Can you mistake a bug for a feature?

"Whatever happens on stage - even if you fall, stammer or forget your lines - pretend it was intended". This is the Rule # 1 of theater.

When I joined Advertising in nearly three decades ago, we were told this in one of the early days. Perhaps because our CEO - Alyque Padamsee - was a famed theater personality those days.

While I never practiced professional theater, for me and whole bunch of my colleagues, surviving clients, copywriters, art directors, studio, accounts, media, our service partners [called 'suppliers' those days], was nothing short of daily, often unrehearsed, theater. So we loved the theater metaphor.

Most of us decoded the 'pretend it was intended' statement as 'don't worry about minor imperfections; keep your eye on the big picture'. This stopped our self respect from hitting the basement, when an error crept into our product - an ad copy, a minor detail in a TV commercial or a sales pitch presentation.

But some people took the 'ignore the minor imperfection' permission to a new level. They would not practice the basic discipline of proof reading the copy, paying attention to any detail and eventually produce work that was consistently poor quality, not becoming of the ad company of the caliber of mine. They chose to forget the other idiom: God lies in the detail , in their zeal to prioritize speed over quality.

Years later, last month, in a product meeting of one of the start-ups I was considering a small investment in, I was shocked into recalling this 'rule'. For obvious reasons I cannot disclose the product, but a couple of people in the team pretty much hijacked the discussion by trying to pass off some obvious bugs as features, designed and intended to be kept there. The other team mates stayed silent, but I could see their discomfort with this argument. It was classic group dynamics at play, the loudest voices were winning and everyone keen to avoid a founder conflict. I would like to believe this is not what happens everywhere, but it worried me enough to keep thinking about it since then.

What one of the founders told me later stayed with me. "You know, sometimes I feel it's not even about the features," he said, "it's about the bug. We owe it to the damn bugs not to have them rub shoulders with the features."