There's a great article in this month's Time magazine on Steve Jobs and Apple's success, even though the company operates counter what conventional wisdom dictates.

One bit that really caught my attention was Steve's "Parable of the Concept Car":

Ask Apple CEO Steve Jobs about it, and he'll tell you an instructive little story. Call it the Parable of the Concept Car. "Here's what you find at a lot of companies," he says, kicking back in a conference room at Apple's gleaming white Silicon Valley headquarters, which looks something like a cross between an Ivy League university and an iPod. "You know how you see a show car, and it's really cool, and then four years later you see the production car, and it sucks? And you go, What happened? They had it! They had it in the palm of their hands! They grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory!

"What happened was, the designers came up with this really great idea. Then they take it to the engineers, and the engineers go, 'Nah, we can't do that. That's impossible.' And so it gets a lot worse. Then they take it to the manufacturing people, and they go, 'We can't build that!' And it gets a lot worse."

When Jobs took up his present position at Apple in 1997, that's the situation he found. He and Jonathan Ive, head of design, came up with the original iMac, a candy-colored computer merged with a cathode-ray tube that, at the time, looked like nothing anybody had seen outside of a Jetsons cartoon. "Sure enough," Jobs recalls, "when we took it to the engineers, they said, 'Oh.' And they came up with 38 reasons. And I said, 'No, no, we're doing this.' And they said, 'Well, why?' And I said, 'Because I'm the CEO, and I think it can be done.' And so they kind of begrudgingly did it. But then it was a big hit."

I think this is a common downfall of many organizations and projects and it results from a sort of "design by committee".  Fred Brooks makes a similar point in The Mythical Man Month with regards to building software:

Simplicity and straightforwardness proceed from conceptual integrity.  Every part must reflect the same philosophies and the same balancing of desiderata.  Every part must even use the same techniques in syntax and analogous notations in semantics. 

Concpetual integrity in turn dictates that the design must proceed from one mind, or from a very small number of agreeing resonant minds.

In the case of Apple, Steve Jobs is the bolt that holds the whole structure together and the success of Apple can be directly related to Jobs' vision.  From concept to implementation, he enforces coceptual integrity at all levels of the organization.

I think the significance of conceptual integrity struck me when I was sitting in OfficeMax one day as my wife was looking for some supplies for school.  Christopher Lowell's Seven Layers of Design: Fearless, Fabulous Decorating was sitting on a desk that was next to the executive chair that I was fiddling with.  In summary, Lowell drives each of the project rooms in the book with his "seven layers of design" to demonstrate how easy it is to change a room from drab to fab in seven easy steps (yes, that sounded non-hetero in my head, too).  As I flipped through it, I couldn't help but admire how he made his philosophy so succint and consistently applied it throughout the book; it made it seem so easy.

I think the lesson to be learned from this is the importance of conceptual integrity from design to implmentation.  Good designs often fall flat in implementation due to poor adherence to the core concepts and ideas of the designer.