Steve Blank, who teaches at Stanford, coined the term innovation theater. It describes what happens when large companies try to copy startup culture. In 2019 he wrote about it in the Harvard Business Review, with hackathons as one example.
In his words, the result is “coffee cups, lanyards, posters, and very little output that moves the top or bottom line.”
In October 2013 the federal health insurance website, HealthCare.gov, failed at its launch. On August 11, 2014, the White House launched the U.S. Digital Service. It was led by Mikey Dickerson, who had helped fix the site.
The White House also released a Digital Services Playbook of 13 “plays” for government projects. Play 4 reads: “Build the service using agile and iterative practices.” Its text says: “We should use an incremental, fast-paced style of software development to reduce the risk of failure.”
In her 1994 book on writing, Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott gave a chapter a blunt title: “Shitty First Drafts.” Early in the chapter she writes: “All good writers write them.”
“The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out…” Then comes the next stage. “The second draft is the up draft — you fix it up.” The chapter has been reprinted in college writing textbooks such as Language Awareness.
Every week, Saturday Night Live performs its whole show twice. At 8 p.m. the cast plays a dress rehearsal for one live audience. At 11:30 p.m. the show goes on air in front of another.
In one writer’s account, about 45 sketches are read on Wednesday. Eleven to 13 are performed at the dress rehearsal, and two or three of those are cut before air. An SNL editor explained: “Our sketches will live or die by the reaction of the audience.”
In the original ending of Fatal Attraction (1987), Glenn Close’s character kills herself, and Michael Douglas’s character is arrested for her murder. Test audiences did not like that she escaped punishment. Director Adrian Lyne reshot the ending.
Close said later: “Six months after we finished shooting, I got a call that we had to reshoot the ending.” She fought it for weeks. The new ending became a hit, and the film was one of the highest-grossing films of 1987. Lyne has said the change “was an emotional and dramatic choice, not a financial one.”
The musical Oklahoma! first opened under another title, Away We Go! It played out-of-town tryouts at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven from March 11, 1943, and then in Boston. Audiences were enthusiastic, and the reviews were only fair. Before Broadway, the creators restaged the big number “Oklahoma” and renamed the show after it. It opened on Broadway on March 31, 1943.
The Shubert in New Haven has hosted more than 600 pre-Broadway tryouts.
American military and business usage: a good plan executed now beats a perfect plan executed later. The claim is not that 80 percent is acceptable, but that the remaining 20 percent costs more in delay than it returns in quality.
The Oakland Athletics, working with one of the smallest payrolls in baseball, used statistical analysis to identify undervalued players and won more games than teams spending several times as much.
The scouts hated it. The methods were unorthodox, the reasoning was unfamiliar, and it produced wins — which ended the argument.
A number carried to three decimal places, quoted from memory by ordinary fans, and applied outside baseball to anything from hiring to sales calls. The unit of judgment is what actually happened, divided by how many times you tried.
American sports put the current result in the largest object in the building, visible from every seat, updated continuously. Nobody argues with it, and there is no separate record of who played better.