Jobs was the first to bring the term “taste” into the context of management studies. However, his halo also led to a common misunderstanding that taste is a personal gift of entrepreneurs and cannot be learned by others. But this is a misunderstanding.
The taste that Jobs spoke of is actually organizational taste, not personal taste. The book “Taste: The Right-Brained Organizations in the AI Era” points out that what truly determines an organization’s taste is not the personal taste of the entrepreneur, but the taste of the users. Organizational taste is often moderately higher than user taste, yet it never deviates from user taste. It is precisely this “half-step” sense of proportion that allows users to feel the true, the good, and the beautiful.
Of course, in real-world scenarios, the founder’s taste often precedes the organization’s taste, which is not surprising. But the real question is: can it be recognized and accepted by users? Without user recognition, an organization can’t even survive. Ultimately, it is still the users’ taste that decides the organization’s taste.
However, this does not mean that the role of entrepreneurs can be weakened. The founder is not only the starting point of the organization’s taste but also the one who guides and attracts the users’ taste. Because the organization’s taste must be moderately ahead of the user’s taste. There is a very subtle difference here: if the entrepreneur’s personal preference cannot connect with the user’s mind, it is just narcissism; if it can be half a step ahead of the user without being detached from the user, that is true taste leadership. Jobs’ greatness does not lie in “I like this”, but in his ability to turn “I know what is better” into a product experience that users can truly feel. Half a step behind is taste; ten steps behind is performance art.
The key here is whether the organization can transform this personal taste into a common value ranking standard for the organization. The larger the company, the less likely it is that all internal decisions can be made by the boss alone. Without a consistent standard for value ranking, the organization will fall into endless internal strife. The boss thinks the employes are incompetent, and the employes think the boss is making arbitrary decisions; there are constant conflicts between departments. The development team emphasizes efficiency, the product team values value, the sales team focuses on revenue, and the design team prioritizes esthetics. Each person and department has their own set of standards, but the entire organization lacks a common standard, a truly consistent value ranking criterion. The book “Taste” tells us that this consistent standard for value ranking is the organizational taste.
To cultivate organizational taste, merely understanding user taste is not enough; merely aligning the taste of entrepreneurs with that of users is also insufficient. More importantly, can this taste truly be transformed into the decision-making capability of the entire organization? Decision-making ability can be learned and trained, and must be completed thru learning and training. This is precisely the core value of the book “Taste”: transforming the entrepreneur’s talent into a replicable capability for the enterprise.