The Groove Issue 12 - The Timeless Quality that Helped Renoir and Apple Succeed
Welcome to the twelfth issue of The Groove.
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Maria
THE TIMELESS QUALITY THAT HELPED RENOIR AND APPLE SUCCEED
One thing 2020 reinforced in everyone is that adapting fast and being nimble is paramount to our survival in our professions, businesses, and everywhere else. Being nimble goes hand in hand with being creative and resourceful, and implies that we need to be agile enough to move quickly through society’s fastest changes without sacrificing the substance of what we do. In other words: we have to be dexterous and steadfast at the same time, even more so during turbulent times.
What We Can Learn from Renoir’s Nimble Practice
Pierre Auguste Renoir, Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children, 1878, oil on canvas. Although some of his contemporaries tried to shame Renoir for painting commissioned portraits, like this one, and doing them really fast, being nimble and adaptable to the circumstances is what made him successful and eventually quite wealthy.
Pierre Auguste Renoir is one of the most celebrated artists of all time. Born in Limoges, France in 1841, to a family of humble means, Renoir became one of the most prolific artists in history, painting more than 4,000 canvases and producing more than 500 drawings during his 40-year career. Even by today’s standards, 4,000 paintings is quite an impressive number. Renoir almost always worked alone, and at the beginning of his career he asked his friends in Paris to lend him their studios to paint and store his canvases since he didn’t have the money to pay for one of his own. He wasn’t bothered by the nomadic life - on the contrary, he was encouraged by how agile his operation was.
Go Where the Need Exists
Pierre Auguste Renoir, Algerian Girl, 1881, oil on canvas. This painting was one among fourteen that Renoir painted during a two-month trip to Algeria in 1881.
Renoir enjoyed painting interiors and landscapes, but his older sister told him that painting portraits and taking commissions was where the money flowed. But he never felt like a sell-out for painting portraits. In fact, for him, portraits were harder to make, as he wanted to both represent the models’ faces as accurately as possible as well as their inner life. It wasn’t until 1871, when Renoir, at the age of 30, rented a room on the Rue du Dragon that became his first studio. Moving around was never a problem - he didn’t need famous architecturally designed buildings or a staff of dozens of people to exercise his creativity and to do so prolifically.
In 1881, Renoir traveled for two months in Algeria and while there, made more than fourteen paintings, then came back to Paris to pick up his fiancée, Aline, and left with her again for two months in Italy, jumping from one city to the next, such as Venice, Florence, and Naples. Since he had a hard time finding models, he used Aline, as one. Nothing, really, was an excuse for Renoir to find solutions and keep himself working swiftly while also being connected to the cultural moment and what the market wanted.
Speed to Market
Renoir loathed being pigeonholed. Camille Pisarro described Renoir as “the most changeable of men” and didn’t mean that as a compliment. But Renoir kept adapting, being nimble and known for his vitality and joie de vivre. As he painted more portraits, he also built a successful practice, bought two estates, and had three other spaces that became his studios in different parts of France. Renoir was so agile that it didn’t take him more than a few hours to paint a portrait. Some days he painted one in the morning, one in the afternoon and one at night. Renoir’s agility served him well - he had a phenomenal career and was able to see his own work hanging at The Louvre, his favorite museum. By the time of his death at the age of 78 in 1919, his net worth was approximately $10 million (adjusted for inflation that is $263 million today).
Being Nimble is Essential for Business Survival
Although Kodak still exists, it has been tremendously diminished by the move from paper-printed photos to digitally-produced images. The iconic company wasn’t nimble enough to proactively and efficiently adapt to the circumstances that later caused its demise.
Companies like Kodak and Blockbuster had the money, the access to credit, and the market share to pivot and thrive. But they just didn’t want to adapt to the changes in technology. It wasn’t that they didn’t see them coming; they knew that everything was moving to the world of digital. The problem is that they weren’t nimble enough and thought they could survive doing the same that they had always been doing. The maxim “what took you here, won’t take you there” could not have been more palpable in these two examples.
Pay Close Attention to Your Market
The 1984 Macintosh by Apple Computer, Inc.
If you run a bigger team, or a bigger company, the idea of being nimble may sound hard to implement. And it may sound contradictory when we think about big companies like Apple. But remember that Apple was an established company selling computers when they decided to enter the business of music-players through the iPod. That shift allowed Apple to pretty much write the future, singlehandedly. The iPod was the predecessor of the iPhone and the iPad. These three devices progressively changed the way the world communicates, consumes media, listens to music, shops, and lives.
How did Steve Jobs and his team decide to design, manufacture, and launch the iPod? Because they were paying attention to the market: 1) by the late 1990s, digital music had become big news and young people were doing it through illegal means, like using Napster. It quickly became apparent to most in the tech industry that Internet-downloaded MP3s were the future of music distribution; 2) in 2000, Jobs learned through the data collected by his team that Apple had a large hole in its upcoming digital hub strategy when it came to music; 3) Jobs told his team that every MP3 or portable music player out in the market was “crap” and poorly designed, and in the same consistent style, Apple’s designers worked thousands of hours on creating a flawlessly integrated and beautiful player. The first iPods hit the shelves on November 2001 and until 2014, when the iPod was discontinued, Apple sold more than 400 million units and over 35 billion songs through them.
Keep Your People Focused on Their Strengths
The first iPod, launched on October 23, 2001. Had Apple not been a nimble company, they would have never capitalized on this opportunity.
As a leader in any business, being nimble starts with being on top of the changes in your industry. You call the shots, but you also direct your team and have them work at what they do best. With Apple, design drives all the other decisions and as such, the top members of the design team led by Jony Ive, the Chief Design Officer, don’t report to finance or manufacturing. They only need to present their developments to the Executive Team. And when Apple’s design team works on a new product, they are even cut off from the rest of the business so there are no interferences and no bureaucracies that may hinder the most important part of the company.
This system was implemented by Jobs who wanted a work environment where employees were encouraged to do great work without paying attention to areas outside their competence, such as financial statements and balance sheets. Under Jobs, only one executive “owned” a P&L, and that was the Chief Financial Officer. By creating a system whereby only a financial executive would mind the budget, Jobs forced functional executives to focus on their strengths.
I think we all have room for improvement in the agility department. What can you do to become more nimble going forward? Is it exercising more dynamism with respect to the market? Getting a deeper analysis of data? Having the presence of mind to check out your surroundings and see what’s working and what could be shelved? Do not confuse being nimble with being reactive, instead, think about being nimble as being fast, effective, and intentional and be willing to tweak your strategy and to embrace uncertainties every step of the way.
THE EXTRA GROOVE
Read:
Renoir, Painter of Happiness by Gilles Neret
Renoir: An Intimate Biography by Barbara Ehrlich White
That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea by Marc Randolph
Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired--and Secretive--Company Really Works by Adam Lashinsky
Watch:
Renoir. A movie directed by Gilles Bourdos