Taste is the throughline

Taste is the throughline. It threads through every surface — product, communication, policy, behaviour. It shines when you least expect it.

It sets the tone internally and externally. It’s how decisions get made when nobody is watching.

The best companies are high taste. They make products that feel almost unbearably delightful.

It’s hard to define, but you can feel it.

You can build taste

I think taste is something you can build — indirectly.

By choosing what you expose yourself to, and what you tolerate.

Be around beauty. Re-read great fiction. Listen to music that lingers.

Find and curate things that resonate deeply. Immerse yourself in their depth.

Taste grows where attention is selective.

Self-discipline is a facet of taste. Restraint, also. Curiosity, too.

The more you build it, the easier it becomes to see it. It has a gravity that’s hard to escape.

Even a modicum makes it hard to accept less.

It cuts both ways

Lower taste often shows up as inconsistency.

Treating some aspects of the business with low care is a sign of low taste. When a company talks about building a great product, but then their voice on their website or social media doesn’t feel crafted and clean, you know something is off. It just feels wrong. It’s subtle but important.

A practical example is “managing by exception”. When you give some employees better perks than others without rhyme or reason, things start to fracture. Others feel it immediately. Maybe they can’t articulate why, but trust erodes all the same.

Another example is publicly dressing down people and treating them as lesser. This not only hurts the individual, but destroys trust as a whole. Opinions are suppressed, outcomes suffer.

Case-by-case decision making without guiding principles is how inconsistency sneaks in.

Plenty of companies succeed without it. But they never go quite as far as they could have.

The internal should match the external.

The voice should match the product.

The waves should match the ocean.

Once you’ve seen that bar, it becomes hard to justify aiming lower.