Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [37]
At Apple, good design comes from a fascination with raw materials and new manufacturing processes. It’s about figuring out how an entirely new product should work, an in-depth process that often means starting over many times before the designers are finished. It’s about an obsession with excellence and the pursuit of perfection. It’s about a fanatical refusal to compromise that all but guarantees Apple’s products have the fit and finish of the finest handmade goods.
Lessons from Steve
• Don’t compromise. Jobs’s obsession with excellence has created a unique development process that churns out truly great products.
• Design is function, not form. For Jobs, design is the way the product works.
• Hash it out. Jobs thoroughly figures out how the product works during the design process.
• Include everyone. Design isn’t just for designers. Engineers, programmers, and marketers can help figure out how a product works.
• Avoid a serial process. Jobs constantly passes prototype products between teams, not one team to the next.
• Generate and test. Use trial and error—creating and editing—to make an “embarrassing” number of solutions to get to one solution.
• Don’t force it. Jobs doesn’t try to conciously design a “friendly” product. The “friendliness” emerges from the design process.
• Respect materials. The iMac was plastic. The iPhone is glass. Their forms follow the materials they are made from.
chapter 4
Elitism: Hire Only A Players, Fire the Bozos
“In our business, one person can’t do anything anymore. You create a team of people around you.”
—Steve Jobs, Smithsonian Institution Oral and Video Histories
When Jobs was conducting his product review after returning to the company, he “steved” most of Apple’s products. But he made sure to keep the best talent on staff, among them people like Jonathan Ive and Cordell Ratzlaff. When Jobs wanted to open a chain of Apple retail stores in 2001, the first thing he did—the very first thing—was find an advisor. He was afraid of getting burned, and so went and recruited himself an expert, Millard “Mickey” Drexler, who was running the Gap. Jobs invited Drexler to sit on Apple’s board and advise the company as it got Apple’s retail chain off the ground. Jobs views the talent on Apple’s staff as a competitive advantage that puts the company ahead of its rivals. He searches for the best people in a given field and puts them on the payroll.
Jobs has a reputation as the boss from hell, a terror-inspiring taskmaster who’s forever screaming at workers and randomly firing hapless underlings. But throughout his career, he has struck up a long string of productive partnerships—both personal and corporate. Jobs’s success has greatly depended on attracting great people to do great work for him. He’s always chosen great collaborators—from his Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak to London-born design genius Ive, who’s responsible for the iMac, iPod, and other iconic designs; and John Lasseter, the storytelling genius at Pixar.
Jobs has successfully struck up working relationships with some of the most creative people in his field, relationships that frequently last for many years. He’s also forged (mostly) harmonious relationships with some of the world’s top brands—Disney, Pepsi, and the big record labels. Not only does he choose great creative partners, he also brings out the best in them. Through judicious use of both the carrot and the stick, Jobs has managed to retain and motivate lots of top-shelf talent.
In Jobs’s view, there’s not much difference between a bad taxi driver and a good one, or a bad restaurant cook and a good one. Jobs has said that a good taxi driver is maybe two or three times as good as a bad one. In the taxi-driving profession, there aren’t that many levels of skill dividing good from bad. But