Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [41]
Small Is Beautiful
Jobs likes to work in small teams. He didn’t want the original Mac team to exceed one hundred members, lest it become unfocused and unmanageable. Jobs firmly believes that small teams of talented employees run circles around larger groups. At Pixar, he tried to ensure that the company never grew to more than a few hundred people. When asked to compare Apple and Pixar, Jobs attributed much of Pixar’s success to its small size. “Apple has some pretty amazing people, but the collection of people at Pixar is the highest concentration of remarkable people that I have ever witnessed,” Jobs told Fortune in 1998. “There’s a person who’s got a Ph.D. in computer-generated plants—3-D grass and trees and flowers. There’s another who is the best in the world at putting imagery on film. Also, Pixar is more multidisciplinary than Apple ever will be. But the key thing is that it is much smaller. Pixar’s got 450 people. You could never have the collection of people that Pixar has now if you went to two thousand people.”
Jobs’s philosophy harks back to the old days when he, Wozniak, and a few teenage friends assembled computers by hand in a garage. To some extent, Jobs’s preference for small development teams at Apple today is the same thing: a simulation of a garage startup inside a big company with more than 21,000 employees.
On returning to Apple in 1997, Jobs set about assembling an A team to resurrect the company. Several of the top executives he appointed had worked with him before at NeXT, including Jon Rubinstein, whom he put in charge of hardware; Avie Tevanian, who headed up software; and David Manovich, who was put in charge of sales. Jobs has a reputation as a micromanager, but at NeXT he had learned to trust these lieutenants. He no longer oversees every decision the way he used to. At Pixar, Jobs delegated almost everything to Catmull and Lasseter. At Apple, he cedes much of the day-to-day management to Tim Cook, the chief operating officer, a master at operations and logistics who is widely considered the number two at Apple. Ron Johnson, head of retail, manages almost everything to do with Apple’s chain of retail stores; while chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer handles finances and deals with Wall Street. Delegation at Apple frees up Jobs to do what he loves best—develop new products.
Jobs’s Job
Working with partners like Jonathan Ive and Jon Rubinstein, Jobs plays a unique role. He doesn’t design circuit boards or write code, but Jobs puts his stamp firmly on his teams’ work. He’s the leader who provides the vision, guides the development, and makes many of the key decisions. “He didn’t create anything really, but he created everything,” wrote John Sculley on Jobs’s contribution to the original Mac.12
Jobs acts as the team director, the arbiter who rejects or accepts the work of his creative partners, guiding them as they work toward a solution. One source told me that Ive once confided that he wouldn’t be able to do the work he does without Jobs’s input. Ive may be a creative genius, but he needs Jobs’s guiding hand.
Jobs is the “product picker,” in the parlance of Silicon Valley. Product picker is a term used by Silicon Valley venture capitalists to identify the key product person at startup companies. By definition, a startup must succeed on its first product. If it doesn’t, it goes under. But not all startups start with a product. Some are a group of engineers who have a lot of talent and ideas but haven’t yet figured out what product they want to develop. This happens all the time in the Valley. To ensure the success of a startup like this, there has to be an individual