Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [100]
At Microsoft, president Steve Ballmer studied Max Weber’s writings before taking the reins from founder Bill Gates. “I went out and I dusted the book back off,” he said. “And you see a lot of great institutions that have managed to routinize after charismatic leaders. . . . You can have great things happen after great leaders, but you’ve got to think about it and be explicit about it.”3
At Apple, Jobs’s characteristic traits—his obsessiveness, his focus, and his passion for innovation—have been turned into distinct processes that will ensure Apple delivers a steady stream of hit products, with or without him.
Jobs’s perfectionism and attention to detail, for example, have been routinized into the company’s prototyping culture. Where Jobs once used to throw substandard work in people’s faces and call it “shit” until it was done right, Apple’s staff now create and test new products over and over until they meet the highest standards. In short, Jobs’s ceaseless pursuit of perfection has become its own process that is used throughout the company and will continue to be, no matter who is in charge.
The prototyping culture can also help Apple ensure that Jobs’s incredible knack for innovation continues. Products like the iPhone never sprang fully formed from Jobs’s imagination. Rather, they were “discovered” through the creation of hundreds of prototypes. Most of the major products at Apple were started over from scratch when engineers found themselves at the end of a false path. Apple’s prototyping process has turned into a method for fostering innovation as well as quality control.
This is a system that does not rely on Jobs alone. Jobs has his input, of course, but so do his engineers, designers, and programmers—and it’s possible to imagine the process operating just fine without him.
“Steve Jobs’ spirit has been institutionalized,” wrote Ap pleInsider, reporting an investor note from analyst Shaw Wu, of Kaufman Bros. According to Wu, Jobs’s spirit and drive has been instilled in thousands of Apple employees, especially the executive team. “We believe Apple today has a deep bench and its culture of innovation and execution or ‘spirit’ has more or less been institutionalized,” he wrote.
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster made the same point about Apple’s executive team. “While Jobs is the irreplaceable face of Apple,” Munster wrote in an investor note, the company’s innovation comes from the entire organization, especially the executive team. “This management team, along with Steve Jobs, has been responsible for Apple’s product innovation.”
Cook: “We’re Here to Make Great Products”
In January 2009, during an earnings call with Wall Street analysts, Tim Cook made a fascinating statement about Apple’s philosophy:
There is an extraordinary breadth and depth and tenure among the Apple executive team, and these executives lead over 35,000 employees that I would call all “wicked smart.” And that’s in all areas of the company, from engineering to marketing to operations and sales and all the rest. And the values of our company are extremely well entrenched.
We believe that we’re on the face of the earth to make great products, and that’s not changing. We’re constantly focusing on innovating. We believe in the simple, not the complex. We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.
We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us. We believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollination of our groups, which allow us to innovate in a way that others cannot.
And frankly, we don’t settle for anything less than excellence in every group in the company, and we have the