With Care and Precision

This is an excerpt from chapter 10 of The Natural Strategist, a guide for modern leaders who want to activate strategy in a natural and humanistic way.

If you place the emphasis on getting the little things right, and address the everyday problems that come up, you can encourage a culture of attention to detail. —Richard Branson

Like Maria’s grandfather, we want to keep our attention focused as we execute our plans. With a keen eye for detail, it becomes easy to notice subtle changes early on, and we can act before small problems become big problems. A mindful presence allows us to carefully observe, notice, and evaluate what exactly is going on. And this clarity enables us to lead our team with clarity and confidence and to execute with precision, care, and determination.

In the run-up to the launch of Slack’s first release in 2013, Stewart Butterfield, the founder of Slack, issued a memo to his team with a simple but powerful message: “Be tough in the interest of excellence.” He saw the launch of their software as a challenge to their customers, because using Slack would require them to change the way they worked and the way they thought about themselves.

Butterfield understood any small irritation in the software could cause future customers to hesitate and question whether it was worth switching to Slack. He challenged his team to approach the launch of Slack from the customer’s point of view. They had to look for and fix any glitches and bugs that might detract from a smooth user experience.

He encouraged his team to think about the speed of the software’s response, the links, and every single detail that could impact the user. He wanted his team to create a “beautiful, elegant, considerate piece of software” that would attract and retain users (Butterfield 2014).

For Butterfield, getting the details right was critical to executing an exceptional, near-perfect launch of Slack. He recognized future customers would only be willing to engage with the software if it was polished and well-designed, and he challenged his team to meet that challenge.

Details matter. It’s worth waiting to get it right. —Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs delayed the release of the Apple II and Macintosh because he did not like the initial look of the circuit board inside the machine (Isaacson 2014).

When the engineers argued that no one would see the circuit boards, he told them he wanted it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it was inside the box. He sent the engineers back to redesign the board so it would look nice with the chips neatly lined up.

He also delayed the release of the iPad because he felt the near-final product was not casual and friendly enough to be picked up on a whim. They decided the bottom edge should be slightly rounded so a user could pick it up with ease. That meant engineers had to redesign the ports and buttons, a delay Jobs was happy to accept.

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes once said that one of Jobs’s outstanding qualities was his ability to envision an overarching strategy while focusing on the smallest aspects of design (Isaacson 2014).

When Apple was about to launch the Apple Stores, he and his retail guru, Ron Johnson, decided to delay the launch for several months so the layout of the stores could be rethought and reorganized around activities rather than product categories as originally planned.

This level of precision and careful, meticulous attention to detail leads to better execution and graceful progress, and gives rise to exceptional results.

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