Push For Perfection
Jobs was known to halt development of a product so that the whole
process could be rethought to see if it was done the best.
He even did this with the Pixar team after the movie Toy Story was in production.
They rewrote the story to make it friendlier.
When the Apple Stores were ready to launch he delayed everything a few months
so that they could change the layout based on the activities and not the products.
He and Jonathan Ives were known to have agreed on improving
the minutiae of a product. They held up
the iPhone by several months because the case competed with the display and it
needed to be redesigned. He even offered
to supply the guns to the team to shoot the two of them for the thought. The team’s reaction to the thought of a
redesign? They agreed. Jobs said that it
was one his proudest moments at Apple.
Some of these opinions went back to his father. When he was a
young boy he helped his father build a fence around their backyard and was told
to use the same amount of care on the back of the fence as on the front.
‘Nobody will ever know’, said Jobs. He
father responded ‘But you will know.’
Tolerate Only ‘A’ Players
Jobs was impatient, petulant and tough with people. But people stuck around. Steve Wozniak said
that he believed in being more patient and not having as many conflicts. Then he said ‘If the Macintosh project had
been run my way, things probably would have been a mess.’
He did not want to land up with people who were mediocre.
CEOs who study Jobs and want to emulate him have difficulty integrating
into their plan how his rudeness and roughness were accompanied by an ability
to be inspirational.
The outcome speaks for itself. He inspired people and had top players stay
with Apple longer than they would have stayed in other more friendly environments.
His Apple family stuck together.
Debi Coleman, a member of the original Mac team who once won
an award for being the employee who best stood up to Jobs, said that with all of the screaming that went on in team
meetings, she regarded herself as the luckiest person in the world to have
worked with Jobs.
Engage Face-to-Face
Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings.
He designed the Pixar building so that people would run into
people that they would otherwise not see.
He hated formal presentations and much preferred
freewheeling meetings.
He believed that people who knew what they were talking
about did not need PowerPoint.
Know Both The Big Picture And The Details
Job’s passion allowed him to be that rare individual who was
able to deal with the large and the tiny.
For example, while he designed and had the vision for managing photos, videos,
music and content in the iPod and then iPad and was able to come up with the
successor strategy of moving it all to the cloud, he was equally fixated on the
shape and color of the screws in the iMac.
Combine The Humanities With The Sciences
He was particularly impacted by a statement from one of his
heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, who wrote about the importance of people who
could stand at the intersection of humanities and science.
There were certainly better technologists such as Wozniak
and Gates and certainly better designers.
But no one in his era could match him better in how he combined the two.
He always thought about disrupting industries.
Many
of his product launches ended with a slide showing a sign at the intersection
of Liberal Arts and Technology Streets.
People may disagree on some of his methods but most would agree that Jobs was truly a remarkable man!