Passion

29505

To say Steve Jobs is passionate about what he does is an obvious understatement. More than anything, he aspires to “put a ding in the universe”–to do great things. In everything Jobs does, there is always an intense sense of mission.

Steve Jobs has always been on a personal mission to “make the world a better place.” This colors and influences anything and everything he does. He believes it’s perfectly OK to be very difficult to get on with as long as you’re passionate about what you’re attempting to do. Therefore, Jobs has no problems or qualms about yelling and shouting until he gets what he wants, even if others describe that as creating a “reality distortion field” around him. And oddly enough, most of Jobs’ collaborators like it that way. They appreciate his passion and find that this pushes them, in turn, to do great things themselves. Sure, eventually it might result in burnout, but in the meantime some pretty amazing stuff will come together on the sheer drive and determination Jobs adds to the equation.

Jobs is famous for recruiting former CEO John Sculley away from being the president of PepsiCo to run Apple with the question: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?” Sculler simply couldn’t resist the philosophical challenge Jobs had thrown down. “If I didn’t accept, I’d have spent the rest of my life wondering if I’d made the wrong decision.”

One interesting dimension of Steve Jobs’s personal stock of passion is he also has the ability to instil similar passion in the team members he collaborates with. The original Mac development team–a ragtag bunch of ex-academics and technicians–typically worked ninety hours a week for months on end. They even got sweatshirts that were emblazoned with: “NINETY HOURS A WEEK AND LOVING IT.”

Due in part to this exceptional level of passion Jobs personally brings to the projects he works on, it isn’t at all unusual for the people he works with to go on a “hero-to-zero” roller coaster ride quite frequently. Jobs is very demanding, and expects high performance from the people who report to him. When people deliver, they attain hero status in his eyes. When people let him down, they are labeled as zeroes. Over the course of a project, the same people will go on this roller coaster ride several times. The people who this bugs typically don’t last, but those who enjoy this intense level of feedback find the ride exhilarating.

Apple’s stock price has risen 1,250 percent since Jobs took over as interim CEO in 1997. That means Apple’s employee stock options are incredible motivational tools. Most full-time employees at Apple have grants of stock options awarded when they join the company that vest after a year or so.

When it comes to motivating people, Steve Jobs is actually highly skilled at both dangling the carrot and using the stick–most often simultaneously. He can persuade people to go after seemingly impossible goals and push them to go beyond what they assumed their limits were. He’s also more than willing to cajole, rebuke and bully if this proves to be more effective than painting a vivid picture of the future promised rewards. Jobs can alternate between being highly charismatic and being extremely intimidating in the blink of an eye. The usual result, however, is that people end up producing work that is better than what they ever thought they were capable of generating.

There also have been times when Jobs has got has got this balancing act wrong and has stepped over the line to one degree or another.

People also talk frequently about the “reality distortion field” that surrounds Steve Jobs–sometimes described as “a ring of charisma so storong it bends reality for anyone under its influence.”

Regardless of whether Jobs is charming, intimidating or a mix of the two, almost everyone who works with him agrees that he has the ability to get more out of people than they themselves believe is possible. Jobs also tends to get credit for everything that goes right at Apple at the same time as he is blamed for absolutely everything that goes wrong. To most people, Steve Jobs is the heart and soul of Apple Computer, for better or for worse.

I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don’t know why. Because they’re harder. They’re much more stressful emotionally. And you usually. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you’ve completely failed. Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you’re not going to survive. You’re going to give up. So you’ve got to have an idea or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you’re passionate about; otherwise you’re not going to have the perseverance to stick it through.

–Steve Jobs

At Apple we gave all our employees stock options very early on. We were among the first in Silicon Valley to do that. And when I returned, I took away most of the cash bonuses and replaced them with options. No cars, no planes, no bonuses. Basically, everyone gets a salary and stock. It’s a very egalitarian way to run a company that Hewlett Packard pioneered and that Apple, I would like to think, helped establish.

–Steve Jobs

Elitism

(29504)

Steve Jobs believes strongly in partnering with A-players and firing all the bozos. He consistently seeks out the highest quality talent and recruits them to his projects. He attracts great people and then lets do great work for him.

There is no question that Steve Jobs is an elitist. He believes you’re far better off having a small team of highly talented collaborators than you are having a vast army of mediocre talent. Accordingly, Jobs has always set out to hire the smartest engineers, designers and programmers on the planet. He has also forged long-term relationships with many of the world’s top brands–including Disney, Pepsi and the big record labels.

When Jobs went back to working at Apple in 1997, he set about assembling an A team to work to turn the company around. He brought with him three of his trusted senior management team from NeXT who he put in charge of hardware, software and sales.

Jobs also brought in an experienced Chief Operating Officer who controlled all operations and logistics as well as a very competent Chief Financial Officer and retail store manager. And then, contrary to most expectations, Jobs delegated day-to-day responsibilities to these people without trying to micromanage everything. Instead, Steve Jobs used his considerable energy getting to work developing new products for Apple.

Steve Jobs has a strong preference for small teams. When he worked on the original Mac, he insisted on an upper limit of 100 people. If someone was added, someone else had to be dropped from the team. He believes large groups become unfocused and unmanageable and that small is best. Perhaps this preference harks back to the early days when Jobs and Wozniak assembled the first Apple computers by hand in a garage, or it may be that Jobs has learnt by experience that when it comes to teams, small is best. Regardless, Apple today assembles small development teams that have more in common with a garage startup than then do with a company of 21,000 employees.

So if Jobs isn’t really a “techie” per se, what is his contribution to a development team? While he cannot do some of the hands-on tasks like design a circuit board or make a computer case, he does provide the project with vision and guidance. Or put another way, Jobs gets involved in making most if not all of the key decisions. He rejects or accepts the work of his creative partners and keeps everyone on track. In the parlance of Silicon Valley, Jobs typically acts as the team’s “product picker”–the individual who has a nose for what will sell and what will not. Steve Jobs is very good at listening to a torrent of new ideas being suggested and separating the wheat from the chaff.

During product development projects, Jobs gets involved in all the major and most of the minor decisions that get made. He’s very comfortable allowing other people to challenge his thinking, but they’d better be prepared to back up what they’re saying to the hilt. Jobs typically makes decisions by engaging in intense, hand-to-hand intellectual combat. The process can be pugnacious and demanding, but it’s often from this kind of white-hot environment that the most rigorous and creative ideas come out. Yes-men don’t survive the kind of intellectual combat that Jobs excels in. He respects those who stand up to him, but they’d pretty darned well be sure of their facts or Jobs will find out and the flow-on consequences will be severe.

In addition to being an astute product picker, Steve Jobs is also the public persona of Apple Computer. He uses advertising exceptionally well to communicate the values he stands for personally and what Apple Computer holds to be important. Jobs’s personality enables Apple to market itself as being edgy, cool and different from other run-of-the-mill competitors. Apple has been positioned as being an icon of change and of revolutionary or bold thinking because of the long-standing partnerships Jobs has maintained with some of the world’s leading advertising agencies.

Jobs also uses secrecy to particularly good effect. Apple is divided up into a number of small teams, and when a major new product is under development, it’s not unusual for teams to be developing the various components without having any idea what the finished product is. The knowledge of the actual product is controlled on a very strict need-to-know basis, with all kinds of military-grade security technologies being used internally. The fact than what the company is working on does not get leaked in employee blogs or other informal channels means a very healthy sense of anticipation builds each year in the lead up to the annual MacWorld Expo, where new products typically get launched. That buzz can result in literally millions of dollars worth of free advertising for Apple Computer.

Jobs is a master at delivering speeches at MacWorld. He uses an impressive amount of precision and timing. In the lead up to the event, banners will be put in position guarded by wrapping and with their own 24/7 security guards. When Jobs casually announces new products, pulleys will unwrap the banner ads and the product will simultaneously show up on the Apple Website. Jobs generally saves the biggest announcement for last in his speech, which he always introduces with his his hallmark “one more thing”–almost as if it were an afterthought. As soon as the new product is announced, an advertising blitz will launch in magazines, newspapers, radio and TV. Within hours, posters will go up on billboards in bus stops around the country, with all the ads reflecting a consistent style and message. The messages themselves will be memorable: “One thousand songs in your pocket” is all you need to know about the iPod. Or “You can’t be too thin. Or too powerful” for the MacBook laptop. All of this is incredibly valuable free PR for Apple Computer, and much of it is the direct result of what Jobs personally brings to the company.

I always considered part of my job was to keep the quality level of the people in the organizations I work with very high. That’s what I consider one of the few things I actually can contribute individually to–to really try to instill in the organization the goal of having only ‘A’ players. In everything I’ve done it really pays to go after the best people in the world.

–Steve Jobs

Perfectionism

(29503)

Steve Jobs has an obsession with the pursuit of excellence. Pure and simple, he lives to make great products, to do great things and to avoid compromises of any kind. He’s perfectly willing to keep doing things over and over until he gets them just right–or scrap the product altogether.

Steve Jobs is an absolute stickler for detail. People describe him as being a pain-in-the-butt perfectionist who is difficult to work with and so demanding it’s unbelievable. But those observations can easily be interpreted as being the byproducts of a tireless and intense pursuit of excellence as well.

The fact that Steve Jobs insists on an unprecedented and unreasonable attention to detail is probably the reason why Apple has won so many design awards. It is certainly the driving force behind the company’s intensely loyal customer base. Jobs is perfectly happy to keep working on the design of a new product for as long as it takes to get it right and even to kill projects altogether if they cannot be well designed.

Even in the early days of Apple Computer when Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were developing the Apple II, Jobs knew design was important. So much so that he hired a freelance designer who was an exHewlett-Packerd employee to design a professional looking molded plastic case for the Apple II, While other companies were putting their rudimentary computers into all kinds of cases, Apple’s computers look like real mass consumer products. Jobs has an innate feel for this. When it came time to debut the Apple II at the 1977 West Coast Computer Faire, a small batch of twenty Apple II cases were made. The company only had enough circuits to make three working computers for the trade show, so the rest of the cases were stacked professionally at the back of the booth. This gave the impression that Apple had already achieved high-volume production, which, in those Apple had already achieved high-volume production, which, in those days, was considered to be a very big deal. Compared to the offerings of other computer manufacturers, the Apple II looked more like it was a finished machine ready to use rather than a hobbyist kit requiring more tinkering.

Jobs continued that trend with the launch of the original Mac. He correctly surmised that most people who purchased a Mac would have no prior hands-on experience with computers. Therefore, the iMac’s screen, disk drives and circuitry were all housed in the same case. By having an all-one design, all of a PC’s normal wires and plugs were dispensed with. All the customer had to do to get started was to plug in the mouse and the power cord. The Mac also had just a simple on/off switch that was placed at the back of the machine so users couldn’t accidentally turn it off in the middle of doing something. The designers even went as far as to place a smooth area around the on/off switch to make it easy to find the switch by touch.

Steve Jobs was completely immersed in every detail of the Mac, and carefully choreographed the design of the packaging. He considers the packaging of any Apple product as an integral part of the user experience. When the Mac was first released in 1984, Jobs believed the only people who would have used computers prior to that time would be engineers, so he gave lots of thought to how the Mac should be packaged. He came up with ideas:

Jobs decided consumers should be involved in assembling the machine so they would familiarize themselves with the main components. Therefore, the computer, keyboard, mouse, cords, disks and manuals packed separately in a box that had a black-and-white picture of the machine.

When consumers opened the box, they saw a piece of packing foam. On removing that, they saw the handle at the top of the Mac–which suggested they should lift the machine out of the box and set it on a table.

Consumers then typically opened the accessory box, which had three cables–one for power, one for the mouse, and the other for the keyboard. It was obvious these three cables should be attached as the next step.

The other components would then be opened, removed from their packaging and progressively added to the system.

Apple has continued to make the “unpacking routine” an integral part of its product design and development efforts, and Steve Jobs is always closely involved in this. His attention to detail in this area is legendary. For example, shortly before the launch of the iPod, Jobs was disappointed to realize that the headphone jack didn’t yield a satisfying click whenever the earphones were attached or removed. He instructed an engineer to work on this, and then Jobs had all of the dozens of sample iPods that had been issued to reporters and VIPs for a product demonstration retrofitted with the new headphone jack that delivered a better clicking sound.

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, it you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really gasp what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that.

–Steve Jobs

When you start looking at a problem and think it’s really simple, you don’t understand how complex the problem really is. Once you get into the problem, you see that it’s complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That’s where most people stop, and the solutions tend to work for a while. But the really great person will keep going, find the underlying problem, and come up with an elegant solution that works on every level. That’s what we wanted to do with the iMac.

–Steve Jobs

Despotism

29502

When developing technology-based products, it’s easy to try and cram more and more features in. You’ve got to have someone who makes the hard call to stop developing new things and start manufacturing and shipping. Steve Jobe is good at acting like a despot and making the hard calls.

As technology becomes more complex, Apple’s core strength of knowing how to make very sophisticated technology comprehensible to mere mortals is in even greater demand.

–Steve Jobs

What makes Steve’s methodology different than everyone else’s is that he always believed that the most important decisions you make are not the things that you do, but the things you decide not to do.

–John Sculley, Apple CEO 1983-1993

When developing consumer products, it’s very easy to let “feature creep” get in the way–where engineers keep on adding more and more features to products merely because they can rather than for any other rational. Steve Jobs is very good at avoiding this all-too-common trap. He never sets out to cram as many bells and whistles as possible into the devices Apple makes. Instead, he’s much more likely to pare back on features until the devices become as simple and as easy to use as possible.

For Jobs, the starting point for any design program is the user experience. He is highly customer-centric in his way of thinking and acting. Jobs sits down and thinks about how to offer customers a better experience than they currently enjoy and then brings together the components that are needed to deliver this superior experience.

Left to their own natural inclinations, most engineers would tend to develop electronics products that have all kinds of features and capabilities. These devices can easily end up being a confusing mess only the developers themselves understand. You need someone to clearly articulate what a product’s primary function is and stick to it. Steve Jobs is particularly good at this. He acts like a dictator or despot and in effect lays sown the law on what features should be incorporated and which features would be an overkill. If something is too hard to use, Jobs has no hesitation hiving instructions for it to be simplified until he gets it right.

This kind of feature creep can also arise when new versions of existing products are under development. Engineers feel pressured to add more features so their products can then be marketed as “new and improved” or ideally as “next generation” products. Similarly, marketers want a rationale so they can encourage people to upgrade. Apple resists this because of the input of Steve Jobs as CEO.

Another unique thing about Apple in the latest Steve Jobs era is the fact that the company doesn’t follow the industry trend of harnessing user groups to provide feedback. Jobs himself shuns these laborious studies as unnecessary. He plays with the new technology himself, notes his own reactions and then gives this as feedback to the developers. That may sound like it takes a lot of chutzpah, but Jobs is entirely comfortable with the end results of this kind o development effort.

Jobs always looked at things from the perspective of what was the users experience going to be, but unlike a lot of people in product marketing in those days who would go out and do consumer testing, asking people what they wanted, Steve didn’t believe in that. He said, ‘How can I possibly ask someone what a graphics-based computer ought to be when they have no idea what a graphics-based computer is? No one has ever seen one before.

–John Sculley

There is one other thing that Steve Jobs does when designing new products that is worth noting. He always asks for alternatives to be generated and then likes to pick the best. He is well aware that there’s more than one way to do most things, and he will usually ask for multiple variations of productions of products under development to be made. Jobs will then look at these various mockups and prototypes, compare them in depth and then pick the best to run with. He habitually dose this for all hardware and software development projects.

Jobs has taken his interests and personality traits — obsessiveness, narcissism, perfectionism — and turned them into the hallmarks of his career. Jobs has used his natural gifts and talents to remake Apple. He has fused high technology with design, branding and fashion.

–Leander Kahney

There’s a new frontier in technology: digital entertainment and communication.

–Leander Kahney

Focus

(26501)

At a personal level, Steve Jobs excels at focusing on what he’s good at and delegating the rest to others. The same philosophy applies to business. When he regained control of Apple, his first priority was to get the company focused on what it’s good at.

Irrespective of any personality issues that may become involved, Steve Jobs is crystal clear about what he’s good at and what he’s not:

Personal strengths and weaknesses

ˇInnovation: Steve Jobs is a master at conceiving and then helping create innovative products consumers love. He’s passionate about this.

ˇPresentations: Steve Jobs is great at launching new consumer products with flair. Apple can guarantee he will generate attention for new stuff.

ˇDeal-making: Steve Jobs excels at negotiating good deals. He has shown this with Pixar and with getting record companies onboard with iTunes.

*Movie making: At Pixar, Steve Jobs knew better than to get involved as a director. He let others use their talents to best effect and was hands off.

*Wall Street: Jobs is no good at dealing with Wall Street types. He always works in conjunction. with a competent CFO who manages this area.

*Operations: Equally, Jobs delegates the intricacies of operations to a COO he trusts implicitly. He stays out of this area completely.

*Dilution: Steve Jobs is proud of the products Apple hasn’t done. Instead of getting sidetracked, the company has stayed focused.

In just same way as Steve Jobs is crystal clear about where he adds value and where he does not, when he returned to Apple Computer as interim CEO in 1997, Steve Jobs systematically took the company apart and analyzed its components. Jobs quickly found that there were four facts staring him in the face:

1. Apple was about six months from bankruptcy if it kept doing business the same way it then was.

2. The company was selling about forty different products–every thing from inkjet printers and hand-helds to computers.

3. Apple’s computer product line had become so confusing that it was impossible for customers to tell one model from another.

4. Apple’s R&D engineers were working on some interesting stuff, but nobody was doing the difficult work of buckling down and getting things market ready.

Jobs went through all of the product lines offered by Apple one by one and then came back with his “go-forward plan,” which was considered to be quite radical at that time:

Apple would develop and sell four machines–two notebooks (one for consumers, the other for professionals) and two desktops (again, one for consumers, one for professionals).

Pro. Desktop Power Mac G3

Consumer Desktop iMac

Pro. Notebook PowerBook

Consumer Notebook iBook

Apple would sell everything else–its printer business, monitors, software, hand-helds, etc.

Apple would focus on making premium world-class computers. Any research projects that did not relate to this aim were cancelled–which meant Jobs killed hundreds of projects with immediate effect.

The product managers were responsible for matching staffing levels to the company’s needs moving forward–which resulted in mass layoffs. Jobs was careful, however, to retain a core team of talented engineers, which he referred to to as his A team. They would later work on the iPod.

Jobs also streamlined Apple’s organizational chart so everyone knew who they reported to and what was expected of them.

Jobs killed the Mac clones in the marketplace, and insisted on keeping everything Apple did totally proprietary.

« Previous Page — Next Page »