Forget iPhones And Free Food, Here's The Real Big Change Marissa Mayer Is Bringing To Yahoo - Business Insider

The story at the end of this article about Marissa Mayer pushing the production team reminds me of another, likely apocryphal, story that I’ve always liked:

The CEO of an electronics company was scheduled to be shown a new video camera (or camcorder if you feel like being nostalgic) that was going to be on the cutting edge of small video cameras and had the strange request to have a bucket of water on hand for the showing. When the production team handed him the camera, he dunked it in the bucket of water and said, “There’s air bubbles coming out of it. That means there space inside of it. Make it smaller.” And they did.

Whether it’s true or not, I’ve always liked the moral of the story: sometimes you need to irrationally ask for the seemingly impossible or just at least demand that the people who work for your push themselves to create the absolute best thing they possibly can. Especially in the world of non-profit communications, I’ve seen that very often, the way big things happen is that there’s someone demanding that they happen, and not for any solid reasons, but just because the person in charge demands it.