Ever had to reboot an internet connected toilet?
There is evidently a new $6,000 model that can pretty much run on autopilot…..at least when it’s working. The New York Times recently described the features and critical downside on your downside of a toilet that can, aside from fulfilling job number two, do it all for you.
Except when you lose that internet connection.
Soon we’ll have the ultimate computer and commode plan, along with your cable, alarm system and phone thrown in too. But imagine what happens when you lose that connection and everything goes down, except in the one place you need it to go down: “Honey, I know you pulled the wires out and plugged them back in, but shouldn’t you check the toilet connection too?” “Uh, how about if you take care of that?”
It’s the one product that the late and great Steve Jobs wasn’t designing when he invented all of the devices we didn’t know we wanted or needed, but now consider crucial to our self-actualization as fully complete humans. Maybe Jobs just figured the world wasn’t yet ready for a portable i-Toilet that mimicked all of his i-Phone functions. Maybe he figured his Apple stores didn’t have enough room to display different i-Toilet models next to his phones, t.v.’s and computers. Maybe app designers couldn’t get the world’s first potable water app to work just right for desert sojourns. Maybe he didn’t want to figure out what type of instruction an in-store i-Toilet class would have to include.
We’ll just never know for sure.
Sometimes breaking people out of their product upgrade comfort zone isn’t worth the effort. You’ve already changed the world, why take a risk? Professional naysayers are accomplished at their art and are ready to start dumping — figuratively speaking of course — all over you. It’s hard to get the imagine-less imagining.
That flushing noise from the i-Phone i-Toilet app I have in beta testing — you’ll be able to download it once I can figure out how to get Apple to approve my sound effects — sort of brings us around to Middle East politics. Trust me on this: There is no Steve Jobs in Israel or in the Palestinian territories.
There are certainly plenty of naysayers and leaders who can cite historical product failures. There are now even some who will only agree to self-actualize at an exchange ratio of 1027 to 1.
Perhaps there are a few individuals with Job’s inventor genes who can envision what their people need and may be capable of working with others to form sort of a Steve Jobs group mindset, but if they exist they are lost in political alliances that take more comfort in blaming others for the history of what is always someone else’s product failure.
It’s a version of the tree falling in the forest analogy: If a leader willingly enters a hard-right alliance forest, gets lost, and is not able to navigate his way out even after he agrees to pay ultra-Orthodox members to study the Biblical implications of his problem, was he ever really a leader?
Hello Benjamin Netanyahu.
If a leader forswears violence and expresses a willingness to negotiate with former enemies, but also demonstrates a willingness to join with others who won’t, and also blithefully undercuts his own more open-minded teammates to pander to members who revel in recounting historical grievances more than developing future solutions, was he ever really a leader?
Hello, Mahmoud Abbas.
But while it isn’t fair to only target Netanyahu and Abbas as poor Jobs replacements, they are certainly the ones best positioned to effect substantive change instead of the sort of change mirage they both embrace: Just enough West Bank security controls are withdrawn and offset by nightly raids, just enough illegal settlement construction is ignored, grandfathered, relabeled or delayed (depending on whether a key alliance member or U.S. official complains the loudest), and just enough missiles and rockets are temporarily reduced and blamed on the other guy’s faction, to allow the concerns about the long-term implications of the Palestinian and Israeli contretemps to fall behind concerns over unemployment and housing.
Sixty three years later, we still have political leaders who haven’t made it out of their beta test stage. Forget Version 1.0.
Israel’s team can’t figure out what they want their Israeli product to be and who they want to sell it to. Let’s see: Do we want to sell our Jewish feature, our democratic feature or both? How do we get the right balance? How do we limit the Israeli Arab customers? Do we want any Palestinian customers?
Imagine a recent Israeli product design strategy session: Let’s call Nefesh B’ Nefesh and see if we can get some Jewish Occupy Wall Street protesters to go through the aliyah process. Those guys are perfect. They don’t have a clear idea of what they want or how to get it any more than we do — real synergy. Maybe we can convince them that it’s a slam against Wall Street to adopt Likud’s platform and pitch their tents in the Arab sections of east Jerusalem, Hebron and around some of our unofficial official settlements. Okay, let’s get organized. You Shas guys go over and study how we do this. Yes, we’ll be sure to hit the religious aspects. Danny and Avigdor, why don’t you go down, way down to Occupy Somethings-land and tell all of those old Wall Street Pharaohs to let our people go?
Good enough?
Then over in Ramallah we can imagine University of Texas grad and Palestinian National Authority Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, and University of Damascus grad and P.L.O. Chairman, Mahmoud Abbas, arguing about who forgot to include the baklava in the U.N. dignitary gift box, whose turn it is to complain about settlements, which university plays real football, who has the best football team and whether Mack Brown’s job will last longer than Basher al-Assad’s. (The University of Texas football program’s G.N.P far exceeds Syria’s, but if Assad’s Swiss assets are included and his more well armed supporters are also factored in, Brown needs to be preparing his resume.)
Winston Churchill certainly realized that counting on leaders to embrace Steve Jobs qualities can lead to disappointment: “(Leaders have the ability to) tell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it did not happen.” Who in the Middle East hasn’t starred in this role? Like most corporate CEO’s, they focus on explanations over inventions, short term forecasts over five year plans.
American political leaders are positioned to play a singular or collective Steve Jobs role, but they suffer from a fear that a large number of constituents and organizations — a.k.a. Supreme Court defined people — will express their dislike of reformulations through their fund raising (or lowering) and get out the vote efforts. They may not always like what’s offered, but there hasn’t been any Steve Jobs brave enough to imagine and sell anything else. Ideally, we would have leaders that, like Steve Jobs, would sell the utility and look of a new Middle East design. But we would first have to send a search party into the Republican and Democratic forest to locate them, and then convince them it’s safe to come out.
How can anyone really successfully reboot the Palestinian and Israeli peace negotiations when we have so many people whose careers are now based on convincing each other that we need to remodel and not reinvent? It’s Dennis Ross and his peace negotiator acolytes along with a reliably idiotic group of terrorist gangs and their offspring. It’s a dysfunctional Israeli coalition party system that leads more to internal compromise than visionary leadership. It’s the U.S. Congress and its preference for a known status quo, contributions, and field trips to Israel, with Gaza and West Bank flyovers. It’s Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran fomenting trouble — the more violent the better.
It’s people drunk on reliable talking points, Palestinian and Israeli caricatures, and a sort of Groundhog Day negotiating approach where Israelis and Palestinians play co-starring roles: Talk about the problem issues to everyone but each other, randomly or intentionally blow up something or someone, complain about motives and values, stop talking and focus blame on the other side’s intractability or lack of seriousness, build some more settlements and fire some more missiles and rockets, start talking again, randomly or intentionally blow up something or someone, build some more settlements and fire some more missiles and rockets, finally engage in REAL talks for a FINAL resolution, negotiate back and forth, hit a road block (in negotiations not the West Bank), talk about the boundaries for two states, fail to finally agree, blame the other side, randomly or intentionally blow up something or someone, build more settlements, fire some more rockets and missiles and then…..focus on the old and new problem issues and sink lower into the comfortable, uncomfortable abyss where the major Palestinian and Israel successes are defined in terms of who won the p.r. war and (especially lately) who got more favorable U.N. and Congressional resolutions passed.
Gideon Levy, Haaretz columnist, writing about the return of Gilad Shalit, a soldier kidnapped and imprisoned by Hamas for over five year, sees “two bleeding peoples (more focused on) the fate of a single soldier (than the) the fates of …an entire people.”
Still, despite Levy’s sentiments, focusing on Shalit is an undeniably important focus. His return is in many ways miraculous. But while the degree of suffering, whether felt by him and his family, the over 1000 Palestinians who were part of the exchange and their families, or the Israeli families who were victims of many of the released Palestinians, may vary greatly in both causation and proportion, Levy is right to suggest that everyone suffers. And the only way to ultimately reduce and end the suffering is to use this moment as an opportunity to move forward.
Who are the leaders destined to have a Steve Jobs-like epiphany that designing and building at least Version 1.0 of a final two state peace agreement is more critical than focusing on all of the reasons it can’t be done?
It will be someone who, while acknowledging the obvious difficulties and risks of making peace with your enemy and moving away from the blame game paradigm, will also be able to paint a vision of the economic, social and political benefits that a peaceful future can entail. It will be someone who adopts a strategy to convince his (or her) people that the road to a peaceful two state solution will be bumpy, but that peace is a vastly superior product upgrade, one that will generate buying excitement and keep people anxiously anticipating what comes next.
Palestinian and Israeli leaders just need to find their inner Steve Jobs and get on with it. Their customer base is huge and untapped and the basic product design has been long known. If Germany and Israel can be friends and key trading partners only 66 years after Nazi Germany, there is no logical reason Israeli and Palestinian leaders can’t find enough common ground to succeed as well.
