A Beautiful Constraint

Give me the freedom of a tight brief

Tony Hsieh now describes Zappos as a customer service business that happens to be selling shoes. They could, he says, just as well go into the airline business.

Constraints fall into four different groups: constraints of foundation (where we are limited in something that is usually seen as a foundational element for success); constraints of resource (where we are limited in an important resource, such as money or people); constraints of time (where we are limited in the amount of time we have to do something); and constraints of method (where we are limited by having to do something in a certain way)

lean,4 frugal innovation,5 Jugaad,6 and even the value of dyslexia to entrepreneurs.7

As Arianna Huffington has put it: “A world of too much data, too many choices, too many possibilities and too little time is forcing us to decide what we value.”

There is no shortage of stimuli here. All around us we see a new generation of inventiveness with constraint at its heart. Cars that go faster while using less fuel, fast food that's healthier, farming methods that create greater yields while using less water

The whole concept of a brand, for instance, is in effect a beautiful constraint. It is the clarity on what that brand is not, as much as what it is, that allows a team to focus on finding fresh, relevant, and inventive ways to be true to what it stands for. When a brand stops respecting those limits and tries to become something it is not, it becomes weaker.

Which of us would be using Twitter at all today, if it had a limit of 14,000 characters rather than 140?

Google's home page is as simple as it is because that was the limit of Larry Page's coding ability at the time