In Support of a Liberal Education
Umami says it all, at least in terms of the tastes - literally - we all feel. There's sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and, new in the last century or so, umami. MSG gives the feeling of umami if you squint a bit (mixed metaphors do ruin things a bit, I know), but it is not exact. It is really the taste you get when glutamic acid is ionized by cooking, fermentation, or sitting in the sun (Lehrer, 58). Aged cheese and ketchup are good sources of the taste. That's why they're such useful condiments. Fish sauce and soy sauce are others. Meat, cooked properly, converts glutamate to a free form you taste, making that steak so tasty (Lehrer, 60).
OK, why bother with a disucssion of umami in a discourse that's supposed to be about strategy? In my estimate, Betty Edwards' book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain laid out a way to think about things that was revolutionary, if you think about it. There was the analytical side of our brains - the left side - that was very useful at, well, analysis. The right side was different. While you didn't really need to go into a trance to get in touch with the right side of your brain, with a little bit of training in doing things like drawing you could do things - like draw - that you couldn't do before.
Umami style cooking (focusing on taste in new ways) and Edwards' style drawing (focusing on drawing in new ways) are useful tools in strategy. Do your numbers, run the cash flows and ROI, absolutely. Those are all useful analytical tools. Now, stand back. What's missing? How do you take the left brain information - analytics - and combine it with right brain stuff like taste and perception. We've spent a lot of time on disruptive strategy (run "Christensen" on the blog if you want the references). Getting to umami, getting to right brain, getting to disruption require new ways of thinking about perceiving. Adding more features to what you already have is nice, but it is not disruptive. Removing some features to make things easier to use while making your product or service cheaper is disruptive. Heat and some flavors enhance the umami experience in food. Drawing differently - the whole process is not the stick figures we all drew in first grade - enhances your artistic efforts. Strategy is artistic in some ways. Yes, analytics are important, but so are thought processes. Take the science out of your product and look at it more like a novel. Look at your product a different way. You're starting to understand disruption.
Wosniak brought technical skills to Apple early on. Jobs brought marketing skills. Different skill sets. Add umami ingredients to your food, get taste explosion. Address your right brain, get better - different - drawings. Address the left brain and the right brain - the liberal arts side, maybe - in your product sessions, get disruption. Not bad.
Reference
Edwards, Betty. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. J. P. Tarcher, Inc. 1979.
Lehrer, Jonah. Proust Was a Neuroscientist. A Mariner Book Houghton Mifflin Company. 2008.