Heavyset

In a prior post, I attempted to make the argument that chefs of a certain stature are able to leverage transparency towards a profitable end without risk to their business because they enjoy an inherent executional advantage. Here, I’d like to explore a closely-related, yet different side of operational transparency – namely that the opening up of proprietary process reveals a conscious set of decisions, and that those decisions create value not only for the operation, but also for the consumer.

To do so, I’d like to consider the career – and more expressly the archives of Stanley Kubrick – unquestionably one of the more private (and least transparent) public figures of his time. So renowned for his secrecy was the director that his wife felt it necessary to state publicly in 2006 that the director was ‘not paranoid’.

The Kubrick archives – a collection of thousands of cardboard boxes stored in every available space on his rural estate and  made famous in the aptly-titled documentary ‘Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes – paint a vivid portrait of a completist; Several boxes contain nothing but the thousands of location shots that would ultimately be used to construct the set for Eyes Wide Shut; Others contains hundreds of photographs of hats, each carefully considered and reconsidered for Malcolm McDowell’s riotous getup in A Clockwork Orange¹; Still more contain the thousands of submitted auditions from twentysomething American actors for bit parts in Full Metal Jacket. So precise was Kubrick in the management of his archives that he comissioned a local box company to develop a unique set of boxes precisely suited to the purpose.

What, then, do these archives teach us about the value of transparency? A great deal, I think. It is impossible to watch the documentary without coming to the conclusion that the most minute details of a Kubrick film had been explored, examined and re-examined with great care; that to watch a Kubrick film is an exercise in viewing tens of thousands of conscious decisions; that nothing is incidental.

This same notion of an involved narrative in which little is superfluous has been taken to an extreme, I would note, in the production of the television series Lost – in which the most incidental item has been precisely chosen to either augment the larger narrative or to fuel speculation among the show’s fans.

Moving beyond Kubrick, then, for the moment: how does a pattern of conscious decision-making translate to value? If we divest ourselves from the study of film for the moment and consider the practical problem of a common household good, I believe that value very much comes into play.

James Dyson has made much of the process by which he came to the design for his eponymous vacuum cleaner – a highly iterative process through which he developed literally thousands of prototypes, ultimately resulting in a product in which every component is deliberate in nature. Certainly, much of the success of Dyson vacuums is owed to his visual design pedigree, but the marketing engine behind the product is fueled in no small part by the openness with which he has made public his failures².

At the other end of the pricing scale, Ikea has generated a mammoth following through a well-documented openness regarding their mandate that every product sold by the brand be designed in such a manner as to minimize cost of both manufacturing and transportation.

Dyson and Ikea each represent a real, if very different, lesson in the value of transparency as related to deliberate decision making. The Dyson customer is willing to pay more for a vacuum cleaner because he or she trusts that every detail has been carefully considered, resulting in a superior product. The IKEA customer³ makes a conscious decision to purchase what is perhaps an inferior product, but does so knowing that every decision made in the manufacturing process has been carefully considered to strike a delicate balance between utility and price. The value generated is a level of trust – trust that the decisions made by a brand are, even if not ideal, not arbitrary.

Consider the level of insight you have into the decisions made by the companies providing the products and services relevant to you. Has the soda can on your desk been designed to maximize your enjoyment, or is it designed to maximize cost? Was it designed at all, or an afterthought? More significantly, what decisions were made in the design of the dashboard of your car? Certainly, decisions were made throughout the design process. What iterations were explored, and then discarded? What were the basis for the decision to manufacture the final configuration, and do these criteria match up with your own motivations for purchase? Would it make a difference to you to learn that your car was the result of a single prototype rather than 1000?

I suggest that the value created by a transparent decision-making process is substantial, and that the trust engendered via the process ( even posthumously, in the case of Kubrick ) adds substantially to the value we place on the products and services we purchase or enjoy. I’d love to hear your own thoughts on the relationship between transparency and trust as relates to absence of the incidental.

1. for those unfamiliar with the film, this is Ari Gold’s boss on Entourage. If this causes you to think ‘oh, that guy’, you are officially fined $20US [↩]
2. a fantastic, and related article on Dyson and innovation as related to education reform can be found here [↩]
3. read: not me [↩]

Related posts:

1. Transparency or Translucency?
2. Transparency Paper One: The Executional Advantage of Celebrity Cookbooks
3. Four questions to ponder for embedded technology hopefuls
4. Registering Complaints
5. VORP and Creating Customer Value