If it could save a person's life, would you find a way to make it faster? "If it could save a person's life, would you find a way to shave ten seconds off the boot time?" [Jobs] asked. Kenyon allowed that he probably could. Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if there were five million people using the Max, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so hours per year that people would save, which was the equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year. "Larry was suitably impressed, and a few weeks later he came back and it booted up twenty-eight seconds faster," Atkinson recalled. "Steve had a way of motivating by looking at the bigger picture." Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs performancemotivation
Both practical and aesthetic concerns The group [of Irwin, Howard, and Wortz]'s thinking here seems to have been influenced to a degree by Christopher Alexander's landmark article, "A City is Not a Tree" (1965)... Irwin referred specifically to Alexander's argument in his effort to sort out his own thinking about how the Miami International Airport might be designed with both practical and aesthetic concerns in mind, allowing for their overlap and emergence from the conditions on the ground. Matthew Simms, Robert Irwin: A Conditional Art A City Is Not a Tree