Following up this week’s earlier post ‘Throwing Away Ideas,’ Toby Moores also referred to Guy Kawasaki’s assertion that the conventional notion of ‘Release, Test, Build’ should be turned on its head and become ‘Release, Test, Build’ in the world online world of community feedback and input. Guy goes through this notion in one of his keynotes in the section ‘Ship Then Test’ or what he colourfully refers to as ‘Don’t Worry, Be Crappy’. In clip above, Guy relate this concept to the Macintosh, but for the context of the whole presentation, it is best to go to his ‘The Art of Innovation’ presentation (24:14 in the index on the right hand column) where he says the following…
“It is my experience that entrepreneurs that succeed…Don’t worry, be crappy. By this I mean, when you have a revolution, when it is literally the next curve, it is 10 times better, it is okay to have elements of crappiness. The first laser printer was too slow. It only printed one side. It only printed on 8 ½ by 11. $7000. It was a piece of crap. But it was a revolutionary piece of crap. It was 10 times better than the best daisy wheel printer. If you wait for the perfect world where chips are fast enough and chips are cheap enough…and with the Macintosh if you wait for the perfect world where there are big hard disks, and there bigger monitors, and there’s slots and there’s colours, and there’s wireless and there is all these perfect things, you will never ship. The way it works is ‘ship then test’. ‘Ship then test’. (except life sciences). That’s the way it works. Windows users are going to find out about this with Vista. Ship then test. Don’t worry be crappy. I’m telling you that if you have something truly revolutionary, it’s okay if your first laser printer has elements of crap to it, it’s okay if your first online bookstore has problems with it. But you have to be revolutionary. People will accept a lot of stuff if you are truly changing the world.”
Leadership and Management / Turning Adversity to Advantage 
I think the shift in emphasis from ‘Build, Test, Release’ to ‘Release, Test, Build’ reflects a wider business trend. To me this is illustrated by the impact of social media on creative industries.I think ‘social’ is a normal management process. When people know what they are doing they get on with it. When there is a problem or an interesting opportunity, more often than not people will turn to trusted individuals to try out their ideas. A quick discussion amongst a small group of peers is a fault-tolerant way of working out the kinks. This is as true of a tricky HR problem, as it is of a sales opportunity in a new market. This is an internal version of ‘Release, Test, Build’ and emphasises the importance of conversation as a management tool.Social Media is merely an amplifier of Social, a normal business process. It is just a very potent one. In a relatively short period of time I have been able to extend my trusted network of people who ‘get what I do’ by more than an order of magnitude. Now I can execute on more ideas of better quality than ever before. This is essential in a changing world where innovation and creativity are our defendable differences i.e. those strengths that are most difficult to off-shore.
It is almost certainly very uneconomical to test for every eventual instance that any product goes to market. Customer feed back in all its forms will illustrate the true test of any impact on the market of any industry has; is the customer! Release the innovation, test the market with it, and then build on the next best idea or improvement. As the video media shows, when computers were very young, the market had a new innovation, people used it, then people grew on their ideas of how they would like it… better! Then its back to the drawing board to start growing the next generation of improvements. It is also proven that its alright to produce onto market, only in its infancy stages, produce that may have some disappointing values.. so long as they are corrected with the support of the supplier in time, as customer needs will generate a want for those products; if they grow their ideas on what they can achieve with them.