Authors: Peter Sander
Steve Jobs placed a lot of value on having a diverse organization, and on choosing individuals with diverse backgrounds and sets of experiences, like his own. As described in
Chapter 1
, Steve never finished college—not even his first year. But he was able to synthesize his own interests and experiences, from electronics hacking to Zen Buddhism to calligraphy, add three heaping scoops of passion, and become what he became. He felt that others should do the same.
When selecting team members, Steve looked for the same breadth of background and experiences. A good technologist is a good technologist, but one with interests in philosophy, the arts, literature, and such really moved the needle. He also liked entrepreneurship and signs of success at other endeavors. People who show the ability to get things done in other fields, to synthesize their experiences, and to take a broader view of the
human experience are more likely to be the pirates that Steve was searching out. In a March 2011 iPad event, Steve told us: “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. That it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.”
Not surprisingly, as Steve Jobs looked for people with diverse backgrounds, he would look everywhere. He was known to recruit the friends and acquaintances of his existing team members, feeling that they were most likely to fit with the team and share many of the same values. Apple doesn’t do a lot of outbound recruiting—these days it doesn’t have to, but even in the old days, people were just as likely to be found through happenstance and connections as through formal recruiting efforts. Even John Sculley was brought to Steve’s attention by two of Steve’s early Stanford recruits.
Once a contact was made with a prospective pirate, the interview was likely to depart from the norm. It wasn’t your typical engineering interview. Diverse, seemingly off-task questions often bring diverse answers, and Steve was known to rely not so much on what people said as on how they said it, and on the meta-data that came in around the actual answer. Again, from the
Fortune
interview: “Recruiting is hard. It’s just finding the needles in the haystack. We do it ourselves and we spend a lot of time at it. I’ve participated in the hiring of maybe 5,000-plus people in my life. So I take it very seriously. You can’t know enough in a one-hour interview. So, in the end, it’s ultimately based on your gut. How do I feel about this person? What are they like when they’re challenged? Why are they here? I ask everybody that: ‘Why are you here?’ The answers themselves are not what you’re looking for. It’s the meta-data.”
So, in Steve’s book—recruit a team of diverse, well-traveled, and highly skilled pirates, and they’ll follow you anywhere.
In October 2004, Steve did a revealing interview for an article in
BusinessWeek
called “The Seeds of Apple’s Innovation.” When asked: “How do you systematize innovation?” he responded with the quote in the heading. He went on to say, “That doesn’t mean we don’t have processes. Apple is a very disciplined company, and we have great processes. But that’s not what it’s about.”
And then: “But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that
shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem. It’s ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.”
The quote speaks volumes for what goes on inside Apple.
Steve Jobs hated bureaucracy. He hated the layers of management, the structure, the manuals, the procedures, the risk-management techniques that tend to grow and eventually choke typical large organizations. Put simply, he wanted the focus to be on customer and product, not process.
Process focus typically arises when organizations grow in size. When they grow, each team member gets a relatively smaller role or task in a greater or larger whole. When people are involved in increasingly smaller fractions of a project or a program, the tendency is to introduce formal processes to enable them to communicate and to make sure that each team member continues to contribute her piece on schedule.
Layers of management, cumbersome communication processes, checkpoint meetings, and various other forms of overhead begin to infiltrate the organization. Pretty soon, team members spend more time preparing for—and
focusing on—these internal processes and process delegates than they do on the customer or on anything else that is happening outside the business. Like the proverbial auto assembly-line worker, they lose the vision of the car and focus on the bolt that needs to be added, over and over.
The organization itself starts to serve its own interests rather than the needs of the customer. Everything happens to achieve some internal objective or meet some internal protocol. Even the R&D team begins to worry about achieving its objective to create patents, not to create exciting experiences for customers.
Steve Jobs was determined not to let this happen in his organizations. Early on, the tentacles of bureaucracy began to settle in on the Apple II team, with 4,000 employees, under John Sculley. Jobs’s way out—and a better example—was the 100-person Macintosh team. But ultimately the forces of bureaucracy won out, almost nixing the 1984 Super Bowl commercial as well, as the organization became more about serving itself and less about changing the world.
If you work for a large organization, you’ve probably experienced it. I know I have. When there are nine people
doing the planning, checking the work, and shuffling the paper for every one person who is actually working on the customer solution, the tentacles of bureaucracy have finally choked the beast. When you work to create excellence, and people line up to scrutinize your procurement decisions, modify your office environment, prepare reports, and market your efforts to other silos
inside
the organization, you’ve probably crossed over to the dark side. It’s easier to tear something apart than to create it, and individuals in these layers make careers out of tearing things apart.
NAs Nick Webb asks in
The Innovation Playbook
: “Does the process serve innovation? Or does innovation serve the process?”
Steve Jobs was well known for preferring holistic end-to-end product and team thinking. He led the design of whole products—hardware and software, core product and accessories, all together—feeling that any time you leave pieces of the product to another company or organization, something will be left out. He thus shunned allowing the Microsoft OS to be used on other manufacturers’ hardware models as an invitation to trouble, if not a formula that produced less successful products.
When it came to teams, Steve felt the same way. When projects are transferred from one organizational silo to another, problems are inevitable. Each silo takes care of its own needs and views the product in its own context, losing sight of the customer solution that was envisioned in the first place. Famously, Microsoft didn’t get its tablet computing platform off the ground, even though Bill Gates himself predicted way back in 2001 that the tablet would overtake the PC—in part because the manager of the Microsoft Office software program didn’t believe in tablets and didn’t want to create a tablet version of Office.
How siloed is this? From one of the world’s premier technology companies? Needless to say, it surprised a lot of people in the industry, but it goes a long way to illustrate Microsoft’s lack of an innovation culture—a big reason that the company is struggling today to replicate its past PC software successes.
In many companies, the R&D organization, entrenched in its separated lab facilities off in the middle of corporate nowhere, is even treated as a silo itself. Siloed organizations and siloed thinking have clearly hurt other big companies—General Motors and HP are obvious examples in the marketplace, and many more would come to light if you looked inside their four walls.
As an alternative, Steve preferred small, holistic, empowered teams. In an effort to avoid bureaucracy and
stay on task, the Macintosh team allegedly never exceeded 100 people. Sure, there was structure within the team; Steve didn’t manage them all individually. But he kept it small and simple and worked directly with any team member as needed to keep things on track—and trusted that a lot would happen without his direct guidance.
Having a clear vision is one of the biggest keys to keeping a small team on track and to having a small team in the first place. Big teams arise in part where people aren’t sure of or don’t share the vision, so that team members and managers need to hash out stuff along the way. The skills, self-motivation, and open-mindedness of team members provide a lot of the self-governance that the team needs, but it starts to not work if the team is too big or the vision is unclear.
As Steve put it himself: “Put together small teams of great people and set them to build their dreams.”
As organizations grow, they tend to take fewer risks. Why? Because individuals are farther away from the customer and the vision, and as a result, they don’t see and feel the benefits and rewards of delighting the customer. Meanwhile, what they
do
see is the risk of doing something that goes badly or fails—and the risk
of losing their jobs in the process. So what do they do? They err on the side of avoiding failure.
Organizations naturally grow and evolve this way. Individuals and groups start working to cover their backsides instead of taking risks to move the company forward and exceed expectations. It becomes a modus operandi. Soon the organization as a whole is focusing on the last failure and trying to avoid it, rather than on the last success. Nick Webb calls that “failure referencing”—the tendency to default to failure as what will probably happen to a new idea because that’s what happened last time.
Steve didn’t let failure, or failure referencing, get in the way. He talked about success, and he energized the team to believe that an idea was a success until proven otherwise—“success referencing.” People who brought new ideas or took risks weren’t punished as long as they had a rationale for what they did. What Steve really hated was not the risk takers but the “bozos” who slowed things down without reason or who were in conflict with the vision.
University of California’s Dr. Simonton chimes in on this, too: “Freedom to take risks, do a variety of assignments, and work on multiple projects at once can spark flexible thinking,” while “pressure to play it safe or close off alternative perspectives can shut down creativity.”
Not everything flies at Apple; in fact, a lot of things don’t. Steve told
BusinessWeek
in October 2004 that success “comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.”
“TWhat does this mean? Ideas should be killed because they don’t match the vision, not because they’re risky.
Apple’s can-do culture would have never come to exist without a healthy dose of passion. Today, many people in the business and academic worlds study the forces that get people to do things, and they lump these forces into the general category of “motivation.” The conventional wisdom is: if you provide clear direction and a decent work environment and put the right financial
and career rewards at the end of the tunnel, your team will be motivated to execute the work and move on to the next thing.
This idea of motivation jumps into hyperspace mode when it comes to Apple. From the beginning, Steve Jobs was passionate about “putting a dent in the universe”; that passion bubbled up in Steve’s external presentations and in his internal communications and behaviors. It trickled down to every employee in the organization—and has done so throughout Apple’s history. Passion directed in the right direction—that is, toward the vision—is indispensable, yet it is so hard to achieve. How did Steve Jobs do it?
Really smart, creative, broad-minded people like to work on really smart, creative, broad-minded things. This is where the vision and the track record for game-changing products enter the picture. People come into the organization with the idea that they can change the world, that they can be an important part of something that is big, complete, and special. They can be part of something really cool selling to millions of people worldwide that they, themselves, not a bunch of outsiders or consultants, have everything to do with. At Dell or HP, even if you have an important role in designing
the latest PC, you know that the majority of the customer experience is still controlled by Microsoft. How easy is it to get passionate about that?