I love watching the UK version of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, a TV show featuring one of the world’s most successful chefs delivering weeklong, intense and foul-mouthed crash courses on how to run a restaurant for those who desperately need it.

Here’s the first ten minutes of one episode:

Gordon follows more or less the same consulting method each episode:

1. Visit as a customer
Gordon visits, tries the food & samples the service. He provides critical feedback, pulling no punches, to the assembled owner and staff.

2. Obtain commitment to change
Gordon shows how bad things really are and obtains commitment from everyone to change.

3. Observe staff
Gordon steps into the kitchen and watches the chefs and service staff at work. Typically owners haven’t put systems in place either in service or the kitchen, don’t have properly trained staff and don’t have enough experience to improve the situation.

4. Demonstrate viability
Most owners cannot go much further financially and have reached desperation point. Gordon demonstrates how the business can be turned around, sometimes running trials to show how much money can be made.

5. Inject business sense
Gordon puts systems in place across the restaurant, leverages relationships to get better deals on business inputs and finds contra deal opportunities such as cross-promotion.

6. Rebuild passion
Usually the staff have wallowed in mediocrity for so long that they’ve lost all interest in their job. Gordon works with them to restore passion, care, attention & love for food.

7. Provide focus
Typically the restaurant has an inconsistent theme and a menu without focus. Gordon says “a good restaurant does one thing brilliantly, a bad one does fifty badly” and typically cuts the menu down to 5 excellent (& simple to prepare) dishes per course.

8. Restore confidence
Gordon often provides the staff with a surprise challenge that irons out problems in the kitchen and restores confidence of the staff and owner.

9. Consolidate the learning
Gordon observes staff on a busy night, irons out remaining bugs in the system.

10. Find replacement staff
Some staff cannot change or do not have the owner’s interests at heart. Gordon provides the owners with the courage to get rid of them and finds qualified replacements.

11. Leave
Gordon Ramsay know how to make a number of small changes to achieve significant outcomes. Then he hands control back to the thankful owner and leaves.

So that’s Gordon Ramsay’s method. It’s good advice for any type of business and entertaining to boot.

In this classic 20 minute TED.com video, Seth Godin explains how to make your idea spread:

The core ideas:

• The TV-Industrial complex (where more advertising -> more sales) is dead.
• People don’t care about you, they care about themselves.
• Be remarkable (both being different and worth talking about) to cut through the noise.
• Find a passionate audience – sell to people who are listening & maybe they’ll tell their friends.
• Making average (merely very good) products is now risky – no one will notice.
• Be remarkable.

For further reading, check out one or more of Seth’s books.

I have a great party trick – I can catch almost anything that I accidentally drop. My ability to catch is only a second-order solution, however – it’s a response to a first-order problem of clumsiness. Really I should try and overcome my clumsiness but for now it’s easier to catch things and wear the odd breakage.

I’m not alone – many businesses have sexy, fun or easy second-order solutions to first-order problems. It’s sexier to make new sales than it is to invoice on time and chase bad debts. It’s more fun to chase new customers than to take care of existing customers and generate repeat business. In a public company it’s easier to boost the share price by making grand announcements than by working hard to increasing company profits.

Beware the sexy, fun or easy second-order solution – the only long-term strategy is to knuckle down and fix your first order problem.

Satisficing was a term coined by Nobel-prize winning economist Herbert Simon for a decision-making strategy that combines satisfaction and sufficing. Put simply it means selecting the first choice that meets your predetermined criteria rather than continuing to search for the optimal choice.

In the book The Paradox of Choice (Why more is less), author Barry Schwartz gives an excellent and well-researched account of the negative impact that excessive choice has on our wellbeing. He strongly recommends satisficing when making personal decisions so as to be more satisfied in life. For a teaser of the book (which doesn’t do the book justice) he has written this ChangeThis.com manifesto: ‘The Paradox Of Choice’ manifesto

By comparison, Matthew E. May – author of the book The Elegant Solution has a must-read ChangeThis.com manifesto on innovation that calls satisficing the fourth of the ‘Seven Sins of Solution’ – sufficing causes innovators to accept a ‘good enough’ solution rather than pushing through to find the best: The ‘Mind Of The Innovator’ manifesto

So – when making a personal decision, satisfice. When solving a problem, optimise / maximise.

Feedback is crucial to the success of systems – by use of sensory cues, designers remove user uncertainty, informing them that their actions are understood by the system and correct for their task.

As with all good things, however, there are people who use feedback for evil. Consider the poker/slot/fruit machine, designed to separate fools and their money. I’ve tried one machine and found it to provide inconsistent feedback, greatly rewarding modest windfalls with dazzling sound and light displays and allowing losses to go all but unnoticed. The feedback I despised the most was the machine giving ‘you’ve won’ feedback when someone bet a dollar and ‘won’ fifty cents (ie. they lost fifty cents). Evil.

Another obvious contender to win evil feedback awards are the cigarette manufacturers who, in adding nicotine, allow their cigarettes to give new users a mild high – feedback that the product is beneficial to you – when the reality is quite different.

Mainstream organisations often use feedback in ways which are cunning, if not necessarily evil. Consider, for instance, the use of MSG (Monosodium Glutamate) in foods. In Malcolm Gladwell’s typically insightful article, ‘The Ketchup Conundrum’, he points out that MSG has a taste which is pure umami, the fifth fundamental taste of the human palate and a marker of protein in foods. Manufacturers who add MSG to their foods may therefore be providing their food products with feedback that implies wholesomeness – protein – where this may not be the case.

Don’t be tempted to join these companies in provide misleading feedback in your products. Take a long term view of business, building your brand by frequently delivering on and exceeding customer expectations. This calls you to a higher standard of truth and transaperency, now valued by increasingly aware consumers.

My favourite truthful & transparent product of late is Another Bloody Water. Just reading the naked truth on the label or website is enough to make you smile, a powerful use of a Liking trigger that raises this product from a commodity to something remarkable.

Do your products, packaging & promotions provide accurate feedback, reflecting the utility that users can expect to receive from you?

How can you use truth & transparency to increase the appeal of your products?

Wandering around a motor show last year, only two cars really interested me – the Ferrari F430:

and the Mitsubishi Evo X:

This troubled me – that in spite of a plethora of choice and my significant interest in cars, all but two left me cold. I sat looking at the Evo X and pondered until I came up with a formula of sorts for desirability in design:

Desirability = (clarity of design purpose) x
(commitment to that purpose) x
? (an aesthetic factor)

In other words, I’m wondering whether the Evo X, the F430 and other products are desirable because:

• they’re designed with a very clear purpose in mind (to not be all things to all people),
• the manufacturer totally commits their products to that purpose, and
• the designers made them beautiful as befits their purpose.

This, then, may be a useful framework for considering the desirability of your products:

• How clear are we on the design purpose of our products?
• How committed are we to delivering on that purpose?
• Is there a way to increase the aesthetic value of our products?

Or in summary form:

• Are our products highly desirable to a niche market (or equally undesirable to everyone)?

Finally, I commend the dieline blog to you as inspiration for extraordinary product and packaging design. It contains countless examples of commodities that have been elevated to objects of desire through clear, committed and beautiful design.

Seth pointed us to The Technium recently, and there’s a wealth of considered opinion there. Believing the impossible has struck me deeply – a piece on how Kevin Kelly had thought Wikipedia would never work but, despite the flaws of human nature, it keeps getting better. The following comment in particular has kept me thinking:

It turns out that with the right tools it is easier to restore damage text (the revert function on Wikipedia) than to create damage text (vandalism) in the first place, and so the good enough article prospers and continues.

Most solutions seeking to prevent malicious behaviour do so by limiting opportunity – passwords, permissions, encryption, etc in the connected world and locks, alarms, security guards, police & incarceration in the physical world – and people with motive invariably find a way around them.

Wikipedia has instead incorporated a simple, single function that has all but eliminated the motive (‘to have my vandalism seen by others’), allowing them to make their content freely editable by an anonymous public. This may look obvious in retrospect – good solutions invariably do – but it’s a remarkable achievement.

Many of us (myself included) love Steve Jobs, but that’s the problem – we can’t imagine Apple without him.

Today I’m reminded of Seth Godin’s comments during the launch of his Tribes book (in response to a question from the floor at 1hr 23m):

“Apple’s stock going down every time after time someone thinks Steve Job is sick? That’s a huge ego play for Steve – he shouldn’t do that. Steve should have a bench of eight people who are leading the tribe in eight really useful different directions so it won’t matter – he’s going to retire one day and you have to plan for that.”

The Telegraph says that Apple needs to act fast on Steve Jobs succession plan, but that would make it a reaction rather than a plan, right? A succession plan is something that you organise before the CEO gets sick, avoiding a drop of 8% in the company’s share price.

I think everyone should have a succession plan, including employees. For a few years now I’ve had the attitude of making myself redundant in any role I find myself in – if my employer or client still needs me after a long period of time, I can’t have done my job properly.

If in two years I’m the only one who can do my role, I’ve failed to share information and train others. If I’m the only champion for an idea after six months then I’ve failed to either create a valuable idea or to spread it. Instead of attempting to cling to my current role, I should be looking to outgrow it, ready for the next challenge. And as I do this I’ll add more value to my employer/client by sharing my knowledge and skills with other employees. In turn this makes more valuable to this client and my next – it’s a virtuous cycle.

Of course, I’ve never succeeded in making myself redundant, but I’m slowly getting better at it. Maybe one day you and I can make the share price of company go up on the day we leave, rather than down.

Get well, Steve.

“The lyric is pure torment. One of the things that was happening at the time was the collision in my own mind between being faithful to your art or faithful to your lover. What if the two are at odds? Your gift versus your domestic responsibility? […] I remember thinking: ‘Is the life of an artist? Am I going to have kids and settle down and betray my gift or am I going to betray my marriage?'”

“I thought these tensions were going to destroy me but actually, in truth, it is me. The tension, it turns out, is what makes me an artist. Right in the centre of a contradiction, that’s the place to be. […] If I had cut loose, what would have become of me? I remember looking at [artists who had] acted with abandon, and had lost marriages, bands, friendships, all in pursuit of the muse. But the muse is taciturn and can abandon you, leaving you with nothing. My muse has different demands. If I’d gone that route, many of my best songs would have gone unwritten. Or if I’d taken the other road, which is straightforward, given myself over to the domestic side of life, the songs would have been lost. It’s the tension between the two that keeps me sharp. You don’t have to resolve them, just don’t go too far either way.”

Recently my brother and I visited a high street, high-end audio equipment retailer. In the hushed tones of faux luxury we browsed under the gaze of a self-important salesman. My brother didn’t need him – he knew all the models, the specs, comparison prices and that some of these very expensive hi-fi units were already superceded. We walked out without conversation or purchase.

The concept of a middleman as a gatekeeper – someone you must go through to purchase – died several years ago. The only way to survive as a middleman now is to add value that a customer needs and can’t obtain on their own. Be an advisor, simplifier, connector, risk carrier, troubleshooter … whatever your prospective customers need.