Admittedly, this is not a post about The Beatles nor is it a post about music, at all.  I came across an article about Design-by-Committee that greatly reflected my feelings the other day at work.  I won’t go into the nitty-gritty about D-b-C other than to describe the idea:

You’re a coder.  You have your degree in computer science.  You are asked to make a program.  Naturally your boss is involved.  Somewhere down the line your boss’s boss decides he wants to get involved.  You make your prototype.  Your boss sees the pros and cons.  Your boss’s boss says it works fine, but it doesn’t feel right, so he grabs the company accountant to get involved (he’s good with numbers, and programming uses numbers).  Yet further down the line, by the time you look up, there are 8 people involved in the design of the program including the administrative assistant (she uses a computer), the VP of Public Affairs (her husband works at Dell), and the custodian (his son works for Geek Squad).

My point is this: most of the time the more fine-tuned the team, the better the product.  I would also go further to say that innovation is fueled by a singular idea, not a bunch of ideas that must be compressed into a compromise.  You could compare this to your local DMV, but I don’t want to get political.

The article is geared toward graphic designers, but I feel this reaches beyond any project – you work hard to create a functional product but somewhere down the collaborative input, it sometimes loses part of the function, but it often loses its soul.

To sum up, The Beatles were great without Pete.  Who became part of the committee as the band started to unravel?  Exactly.

Why Design-By-Committee Should Die – Smashing Magazine.

img credit: monero hernandez