Small Talk

July 2, 2010 »

The Art of the Ship

I had the unique privilege to go hear Seth Godin speak in downtown Boston a couple weeks ago. As a recent convert to the Seth-Fandom tribe, it was quite a treat to hear him live and see what he’s really like. I was not disappointed.

Seth took the audience on a brief catch-up of his books and how the story weaves through them. He ended up by talking a lot about the concepts from his latest book: Linchpin. If you haven’t yet read it, I highly recommend it. It’s a refreshing look at what it means to work passionately.

After speaking for a bit, Seth opened it up for question and answer time. I took the plunge and asked one: “You speak about the need to ship as well as the goal of treating work as art. How do you deal with them when they are in conflict, or at least seemingly in conflict?” I wanted to know how one can be an artist at work while still remembering that there are deadlines and goals and schedules and clients and customers.

Seth gave some great thoughts as a response, primarily focusing on the need to ship and to have that be a true stake in the ground that all else works from. He said (paraphrasing), “don’t work towards an unknown ‘future ship’. Pick a date and make that set-in-stone . Then, work back from that to see what is reasonable in terms of expected features and resource requirements and milestones along the way. Then go to it with gusto, until you hit that date, and then ship.

Having the discipline to ship, and to know that one must ship, is invaluable in an electronic economy. There will always be more features to add, bugs to fix, tweaks to be made. Waiting for a product to be perfect can keep it from ever being offered. As Voltaire once said: “The perfect is the enemy of the good”. The lesson I’m trying to learn is to pursue perfection (that’s the art part), second... and ship, first!

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