These two little Post-it notes have hung on for dear life on my laptop for trips to at least five different cities across three countries. Each time they fall off as they lose their stickiness, I pick them off the ground and hope that they still have some staying power. Miraculously they are here with me in Shanghai but now I can officially relieve them of their duty.

How we evaluate our particular feelings on a situation of less versus more depends entirely on the overall context. We generally strive for that which is meaningful in life, and thus a little bit of something (less) when timed correctly can mean a great deal. There is certain poetry in a gift of less — such as the offering of a single rose versus twelve.

On the other hand, a lot of something (more) can be particularly exciting when you’ve gotten by with so little. For instance I recall being stuck in a suburb of Dallas one summer without a car with only access to food from a 7-11. I became an expert at cooking with Bisquick. One day I wandered by foot in the blistering Dallas heat about three miles to get to a bona fide supermarket. The feeling was awesome. In later years enabled by a car however, I lack the same exhuberance when visiting the supermarket unfortunately.

It seems that there’s much greater challenge in creating meaning from less, than it might be for creating meaning from more. At the same time, from a resources standpoint less is generally cheaper than more, so less is physically easier to realize. The overarching question is how to envalue the state of less so that it feels like more. So I go back to thinking more about this for later …

I gave a talk to the M50 in New York last week. There I heard the common cry for more customer-led innovation as opposed to technology-led innovation. The logic of this approach being the assumption that when you let technologists make stuff, they are bound to make products that have more features than you’d ever want in a lifetime. Instead by listening to your customers, a product that is better tailored to their needs is created. In other words it isn’t necessarily over-designed or over-engineered. It’s ideally juuuuuuust right. Seems like commonsense.

Later in the week, I had lunch with the owner of a small business where I brought up the point above. His reply was that even when big businesses listen to their customers, that by virtue of being so large they can’t change what they’re doing fast enough to respond. So by the time they’ve changed, the customers needs have often moved onto something else. He was trying to make his own point that a leader’s intuition shouldn’t be discounted as a necessary tool in a world where hard data seems to matter too much. With so many unpredictable variables, the power of luck in success is everpresent.