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“You can observe a lot just by watching.” – Yogi Berra

In his new book, “In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing”, author Matthew May offers a prescriptive any business can use to unlock their creativity and their potential. By focusing on 4 elements he finds in common among elegant solutions – symmetry, seduction, sustainability and subtraction – May illustrates how businesses can solve problems in new ways.

Much like Malcolm Gladwell, May ties together disparate cases where companies, governments and managers found elegant solutions to look for the common thread among them. He then looks at how your business can apply these same lessons. And much like those of us here at thinks Central, , May is clearly a fan of kaizen – the Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement. To that end, May highlights how companies have used kaizen – and particularly its emphasis on observation – to solve problems at their root instead of simply on the surface. While May sometimes wanders a bit far afield, he continually cycles back to this core theme, and ties his observations to practical advice useful in any business. May did this so well, in fact, that I bought a copy for every member of my team to read, too. You should pick up a copy, too

Why?

Because when all is said and done, May recognizes in “In Pursuit of Elegance” that elegant solutions are less about “thinking outside the box,” and more about putting the box to good use, too.



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Fred Wilson asks interesting questions about the utility of Kindle as a blog reader, particularly given the $0.99 monthly subscription cost per blog Amazon is tacking onto the thing. I wasn’t aware of that “feature” and agree with Fred that I want my content to be free (though if you want to buy a book and support this site, that’s OK too). Here’s the thing, though. How many folks interested in an e-book reader will think that $0.99 per month is unreasonable? Clearly, the early adopters will – and that’s likely the current audience for the Kindle. But what about a year down the road? I don’t know. Does Amazon think they’re playing nice with the blog community and encouraging a new business model. Maybe. It does seem awfully weird to me that the company who essentially invented the concept of disintermediation (remember the “how to avoid getting Amazon’ed” meme during Web Bubble 1.0?) is now trying to become a content intermediary. I wonder who’ll Amazon them this time around.

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