Tech Town, NC

Someone needs to streamline government the way Steve Jobs streamlines products. Politicians love to trot out nausea-inducing spaghetti-like organizational charts to illustrate bureaucratic waste. I know it’s easy to just point to a successful person like Steve Jobs and say we need more people like him, but whenever the bureaucratic gobbledygook gets paraded around I am reminded of a story about Mr. Jobs and the way he handled designs from a recently acquired DVD software company.

The anecdote, from an outstanding Fast Company story, starts with the DVD burning software engineers furiously mocking up complex wireframes and detailed UI screenshots of menu options. Then Steve shows up, draws a single rectangle with a “burn DVD” button and explains, “You drag your video into the window. Then you click the button that says burn. That’s it. That’s what we’re going to make.” Boom. Product designed. Direction set. Get onboard.

What if, during the endless healthcare negotiations, Obama walked into a room during discussion of individual “exchanges” and the structure of subsidies, oversight panels etc., grabbed a marker, drew a box that said “Single Payer,” with an arrow down to another box that said “America,” and told everyone: “THAT’S our healthcare product.”

Now, please don’t think I’m advocating simplicity for its own sake, or the dumb-ing down of government, or single payer, necessarily. Really, please don’t take that from this or the whole post will be for naught. My point is quite the opposite, actually.

Because, the truth is, that DVD product was NOT simple. The iPhone is NOT simple. Apple’s products are coherent wholes that pull together “magical” technologies and make them useful, even fun. If politicians could design and present policies and ideas that were useful, coherent wholes, Americans would be much less anxious, and much more willing to pull together for those policies. It’s the ability to take complexity and make sense of it that requires true intelligence, and it’s what has made Apple such an iconic success.

Of course, Apple is very much a top-down company, and isn’t necessarily as “democratic” as, say, Google. And I’m not going to advocate a dictatorship as a solution to our ills (though the devil’s advocate might say China’s success as a sort of “Apple of governments” argues for just that). But I think the way the decision is made is less important to my point here. However a decision is made, it must be thought out, and clearly presented. That’s it.

Unfortunately, there is one very big obstacle that exists in politics that doesn’t exist for the real Steve Jobs. If one of Apple’s rivals pulled a diagram of the iPhone’s guts, it would look pretty hairy too, perhaps even worse that the infamous Afghanistan Stability chart. But in that game, it’s not in RIM’s, HTC’s, or Google’s interest to make people scared of smartphones. Unfortunately, in politics, it IS often in the opposition’s interest to make people scared of government. How would our fictional George W. Steve Jobs Obama get around that? That’s a subject for another time, I think. For now just keep it simple, and think about what might have been.