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What Steve Jobs Understood About People That Local ‘Movers and Shakers’ Don’t

It’s an easy – and false – pose to assume that people can’t understand a supposedly complicated project.  There was some of this thinking in an editorial about which I commented yesterday, in the Gazette‘s contention that that “SWAG’s [Southern Wisconsin Agricultural Group’s] complex, though intriguing, always seemed grand and hard for average residents to picture.”

Steve Jobs knew better – he understood that ‘average’ customers could understand a plan if only it were set forth properly.  Walter Isaacson relates, in Chapter 29 of his biography of Jobs, that for retail store design, Jobs felt that “it was important that customers intuitively grasped the layout of a store as soon as they entered.” 

People are more than capable; they see something easily if it’s explained properly. Communications failures are, most often, leadership failures, where leaders write and reason weakly. 

Forget categorizing people as average; there’s very little that’s average about the average person – most people are very clever. 

Social and policymaking gains come from holding proud (but mostly dull, dim, and lazy) elites to a higher standard. 

P.S. ‘Movers and shakers’ is an editorialist’s haughty term.  I use it as a joke, because it’s so obviously absurd and unjustifiably proud. 

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