood in the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”
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Soil, Growth and The Art of Conversation

The American poet Robert Frost observed that our ideas are like seeds. “To flourish, when we harvest, we must not consume them all but turn some back to the earth to be transformed to compost in order to further enrich the soil. Out of one idea grows another…and that also is turned under. The seeds that are finally offered is the result of a patient waiting upon the gift – and it grows in response to the months of patient turning and building of the soil.” (From Robert Frost; A Life. (Jay Parini)
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