The Japanese have a great expression I love that roughly translates to "upend the tea table". It harkens back to a time when stern Japanese fathers would upend the family table if they didn't like what was for dinner and force their wives to cook a new meal.
Legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto is famous for "upending the tea table" at Nintendo. He often comes along when products are ready to ship and forces people to go back and reevaluate, redo, and reinvent their work if he feels that they've gotten too comfortable or settled in to familiar patterns. One of my favourite Miyamoto quotes is "A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever." The result of this perfectionist philosophy is that Nintendo often ships video games months or even years late, but when it does finally ship them they're usually insanely successful.
Here in the West we're not usually encouraged to upend the tea table. We're taught to meet deadlines, stay on budget and value efficiency over creativity. I am sure every puppet builder and freelance artist reading this knows all too well about the need to get work done on time and on budget versus the need to get it done right.
Deadlines and budgets are important and I think that the obsession with them in places like Canada and the U.S. isn't surprising in a culture where companies are only worried about the next quarter and politicians don't think past the next election cycle. This is an area in which I think we in the West can learn a lot from the East. I can't help but notice how North American corporations tend to focus on where they'll be at the end of the fiscal year, whereas Asian corporations tend to focus on where they'll be at the end of the next quarter century.
Which continent do you think will have bigger superpowers in 2032?
