Top Highlights

• This book's aim is to show how and why the opposite is true. How constraints can be fertile, enabling, desirable. Why they are catalytic forces that stimulate exciting new approaches and possibilities. How they can, in fact, make us more than we were, rather than less than we could be. Why we should see in them beauty, rather than the beast, and wh...
• Google's home page is as simple as it is because that was the limit of Larry Page's coding ability at the time. He couldn't afford external resources, and all he knew how to do was create a search box and a logo—so while the rest of the search brands visually cluttered their home pages, Google's simplicity stood out for its understated respect for ...
• The whole concept of a brand, for instance, is in effect a beautiful constraint. It is the clarity on what that brand is not, as much as what it is, that allows a team to focus on finding fresh, relevant, and inventive ways to be true to what it stands for. When a brand stops respecting those limits and tries to become something it is not, it becom...
• By making a constraint beautiful, we mean seeing it as an opportunity, not a punitive restriction, and using it as a stimulus to see a new or better way of achieving our ambition.
• Ten years from now, we would like to search Google for a definition of constraint and see it include this: a limitation or defining parameter, often the stimulus to find a better way of doing something.