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How Steve Jobs Solved the Innovator's Dilemma
hype7 writes "With yesterday's release of the Steve Jobs biography, a raft of interesting information has come to light — including Jobs' favorite books. There's one book there listed as 'profoundly moving' to Jobs — The Innovator's Dilemma by innovation professor Clayton Christensen. The book explains how in the pursuit of profit, good managers leave their companies open to disruption. There's an interesting article over at the Harvard Business Review that explains how disruption works, and how Jobs managed to solve the dilemma by focusing Apple on products rather than profit."
He can't because he's dead.
It's very nice if you can run a company and just worry about your products, but unfortunately most senior management can't. The board and the shareholders hold them to stock price and quarterly earnings, and if they don't make the expectations they're likely to be replaced by the board.
Steve Jobs was a bit of an unusual case, because the man had a brand unlike almost any other corporate executive in the United States. Think about how he took most of Apple's engineering staff off of MacBook upgrades and OS X development to create the iPhone. It worked, and created Apple its most profitable product line ever. But what other person, at what other large company, has the political capital to sacrifice development of an existing profitable product line for an unknown?
That's why Apple was so successful under Jobs' tenure: he had the resources of a huge organization, but the political capital amongst employees, the board and the shareholders to make the kinds of decisions that usually only small companies (with small expectations) can manage. It takes technical talent to create great products, but it also takes a management that's willing to let the talent do that. It's unlikely that Apple will be able to continue in the same vein for long, now that Jobs is gone. His successors may be great, but they'll never be Jobs.
If Christianity is any metric to measure this by, we're going to be hearing about Steve Jobs for at least the next 2100 years...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
What will determine Jobs' perceived success going forward is if Apple continues to innovate, or that it falls apart without his guidance.
A great leader creates success around them. Does Apple in 10 years look the same or worse than it does now? If worse, why? Cook is a capable performer, but was Jobs the lynchpin that kept things moving or did he create his 'legacy' in a stable enough fashion that Apple continues as if he never left.
"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested." (LT 2004)
Apple managed to turn profits by outsourceing the actual production so they could focus on design.
I think all of us in the tech industry know of or have experienced decisions which make sense only when viewed from the light of "near term profit is the most important."
You know:
- Downsizing skilled engineering teams to cut costs in order to hit profit numbers
- Terminating new products before they've been completed, because some number cruncher couldn't foresee profitability
- Failure to endorse refactoring of software modules engineering states are fragile/non-maintainable because it requires dedication of resources to something that doesn't drive current revenues
- The list goes on
Here we have evidence, finally, that profit at all costs isn't how you run a company.
I think this speaks more to how pathetic the leadership of a lot of US companies have become more than it does on Jobs. Love Jobs or hate him, one thing that you cannot deny is that he was one of the few US CEOs that actually gave a shit about what his company makes and sells. Compare Jobs to people like Fiorna or Bob Nardelli whose sole purpose was to get inside a company, didn't' even matter which industry it was, and play games with numbers while gutting the company and enriching themselves in the process. Fiorna didn't give 2 shits about servers, or calculators, or Unix etc. To her they were all just "product", an annoyance that she had to tolerate on her way to stealing from the HP shareholders, employees, and customers.
Now compare that to Jobs, people talk about the reality distortion field, but the only way Jobs could actually create that field was if he actually cared about what he was talking about. He gave such good presentations because in a lot of ways he was like a kid who had just been given a neat toy and was showing it off at show and tell, there was genuine passion there. If companies want to emulate Apple's success the first thing they have to do is hire executives that actually are genuinely interested in what they make and sell.
Monstar L
It drove more than their share price.
If you're arguing that he made bad business decisions, I think you need to rework your argument.
It's the most misunderstood thing in business - do good work, make the customers happy, create good value and profit becomes a side effect.
Most of the stuff on
Ah, the classic "They make money - they suck!", or the equally entertaining "They used to be good before everyone knew about them."
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
If Apple are focussed on their Products rather than their Profit - why are they suing Samsung to protect their profit? Samsung aren't making iPads - so they aren't suing to protect their product... People (Fanboi's) will still buy iPads regardless of whether or not the Galaxy is available...
dnuof eruc rof aixelsid
And if someone does the same to you in reverse, tie em up in the courts for so long that their product is obsolete before it reaches the hands of consumers.
Part of a 101 Business class, that is. You know, that class that all the football players ace.
Growing a business, expanding market share, increasing sales revenues in a competitive market place all require taking risks, otherwise known as 'disruption'. Good managers know how to stay focused on the risk, not avoid it. Meanwhile, they minimize unneeded risks, or issues that divert the organization's attention from their primary goal. There is a very good correlation between risk and ROI. No risk means your investors had better be willing to live with T-bill like returns.
You want no disruption? Go into a government bureaucracy or get a job in a large corporation away from the principle line of business*.
* The problem here is that its easy for companies to outsource these tasks. So in the final analysis, you are still exposed to risk. That which involves turning your job over to leaner, more competitive service providers.
Have gnu, will travel.
Mod parent funny.
--
BMO
Uh, no, RMFP, it's actually the "you're part of the problem you're whining about" argument. Slashdot attracts readers to the comments section where they serve ads. If you post about how you hate Apple, you're making money for Slashdot and encouraging them to keep running Apple stories.
But, hey, according to somebody with a mod-point, I shouldn't be pointing this out. Well, if I'm some crazy person, fine. You're welcome to go to apple.slashdot.org and peek at all the recent stories and how many comments they've gotten. After three or for stores with 500+ comments it really is hard to say that people who post on Slashdot don't want Apple stories posted.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I wanted to wait until his next biography to find out if Zombie_Jobs rises again.
...it's been more than three days.
We need to wait 75 years for someone to promulgate a resurrection + subsequent disappearance/ascension myth. Maybe a little longer, given current lifespans. Preferably, the promulgator will be someone with admin access to archive.org in order to "tweak"/"harmonize" historical accounts. The promulgator can also publish three different accounts under different pseudonyms to give the appearance of corroboration of the "historical" account.
4 bonus internets if the promulgator can integrate parthenogenesis somehow producing a male Jobschrist.
That's one piece of the puzzle.
Two of a few examples that come to mind...
How did he get some of the best talent to work for Apple; especially in the late 90s when engineers knew it was nearing bankruptcy and the dot.com boom was paying top dollar for talent in a variety of interesting projects?
How did he get a good number of the consumer populous to think of Apple as being "THE" computer worth having; especially when it offered similar or only slightly better performance and features to what established big dogs (i.e., Dell, Compaq, and HP) were offering?
I grew up idolizing engineers like Woz & Carmack for their engineering skills; it wasn't until years of participating in group projects, and taking leadership positions on teams of 6 - 12 people have I realized how underrated amongst the technically proficient are the humanistic contributions that go into any project of a significant size. The larger the project, the more likely it will fail without stellar leadership. (e.g., Take a look at what Longhorn claimed and what it became when released as Windows Vista.)
I truly believe Steve cared about his products beyond the profit; he knew a great product, marketed the right way, would bring the profits. I wish more companies used this mentality.
I hope whatever qualities Steve possessed, that allowed Apple to be successful during his oversight, are able to persist amongst his successors.
Here are some things attributed to Jobs by his official biographer that won't be appearing in any Slashdot stories:
Steve Jobs told President Obama he probably would not be re-elected [because] regulations and unions in the United States were crippling its ability to remain competitive. "You're headed for a one-term presidency," Jobs said to Obama.
[Jobs said] it was too difficult to build a factory in the U.S., which led the company to build manufacturing plants in countries like China.
Jobs also said teachers' unions "crippled" the education system in the United States. Among his requests to Obama were an 11-month school schedule, school days that last until 6 p.m. and a merit-based system for employing and firing teachers.
[Jobs] told Obama that the United States needed to become more business-friendly.
You may now resume your continuously scheduled iSpin.
anyone whose played Civ can tell you this one:
“There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.”
Henry Ford
It seems somewhere between Ford and outsourcing everything we can to india and china, industrialists became looters.
Jobs solved the innovation dilemma by having a lot of engineers circled around him.
Which itself was a master stroke that made him an outlier (a positive one when it comes to profit) above the average management crop. And if we look deeper, we see him (after he was re-appointed CEO) taking Apple (which was a few weeks short of bankruptcy) and turned it in a way that it is hard to replicate in the business world. That takes more than just having a lot of engineers circling around him.
I think he was an asshole, but you cannot deny the brilliance and determination the motherfucker emanated (or farted, whichever verb appeals to you the most.)
Give Apple another 10 years and we'll see if this "culture of innovation" supposedly created at Apple continues, or it was just one man with a plan that drove their share price.
That depends on the people who took over from Jobs and how well Jobs judged their abilities. If they think like him the company will prosper. If the spreadsheet monkeys move in they'll piss away everything Jobs achieved inside of 10 years... tops.
making products people want to buy so that you can make money isn't really earth shattering.
Making things people want to buy isn't earth shattering. Finding out what people want before they know *is*. People didn't want the iPhone before it was out there. People have wanted printers since Gutenberg. So HP making a printer to make money isn't earth shattering. But making a phone in a crowded phone market that people wanted, really wanted, *is* earth shattering. Why didn't anyone else do it first? Why have phones been around for 20 years before that happened. It's not just the "find a need and fill it" marketing you are referring to, it was "find a desire and make a product that generates a "need" when none existed before. It's unlike the CEO training classes that are almost exclusively common sense.
Learn to love Alaska
This submission feels like pure PR for a book or two.
You know, as a devout capitalist, I've always believed that customers service comes first.
A capitalist of the Adam Smith variety would say that profit comes first, and that good customer service and mutual benefit is a consequence of pursuing profit.
The fact that this doesn't work under a lot of different contexts, particularly the ones that Harvard MBAs get themselves learned in, is the guts of the story.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
I like how he still thought he was an innovator, when he admitted in his own book that another guy came up with the idea for products like the iPhone. That same guy received an award for it. That guy still works for Apple.
Steve Jobs was just the business man who could sell it. This has not only been blatantly obvious from the beginning, but now his own words back it up. So why are we still describing him as an innovator and visionary?
I can however credit him for being a good business man. And that's how he should be remembered. You know, the honest way.
Its a bit of a mix. If you are profit driven and already have good products, you'll be fine until the products are superseded by something else that is more attractive.
This is where apple was between say 1984 and 1997 - gradually sliding downhill with no direction in a race to the bottom - and losing.
However... Eventually, you need to put quarterly earnings calls aside, and figure out how to make something people don't even know they want, rather than race to the bottom against everyone else building an ever cheaper version of X. Thats a race that nobody wins, so don't be in that race.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Yet he died after making more of an impact on several massive industries (film, music, computing) than you ever will. He wasn't too bad off in terms of money, either. So what does that make you?
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
And Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field is rivaled only by your own. I guess the fact that Apple is the most valuable company in the world, the most valuable company the world has ever seen thus far, and they are tiny compared to the next 9 most valuable companies, doesn't impress you. All the major tech companies seem to hit a wall at some point, and strain under the weight of their dead... Adobe, Microsoft, IBM, RIM, Nokia... they move like slugs. Apple has been running rings around the competition for nearly half of the last decade.
It's funny, though... how Apple is held up to a higher standard... how its always "Apple vs EVERYONE ELSE" and never a fair comparison. Try Apple v Microsoft. or Apple v Dell. or Apple v RIM. or Apple v. Sony... and then you'll see what a silly person you are saying things like "Apple sucks... because the combined forces of their 20 competitors are starting to eat away at their market share."
The Admin and the Engineer
Slashdot is ad-driven and Apple brings a lot fo comments, both good and bad.
Think about that next time you whine about too many Apple stories floating around.
It's a common explanation. But there's a more straightforward one. AFAIKS getting story on slashdot is a 3 step process. A story is submitted. People vote for it or against it on firehose. An editor picks it,theoretically with some regard to how it was voted on firehose.
The number of Apple stories on Slashdot may simply relate to how many are submitted and how they are voted on in the firehose. It doesn't require that were being trolled for comment quantity by the editors.
Either explanation could be true. As could the even more straightforward explanation that the number of Apple articles isn't excessive at all. They just aren't to some people's taste.
I truly believe Steve cared about his products beyond the profit
If this were true, Apple wouldn't be suing Samsung over who owns the rectangle.
Pixar, a company run by SJ
http://www.geekosystem.com/how-pixar-bosses-saved-their-employees-from-layoffs/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/10/14/no_layoffs_at_apple_steve/
And if by "stagnate" you mean year over year growth that vastly outpaces the industry you're right....
Laying off thousands of people, cutting hundreds of product lines to focus on three main products which are beginning to stagnate is hardly 'innovative'. It's hardly a good idea either.
Under Jobs, Apple went from nearly bankrupt to the biggest, most successful company in the world in just 14 years. Congratulations - by claiming that it was all a bad idea, you've just made what must be the stupidest post of the day. And I'm including all the Frist psots! in that.
âoeThere is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.â - Henry Ford
It seems somewhere between Ford and outsourcing everything we can to india and china, industrialists became looters.
Actually it's that some business schools taught their students to be parasites on successful businesses:
1) Find a company with some sound guts that's fallen on temporary hard times.
2) Get hired on as CEO with big blocks of stock options and rules approved for bonuses that condition them on short-term bottom line.
3) Bring in your cronies on similar terms, replacing the upper layer with people loyal to you rather than the company, its shareholders, or its workers.
2) Cut investment in the future to make the bottom line good short-term, for a few quarters. Stop the research, fire the personnel that design the future products. Replace the local personnel that build the PRESENT product with cheaper offshore people (who have no loyalty, lore from the company's past, or connections to the company's remaining local engineering).
4) After a few quarters, announce you've turned the company around. Declare victory. Move on to the next sucker and cash out. (Profit!)
5) Let your successors take the blame when the house of cards to which you've reduced the company finally collapses.
These aren't the "industrialists" who built the enterprises. These are the predators who take it down and get the first and best chunk of meat from the still-struggling carcass.
Some time after Henry died, Ford Motor Company fell prey to such, and started to deteriorate. But the Ford family still had controlling interest. Eventually they saw what was happening, threw out the jackals, installed some better heads, and turned the company around again. Soon Ford products were better than the best Japanese and European imports. Come the recent economic troubles, while GM and Chrysler went down and got taken over by the government, Ford didn't need any bailouts and is still prospering.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Why not? Caring more about products than profits does not mean you don't care about profits. It means that your first priority is to create great products, and then you minimize the costs of fabricating them, you maximize your profit margin, and you obstruct competition as much as possible.
Getting parts built in sweatshops and suing others on spurious grounds is perfectly consistent with prioritizing product quality. What it isn't consistent with is being a decent human being.
iPhone and iPod weren't that different. Both of them were copies of existing products, but with much better execution than the competition. There were other MP3 players before the iPod came around; remember the famous Slashdot posting which called it "lame" because it had a FIrewire port and no USB. Then Apple came along, took the concept, and made their own version with the clever and easy-to-use click-wheel, and it took off. Then they added the iTunes store and it took off even more. Somewhere along the line they finally added a USB port (honestly I'm not sure how the thing took off at all before that point since PCs usually didn't have Firewire ports then, and still frequently don't).
Same with the iPhone. Crackberries and those shitty WinCE phones were out many years before iPhones arrived. But iPhones were sexy and really easy to use, and didn't require a silly stylus to use. And of course they had an appstore very quickly which sealed the deal.
... which is why Asian companies kick the American's asses. Long range thinking in the US is having a 5 year plan. In Japan, they have 100 year plans [and a dozen other links].
Most of the stuff on
zombie jobs will be back on the 100th anniversary of the apple II, its one of the things on this "tablet" that I have acquired.
~Moses 2.0
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Spurious grounds: opinion, not yet held up in court. I was around for the first Look n Feel lawsuit, and I didn't have skin in the game like Jobs... once you've been burned by the legal system like that, you're an idiot if you don't learn SOME sort of lesson.
sweatshops: tarring Jobs with that is a cheap shot. My Tevas' manufacture went overseas. Ditto every other bit of outdoor gear I buy. Design in america, make in (insert cheap nation). Congressmen get tens of thousands of dollars per cycle from Samoa businessmen running sweatshops in international free trade zones there. My accountant has data entry done in India; if I checked, I bet my medical records are similarly transcribed/maintained. And most importantly, you are just as guilty of supporting sweatshops if you're BUYING that shit as he is for making it.
>> he was angry about Google being painted as evil
Why don't you go back and check the front page stories about Google for last seven days? Then compare the number of Steve Jobs/Apple/iphone The Greatest Evaaar stories. This is not about opinions, but about facts. The stories are picked with clear bias against Google (some of them are clear troll/flamebaits), and some of the summaries are just plain stupid and do not belong to slashdot.
Here is the list for you - I will leave checking the summary to you:
How Steve Jobs Solved the Innovator's Dilemma ..
FTC To Monitor Google's Privacy Practices For 20 Years
Concerns Over Google Modifying SSL Behavior
Microsoft Now Collects Royalties From Over Half of All Android Devices
Android ICS Will Require 16GB RAM To Compile
A Decade of Apple Oddities
Google Not Reciprocating On IFrame Usage?
Siri Envy? Iris Brings Some Voice-Assistant Features to Android
Meet Siri's Little Brother, Trapit
Jobs Wanted To Destroy Android
Android 4.0 Source Code Coming "Soon"
Not necessarily. The point of marketing is to make you want it. It doesn't have to be great, you just have to believe it's great.
How is "cool' not what people believe is great?
But yes, the point of Apple (under Jobs) was clearly not merely marketing.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
You're all missing the point here. When Jobs returned to Apple, what resulted was a set of more or less "meh" Mac machines, a detour through the PowerPC, and a kludged up version of the Next OS. Apple desktop market share remained in single digits through that period.
What worked was the iPod. The reason the iPod was successful was deals with music labels. Jobs was good at deal making in Hollywood. As CEO of Pixar, he was a studio head, at the top of the Hollywood food chain. The labels had to listen.
That's what made the iTunes store go, which is what really drove the product. The hardware was secondary.
Considering how much profit Apple makes by staying customer-focused, one could argue they're both the same thing. It's just that some companies don't realize that the best way to get profit is focus on the customer experience. In other words, they focus on making profits but don't have a clue how to get them.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
If it was only marketing, wouldn't everybody be doing it? Or are you just saying that only Apple has an advertising budget?
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
Tim Cook is going to get 10 million shares of AAPL if he sticks around another 10 years, so they pretty much have him locked down. Tim Cook is a practical man, but he's a true believer.
Jeff Williams is a Tim Cook operations kind of guy, and without a doubt much of Apple's success was because of operations under Tim Cook. Operations will continue moving along quite well for the foreseeable future.
Jonathan Ive is absolutely a true believer, and Jobs set up Apple to give the man free reign of the company. I don't doubt Jonathan Ive is living his dream job, and he'll stick around as long as they let him and he'll keep the Jobs way going. Realistically, much of Apple's success has been a collaboration between Jobs and Ive, not Jobs alone.
Scott Forstall is probably also living his dream job, I doubt he'd jump ship either, and he's certainly a true believer as well. He's also got a reputation as being rather Jobs-like in his aggression, so he'll be a watchdog as well for Apple culture.
I'm sure Eddy Cue, Bob Mansfield, and Phil Schiller will stick around too, and that pretty much rounds out the executive team.
The Apple board let Steve Jobs pretty much do whatever he wanted during his tenure as CEO when he came back, and he used that power to set up a group of managers and culture under him to carry Apple forward as an innovative company. For all the talk of Jobs being a brutal, nasty boss who bludgeoned people into doing things his way, what that really means is he forced people out that weren't, in his mind, Apple material. The only people left are the true believers.
The spreadsheet monkeys won't have an easy time worming their way back in.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
Be it as it may, what it comes down to is that Apple created a product their customer doesn't complain about. And in this time and age, this is already the superior product. Whether you liked it a lot or didn't, Apple made products that "work". They don't crash, they don't lock up, they don't keep their user puzzled how to use them. They made "computer stuff" usable by common folks.
I can see it in my dad and other computer illiterates. They are usually afraid to "poke" at their other goodies, fearing they might "break" something. Not so with Apple. My dad even started trying to find out what this button does, something he would NEVER have done in any other OS he ever had. Reason? He might have changed a setting and wouldn't have a clue how to undo it.
That's what sets Apple apart from the rest. Personally, I consider it an abomination, I just can't wrap my mind around their way of doing stuff, but it seems to work just great with people who have no computer background. And that's what endeared it to those people. And what makes a lot of computer specialists hate it. Not so much the "loss of edge", just that they do things in a way that makes us look stupid instead of the computer illiterates.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A capitalist of the Adam Smith variety would say that profit comes first, and that good customer service and mutual benefit is a consequence of pursuing profit.
My CEO, who tries very hard to be one tenth as successful as Steve Jobs (and that he failed so far is not his fault, but Apple's), says: "If you look after your customers, and you look after your employees, the stock will look after the shareholders just fine by itself". And that has worked quite well in the last years, for the customers, the employees, and the shareholders.
That's... exactly what the story is saying Jobs didn't do. It wasn't "if the big will eat it, I'll give it to him", it was "if we make a really cool interesting meal, not just pigs, but humans too will eat it".
It's the most misunderstood thing in business - do good work, make the customers happy, create good value and profit becomes a side effect.
If you read the book, you'll see that this is where the danger lies. This is what a good, normal managers would do. But customers don't always know what they want, and you leave yourself open to attack from adjacent areas. Two of the examples in the book - computer hard drives and construction machines - show how companies by doing what you say ("doing everything right, by the book") eventually come under attack from adjacent market sectors and die.
That's the real miracle of Steve Jobs.
It's not that Steve Jobs is particularly exceptional. What's exceptional is that someone like Steve Jobs got into a position of power and authority.
If Steve Jobs was Steve Jobs the designer he would have probably been fired for not playing politics and that would have been the end of it... hell it even happened once! The only reason Steve Jobs was able to be Steve Jobs was because Apple failed miserably and they were desperate. With nothing to lose someone with above average creativity and common sense was able to purge the Excel Jockeys.
A lot of modern capitalists seem to misunderstand Adam Smith. Yes, he said that individual ambition serves the common good, but he never said that "profits come first." In fact, Smith defined "wealth" not as money, but in a more holistic way: "the annual produce of the land and labour of the society."
Also, those who argue for lower taxes on the rich and on corporations are certainly not following Smith's advice:
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Because that strategy works! As long as everyone else is doing the same thing. If the entire market is made up of average-to-bad products, everyone winds up competing on price, and the way to win on price is to cut as many corners as you can possibly get away with, which leads to more average-to-bad products.
Moreover, in many cases like that, one competitor will try to break away from the pack with a superior product, only to find that in most cases people will not pay more for a superior product. They will buy the cheapest alternative that can plausibly appear to meet their needs over more elegant solutions that cost more. This is why our houses are filled with particle-board furniture and appliances that break every three years, unlike our grandparents' houses, which were filled with sturdy (read: expensive) furniture and reliable (read: expensive) appliances.
(Some will argue that a product that doesn't find a market is by definition inferior to one that does, of course, but that line of thinking leads to the conclusion that the Big Mac is the pinnacle of fine cuisine.)
In other words, the interesting thing about Apple from a business perspective isn't that they made better products, it's that they convinced people to pay more for a better product.
Read my blog.
It is motivation 3.0. The academic world has discovered the FACT that people do not create or innovate based on a motivation of profit (financial rewards). They do it because it brings them joy to be a part of something and create things--expressing themselves. Outlined in Daniel Pink's book, Drive; is the concept that you cannot offer financial rewards (carrots) to creative people--it backfires! This has been documented through various scientific and case studies. I think most of us programmers/developers/designers already know this. Much of our problem with management is their assumption that we must be compelled (extrinsically) to work, just like a laborer.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
IIRC, Smith said taxes should be "easy," which doesn't necessarily mean small or large. Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that he would advocate "high" taxes, just that he favored progressive tax rates. In the current (US) political climate, a lot of people are talking about a flat tax, or other regressive schemes, and justify this on the theory of "supply side" economics. You know, we can't "punish the job creators" and all that... Smith would have laughed at such talk.
Basically, we had a very progressive tax system from WWII through the 70's. And that period was a golden age for the USA, just as Smith would have predicted. Rich people still had their mansions, yachts, and limos (or "opulence" as Smith might have put it), and the government managed to build infrastructure, provide services and offer inexpensive education, all without running up massive debts and deficits. And (except for women and minorities) everyone was pretty happy with the situation. Businesses thrived, workers enjoyed generous pensions and health benefits, and opportunities abounded.
Since then we've dabbled with various levels of less progressive schemes. (The income tax is progressive, but when you consider sales tax, gas tax, property tax, etc., the total tax burden is still highest on the middle class.) The idea was that "job creators" would have more money, and therefore they would create more jobs. But they didn't always do that. Increasingly they found it easier to "gamble" their extra cash on stocks and securities. So while the government was running up historic deficits, there was an excess of "hot money" in the markets, leading to speculation and bubble formation.
Oh, and let's not forget deregulation... another exaggeration of Smith's ideas, which gave us the S&L crisis in the 80's and the "Great Recession" of 2008.
But that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC