Authors: Peter Sander
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Visions create value propositions
. Customers are usually willing to trade off something to get something better, and value proposition–centered visions capitalize on this. Southwest had a clear vision that customers would accept no meals in flight, no first class, no assigned seats, and no interline baggage in return for cheap fares. CarMax figured that people would pay a somewhat higher price to get a haggle-free and trustworthy car-buying experience. Starbucks figured that people would pay $3.45 for a latte to get an intellectually stimulating third place. Apple figured that people would pay 99 cents for songs to get a reliable download and copyright peace of mind.
If you know your customers and know your business, you should be able to build a vision around one or more of these patterns.
Few things were more important to Steve Jobs and the Apple organization than vision. While Steve was connected enough with his business to get into the details of product design (and often did), his real contribution was the vision and the passion necessary to conceive, develop, and market the right products, over and over. Steve used his deep customer sense, his broad worldview, and his understanding of technology to formulate some “amazingly great” visions. These visions fueled—and were fueled by—the innovation culture that supported them. Together, the visions and the culture led to the development of amazing products. The building and nurturing of the innovation culture is the subject of the next chapter. In the meantime, here’s what Steve would have done—and you should, too—concerning vision:
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Stay focused on the customer
. Always. Otherwise, the vision will lead you astray.
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Take inventory of what’s out there
. Constantly monitor the competition to see who’s doing what, how customers respond to it, and what gaps are left to be filled.
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Think how things can combine and evolve
. Think of a future, and how you can combine what exists today or in the near future to deliver it.
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Articulate the idea
. It isn’t a good idea until it is clear, distinctive, and specific. Work on that. A clear and compelling vision, as Hawkins says, will sweep objections away.
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Try it out on outsiders
. Of course, you want your organization’s response and feedback on a vision. But if your vision makes sense to your next-door neighbor, your mother-in-law, and your dog, you’re even more on the right track.
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Keep it in front of the organization
. Keep everyone in your group in constant touch with what you’re thinking and what you’re seeing.
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Always be willing to adapt or refine the vision
. Never assume that your vision is perfect, or that the world won’t change. Arrogance is a vision’s worst enemy.
Real artists ship.
—Steve Jobs, Macintosh team off-site,
January 1983
Time
magazine, obviously taken with the success of Apple and the evolution of the iPod, did an extensive front-page cover story and interview with Steve Jobs in September 2005, a rare media appearance during this period.
Steve told
Time
a story that he’s told before: “The Parable of the Concept Car.” It goes like this:
“Here’s what you find at a lot of companies,” he says, kicking back in a conference room at Apple’s gleaming white Silicon Valley headquarters, which looks something like a cross between an Ivy League university and an iPod. “You know how you see a show car, and it’s really cool, and then four years later you see the production car, and it sucks? And you go, ‘What happened? They had it! They had it in the palm of their hands! They grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory!’
“What happened was, the designers came up with this really great idea. Then they take it to the engineers, and the engineers go, ‘Nah, we can’t do that. That’s impossible.’ And so it gets a lot worse. Then they take it to the manufacturing people, and they go, ‘We can’t build that!’ And it gets a lot worse.”
(Full article:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/
article/0,9171,1118384,00.html
)
This little story goes miles toward explaining perhaps the most important element of leading a business: the creation and nourishment of an innovation culture. Steve gave his view of why innovation doesn’t happen in a typical culture, which, of course, we can carefully turn around to arrive at what really
does
work in a Steve Jobs organization.
“Culture” describes the work environment and personality of an organization. It is a “collection of values and norms that are shared by people and groups” that guides how these people and groups interact with one another and with outsiders. Some cultural norms are conscious and tangible, written down and drilled into workers’ heads. Others are quite subconscious and intangible, originating from the greater vision, purpose, and history of an organization.
Culture describes what an organization will do, how it will behave, and how it will respond to marketplace requirements. As a brand is to a product, a culture is a predictable pattern of activities, attitudes, and interactions that defines how something gets done. Culture can also dictate what an organization
won’t
do, such as bogging down innovation and response to the marketplace with red tape and excessive risk management.
Culture goes a long way toward explaining the unique qualities of the Steve Jobs–led Apple organization that have led it to prosper and put their stamp on corporate history. Quite obviously, the Apple culture is one of innovation, a fertile ground for vision “seeds” to germinate into healthy game-changing products. What is an “innovation culture”? I’ll offer a simple definition, which again I think would have passed muster with Steve Jobs:
An innovation culture is a work environment that enhances, rather than impedes, the delivery of visionary products to the market.
Vision and culture go together. A company with an innovation culture is easily driven by an innovative vision; a company with an innovative vision is more likely to display an innovation culture. If you lack a solid innovation culture, even the best customer sense and vision for the future will fail to produce game-changing products. When combined, a vision and a strong innovation culture work together to bridge the gap between the customer and the product.
If the vision and the culture are not both in place and in balance, strange things can happen. A strong innovation
culture with no vision will be directionless; it may hit a winner by accident, but that’s unlikely. A strong vision without a strong innovation culture will fail, as the visionary will constantly be shot down by process and the “organizational antibodies,” the assortment of players who see no gain from taking risk and departing from what’s already been done.
A good innovation culture is a culture of “can do.” It is a culture that enthusiastically embraces the vision. It is a culture that looks for ways to do something rather than reasons not to do something. It is a team that consistently produces amazing results without excessive structure, process, or coercion. The absence of barriers and bureaucracy allows good ideas to be developed rather than taken apart every step of the way. It is holistic—that is, it pervades the organization.
It is a positive, not a negative, culture.
In their annual reports, statements to the media, and financial presentations, many companies crow about having an “innovation culture” or being “innovation driven” or doing “innovation for tomorrow.” But what do they really mean? Does the IBM or HP patent mill represent an innovation culture? Is a company that
spends 10 percent of its revenues on R&D innovation driven? Not necessarily. Does a company with a big R&D lab, such as Alcatel-Lucent (Bell Labs), have an innovation culture? Not necessarily. Does a company that makes “Invent” its tagline, as HP did, have an innovation culture? Probably not.
AOne word, or a couple of words, does not make for an innovation culture. Innovation must happen naturally as part of the culture throughout the company to count.
More than anything else, all Steve Jobs’s organizations, from Apple to NeXT to Pixar, have lived these three words: “Real artists ship.” The three words say a lot. First, Steve is calling his team a team of artists. He recognizes the creative and multidisciplinary talents of his team members. But to be relevant, or real, they must produce products that delight customers, and that ultimately sell.
In these three words lies the big difference between a Steve Jobs organization and most others. Most organizations are so focused on the “ship” part that they neglect the creativity and synthesis of the vision. At the same time, artists can be so driven by the creative, new, and avant garde that they fail to produce anything of
value, that is, anything that will appeal to the customer and command a premium price.
Steve Jobs connected the two ideas like no leader in history. But it went beyond that: with unstoppable evangelism, passion, and support, Steve Jobs added a certain magic to an organization.
It quickly became a well-organized, functional group of artists that—yes indeed—shipped.
Culture, like vision, has a certain intangible quality that’s hard to identify. Culture works—or doesn’t work—to produce innovations, but every corporate culture is slightly different. It’s a bit like pornography: a good culture defies precise definition, but you know it when you see it.
Culture comes from leadership. Leaders select the team, set the vision and tone, and should determine or heavily influence how the team will work together to produce results. Culture is innate and continuous; it is not something that starts and stops when a team develops a product.
Leaders face at least four primary duties to make and maintain a culture of innovation and excellence:
• Selecting the team
• Organizing the team
• Sharing the passion
• Keeping the focus
We’ll cover each of these in turn.
This quote, made back in the days of the original Mac development team, says a lot about how Steve viewed people and selected them for teams. It also speaks to the kind of team and team behavior he admired. To build a team, all organizations seek the best and the brightest people, particularly for their innovation and new product development organizations—that’s not what’s in question here. By seeking out the pirates, Steve took the idea a big step further.
Why pirates?
A pirate can function without a bureaucracy. Pirates support one another and support their leader in the accomplishment of a goal. A pirate can stay creative and on task in a difficult or hostile environment. A pirate can act independently and take intelligent risks, but always within the scope of the greater vision and the needs of the greater team.
Pirates are more likely to embrace change and challenge convention. “Being aggressive, egocentric, or antisocial
makes it easier to ponder ideas in solitude or challenge convention,” says Dean Keith Simonton, a University of California psychology professor and an expert on creativity. “Meanwhile, resistance to change or a willingness to give up easily can derail new initiatives.”
So Steve’s message was: if you’re bright, but you prefer the size and structure and traditions of the navy, go join IBM. If you’re bright and think different and are willing to go for it as part of a special, unified, and unconventional team, become a pirate.
Steve looked for the pirate in all his team members. But it wasn’t enough just to be brilliant, and it wasn’t enough just to think different. Steve’s pirates had to have the passion, the drive, and the shared vision to want to delight the customer with a perfect, game-changing product. Steve was constantly worried that as Apple grew, it would become like other big companies: tied up in bureaucracy, with a hundred reasons why something couldn’t be done. Pirates with passion would not let this happen. In keeping with this idea, Steve wanted his pirates not only for the product development organizations, but also for routine business functions like accounting and even his administrative assistants.
As Steve told
Fortune
editor Betsy Morris in 2008: “When I hire somebody really senior, competence is the ante. They have to be really smart. But the real issue for me is, Are they going to fall in love with Apple? Because if they fall in love with Apple, everything else will take care of itself. They’ll want to do what’s best for Apple, not what’s best for them, what’s best for Steve, or anybody else.”