You know Steve Jobs was one of those romantic
innovators who comes up with great ideas,
has real passion, real vision and that prickly
personality, that very pushy reality distorting
personality that can get something done.
However, in writing about Steve Jobs I realized
something interesting.
It wasn’t just his one vision.
It was his ability to create a team around
him, his ability to work in partnership with
Steve Wozniak.
You go down the list with dozens of people
all the way to Tim Cook.
And not only to work in partnership but to
create a collaborative team around him of
great designers like Jony Ive and software
people like Phil Schiller and Johnny Rubinstein.
And I once asked Steve Jobs, you know, what
product are you the proudest of.
And I thought he might say the iPod or the
iPhone or the iPad, whatever, the Mac.
And he said, you know, making a product is
hard but making a team that can continually
make products is even harder.
The product I’m most proud of is Apple and
the team I built at Apple.
And that’s when I moved to this new book,
The Innovators, because I wanted to say it’s
not just about the visionary, it’s about
the visionary being able to execute on the
vision by finding the right people to be collaborative
and creative with.
So with Steve Jobs even though we think of
him as being a tough boss or we think of him
as having sort of a prickly personality, there
were people who were so loyal to Steve they
would walk through walls for him.
He developed around him the tightest, most
loyal, most integrated team in Silicon Valley.
You know, Steve Jobs was very intuitive in
the way he made decisions.
He wasn’t somebody who deeply reflected
or spent a whole lot of time hashing it through.
But he would work with everybody from the
hardware designers like Jony Ive to the software
people and just sort of say no, that doesn’t
feel right.
Sometimes he used a little bit stronger language
than that.
Or it’s genius, it’s perfect, it’s awesome,
it’s incredible.
But, you know, don’t try this at home.
People come up to me sometimes and say I’m
like Steve Jobs - when somebody does something
that stinks I tell them it stinks.
Yeah and have you invented the iPod?
Have you invented an iPhone?
No, Steve Jobs didn’t just have a tough
personality.
He also had a charismatic visionary personality
and he brought people in.
And he really could inspire people because
even though sometimes he couldn’t articulate
exactly what he wanted he could sure point
the way to getting it there.
He also believed in physical space as necessary
for collaboration.
We think maybe we can collaborate in the digital
age by doing it virtually from afar but when
he built the Pixar building and when he designed
what will be the new headquarters for Apple
it was all about making sure people had serendipitous
encounters.
That they came through the atrium.
That they walked through the perimeter where
the light was in the new Apple headquarters.
Where they would just bump into people and
say what are you working on.
And then naturally collaborate.
But he felt that, you know, just by walking
through Jony Ives design studio and touching
a few things and talking to people he could
collaborate by being in a physical space better
than he could do it by Skype or email or,
you know, Google hangouts.
So Steve’s team building skills really sort
of came from the force of his personality
and being with him.
