Sam Maloof is “America’s most widely admired contemporary furniture craftsman.” He’s 93 and still going strong. Here’s a slideshow of his work.

He doesn’t take measurements before he starts a project.

I do not feel that it is possible to make a working drawing with all the intricate and fine details that go into a chair or stool, particularly. Many times I do not know how a certain area is to be done until I start working with a chisel, rasp, or whatever tool is needed for that particular job.

For him, functionality trumps aesthetics.

My goal is to make furniture that people can be comfortable living with. If you’re not preoccupied with making an impact with your designs, chances are something that looks good today will look good tomorrow…

I try to make my things aesthetically pleasing; but, if it isn’t functional, people will ‘oo’ and ‘aah’ over it in an exhibit but they won’t buy it. … My feeling is a chair has to be functional and comfortable for tall and short alike.

It takes less than you think to start. Zero dollars of investment. You can keep your day job. Just two months of nights and weekends. Then launch it. Maybe it’s not perfect yet. But get it out there.

That’s what the guys at Tapbots did. Six months ago they shipped Weightbot, an iPhone app for tracking your weight. It sold 100k copies in its first 100 days. And a newer app, Convertbot, a unit conversion app, is selling at about twice that rate.

Now they’re leaving their day jobs and giving Tapbots 100% of their energy. The plan is to keep things tight though…

Longer term we aren’t looking to get any VC funding, grow to 100s of employees or get bought out by some big corporation. We may get help with support, testing and/or marketing, but development and design is going to just be us two for the foreseeable future. We think that’s the best way to keep the quality of our applications at the level that everyone expects. Our goal is to produce about 4 applications a year. We aren’t going to shovel out crap-ware to cash-in on our names. We aren’t going to write the next Office or Filemaker. We are going to write simple but incredibly polished applications that are created specifically for the iPhone/Touch devices. Two guys, lot’s of passion and a lot of hard work, that’s the Tapbots way.

The Tapbots way sounds like a pretty smart way.

Why don’t we just call plans what they really are: guesses. Unless you’re a fortune teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy. There are just too many factors that are out of your hands: market conditions, competitors, customers, the economy, etc. Writing a plan makes you feel in control of things you can’t actually control.

In fact, you might as well change the name of your business plans to business guesses, your financial plans to financial guesses, and your strategic planning to strategic guesses. Do that and you’ll probably start putting a lot less weight into those things.

Ian MacMillan, Wharton professor of innovation and entrepreneurship, and Rita Gunther McGrath, a professor at Columbia Business School, believe “the only plan is to learn as you go.” They say 1) conventional approaches and planning don’t work when you’re trying to get into new spaces, 2) assumptions are what get most companies into trouble, and 3) it’s not failure that companies need to avoid, but rather “failing expensively.”

Here’s an example: You want to get money for a project. You put together a PowerPoint deck of 100 slides with all these back-up details and all these spreadsheets. You go to whoever has the resources and you make this big pitch. And then they say, “Okay.”

You set off, and in two or three months you discover that the market wasn’t exactly what you thought, and the service delivery requirements aren’t exactly what you thought, and maybe the product needs to be tweaked. Now, you’ve got this huge commitment that you’re supposed to live up to. So the first dilemma that we see in companies that causes them to fail so systematically is this presumption that you can be right in a world of massive uncertainty. That leads to these kinds of dysfunctional behaviors.

Great way to put it there: Stop presuming you can be right in a world of massive uncertainty. The only plan you should make is to plan on improvising.

Vic Firth came up with the idea of making a better drumstick while playing timpani for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The sticks he could buy commercially didn’t measure up to the job so he began making and selling drumsticks from his basement at home. Then one day he dropped a bunch of sticks on the floor and heard all the different pitches. That’s when he began to match up sticks by moisture content, weight, density, and pitch so they were identical pairs. The result became his product’s tag line: “the perfect pair.” Today, Vic Firth’s factory turns out over 85,000 drumsticks a day and has a 62 percent share in the drumstick market.

Les Paul invented the solid body guitar because his audience at a BBQ joint couldn’t hear him play.

I was appearing in person playing outdoors at a place called Goerke’s Corner. That was halfway between Waukesha and Milwaukee, and it was interesting because the people would drive in to get their barbecue sandwiches and their root beer, or whatever. I would play and sing for them, and one fellow sitting in a rumble seat of a car wrote a note to me and gave it to the car hop. She brought it to me and it says, “What you got going up there…I can hear your voice and your harmonica fine and I enjoy it, but the guitar is not loud enough.” That made me go home and think about it, and in my own simple way, I said, “Well, now, let me investigate the guitar.” I first tried filling it up with rags, and I ended up with Plaster of Paris in it.

Alain Mongeau, Mutek’s founder and director, explains how Robert Henke came up with Ableton Live:

An artist like Monolake [techno producer and sound artist Robert Henke] is a perfect example. For instance, he’s always wanted to make the kind of music that he was imagining, but there was no way to make it happen. So he actually pushed and pushed and pushed and finally created the tools to make that music, which ended up being Ableton Live software, something that’s obviously had a tremendous impact on this whole field in the last ten years.

These musicians had a problem. They went out and solved it. And it turns out there were tons of other people out there who wanted the same solution.

We associate great ideas with lightning strikes. But the truth is a lot of great inventions come from dull aches. What’s hurting you? And how can you fix it? There might be a big crowd out there who wants that solution too.

Politifact just won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for its coverage of the 2008 election. The board cited PolitiFact’s use of “probing reporters and the power of the World Wide Web to examine more than 750 political claims, separating rhetoric from truth to enlighten voters.”

Matt Waite, one of the site’s founders, posted about the big win and the key lesson he learned building PolitiFact: Demos, not memos. [thx JB]

Demos, not memos.

To be clear, my bosses thought PolitiFact was a good idea from the start. But there was a material difference between how they reacted to memos and how they reacted to seeing it working.

The sales job got easier. The abstract became concrete. The conversations changed from “what do you mean by” to “what if we did this.”

Some of the Getting Real-ish reasons Waite gives for this “demos, not memos” approach: 1. Ideas are cheap and plentiful. Execution is hard. 2. Meetings suck. 3. Requirements documents suck.

(Waite also links to “Why requirements stink” which offers this great example: “Here’s a requirements list: Make a $5 car that goes 500 miles per hour, weighs 10 lbs, and is invisible.”)

Think about how much time you would waste trying to explain the screen shown above. Just build the damn thing and then everyone gets it. Create instead of debate. That’s how you get from “huh?” to “aha.”