As the New York Times Book Review reports today ("Noise Off"), three books have been published within the past month that all cover silence as a technological, cultural, and social phenomenon (my favorite line: "A person who says 'My noise is my right' basically means 'Your ear is my hole.' ").
Coincidentally, last week, frog design founder and industrial design legend Hartmut Esslinger shared with me an anecdote from his time working with then-Sony CEO Akio Morita in Tokyo in the 70s. Hartmut described how Morita had once summoned him to a large quiet room filled with wooden-bodied Sony television sets stacked up against the wall. Hartmut inquired why they'd been locked away, to which Morita replied: "They will be here for a while. The wood has to find itself."
"It's all Zen," Hartmut told me, "Morita got it, Steve Jobs gets it, but there aren't too many other leaders out there who do." Apple's design, in its simplicity and profound knowledge of the value of absence, indeed has an air of Zen, a confident and reassuring calm that exudes mysticism, dignity, and timeless quality.
Hartmut's story made me think of Robert M. Pirsig's book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which made an indelible impression on me when I first read it in my early 20s. An expansive philosophical treatise on the question of quality, it includes a quote from Socrates' Phædrus Dialogue: "What is good, Phædrus, and what is not good... need we ask anyone to tell us these things?"
Steve Jobs obviously acts upon this maxim. Quality is an act of distinction but brands are like people: they’re inherently different, but only rarely distinct. Most of us work hard to make the right noise amidst all the white noise. Silence, in the way we think, lead, and design, may give us more time to truly distinguish ourselves.
[image: anechoic chamber]
Comments