Steve Jobs had a lot of feedback on the original calculator app. He sent the programmer in a rock-fetching canard, demanding changes each day and then finding new things he didn’t like. Eventually, the developer just added an extra window, below, that allowed Jobs to tinker with all the UI aspects. That ended the back and forth.
This a common problem with how executives work. You are often just a mouse and keyboard proxy for them, especially with slides. As manifested by Jobs:
The primitive calculator design tool also revealed something about Jobs’s management process. He knew what he wanted when he saw it, but he perhaps struggled to articulate it at times. By giving him direct manipulation ability, Espinosa did an end-run around that communication problem entirely.
What needs to happen is for the executive to just work on their own slides before involving anyone else. You should be making your own slides anyhow and using highly paid people as a mouse is poor ROI.
The calculator programmer realized this and made it another executives could work on their own slides problem themselves, saving everyone lots of time responding to executive “feedback.”
I’m hopeful that AI can serve this role. The AI is happy to be your house and tireless when it comes to ideating. Knowledge workers of the world and the executives they support would be much more productive if the executive spent time with an AI doing the first cut of their slides to “articulate” what they need.
A related, often ignored corporate productivity hack (and maybe the calculator fiddling is an example of this) is bikeshedding:
Parkinson observed that a committee whose job is to approve plans for a nuclear power plant may spend the majority of its time on relatively unimportant but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bikeshed, while neglecting the design of the power plant itself, which is far more important but also far more difficult to criticize constructively.
We’ve all been in multiple meetings like that, right? Probably several already this weeks and it’s only Wednesday.
Bikeshedding is a type of bullshit work. And, when it comes to bullshit work, have the bullshit artist do it.
🔗 The Mac calculator’s original design came from letting Steve Jobs play with menus for ten minutes