Too many chefs can spoil the design stew.

Design in a corporate environment is often complicated by the too-many-chefs syndrome, where every department feels entitled to control the design process. Engineering wants a test bed for their favorite pet ideas. Marketing wants a product with the longest feature list in the industry regardless of the merits of those features. Manufacturing wants a cardboard box with no parts in it. The stockholders want a product to enhance the bottom line, while the company founder wants one to enhance his or her personal image. And as a consequence the product design will often turn out be excessive, off-target and watered-down.

Most designers learn to tolerate all the chefs. But sometimes the interruptions and interferences can get out of hand to the point where the designer has to make a conscious choice between continuing the process or handing it back to the client.

A design intent cannot be changed on a daily basis without taking its emotional toll on the creative people who must make it happen. The intramural battle for control is not something natural-born designers find appealing, and more than a few of us have moved on to other places rather than face this turmoil any longer.

Some company founders and stockholders and marketing executives and chief engineers and manufacturing plant managers have had too little real-world life experience to learn --as so many practical people already know-- how there is no controlling anything in this world, at least not in any permanent way.

On a dude ranch in Arizona a few years before the last World War, two Kennedy brothers, Joe Jr. and Jack, were forced by their father to spend the summer "toughening up" under the bright desert sun. That summer they built fences and fireplaces and outbuildings, some of which remain to this day. The father had plans for these boys and he wanted them to be in the best shape possible for the competition that lay ahead for them.

In the end, one of these boys did make it to the White House -- the father's second choice after Joe Jr. had been killed in the War. But then Jack was murdered and soon after that his kid brother also went down to an assassin's bullet. And near the end of it the old man himself had stroke and died a few years later ...a broken soul.

And so I must ask... Did Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. ever really have control over events as so many claimed at the time... as though what happened resulted from his mastery of the political world... trailed by a mysterious curse -- or was it all from the beginning mostly happenstance where things simply went well for a time, then badly afterwards, all largely beyond his control at any point along the way?

A design is a plan --whether for a new product or company or even for the presidency-- and in the real world these plans rarely turn out the way one would hope no matter how rich or powerful one can be on this earth.

Perhaps our planet would be a better place if those in powerful positions understood that control in the long run is just an illusion.

Even Bill Gates will grow old and die someday.