THE STORY AS I HEARD IT WAS Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were high school friends. One liked to hack, one understood the eventual value of those hacks. Woz hacked, Jobs sold. They built the Apple I and put it in a wooden box. The reaction and reward were sufficient enough to fund the Apple II (stylized as Apple ][), and that changed everything. It was 1977.
Personal computers blossomed into existence, and the world took note. IBM especially. Shocking everyone (including IBM), Jobs and Wozniak took the core ideas of Apple and built their own version of a personal computer. At the same time, Microsoft licensed IBM an operating system it did not own. Other companies cloned the IBM designs. PCs flourished. Operating systems, too.
Meanwhile, back in Cupertino, Apple stumbled with the Apple III and the Lisa. Unreliable. Expensive. From these failures came the Apple Macintosh (Mac) and a clear vision into the future, where computers would become friendly and helpful rather than a glorious impenetrable hobby.
Slow to start, the Mac gradually gathered memory and applications, becoming the default tool for poets. The IBM PCs and clones invaded business. Microsoft looked at the poetry of the Mac operating system and developed Microsoft Windows, which, as with most Microsoft products, took three major releases to become not awful.
The Mac was inspired, but it was not selling to businesses. The Apple II was. Politics, ego, and who knows what went down at Apple, and Jobs left to found NeXT. Apple was adrift and appeared to be incapable of saying no to infinite variants of the now-selling Mac.
Microsoft finally achieved Windows 3.0. The PC clones diluted IBM’s market share, all powered by the increasingly dominant CPUs of Intel. Apple’s flight path continued to drift aimlessly downward. Partnerships and politics resulted in Apple acquiring Jobs’s NeXT. He joined as a consultant, but we all assumed (hoped) he was in charge.
Jobs laid waste to unfocused and poorly managed projects at Apple. Some were beloved. He drew a product strategy as a box with four sub-boxes and clearly declared, “This is what we’re going to do.”
And they did.
Fast-forward to the turn of the century. I’m sitting at the bar at the Mexican restaurant Chevy’s in San Jose with my then start-up’s CEO. Getting wrecked on obscenely and unnecessarily large margaritas, we slurred through the implications of the dot-com bubble whilst planning the third round of layoffs at our failing company.
Patrick, a recruiter, called and asked, “Do you want to work at Apple?”
“I’ve wanted to work at Apple since I was a kid.”
Steve Jobs kept teams at Apple lean and hungry. Organizational structures were as flat as possible to encourage high-bandwidth communication. Titles were not allowed, which meant no matter what you did pre-Apple, you were taking a title hit when you arrived at the Mothership.
In my case, the career optics felt strange. I’d been director at my start-up; at Apple I was a senior manager. But the role I’d stepped into was the same—I managed managers. Another uncomfortable step away from the humans doing the work.
This distance was disconcerting. As a manager, I had to deal with the discomfort of not actually doing the practical and obvious work, but at least I could glance at the engineer’s monitor and get a glimpse of work happening. As a manager of managers, I had to take the word of other managers regarding how the work was proceeding. This distance is the primary challenge for the manager of managers. How do you…
Gather and maintain context of complex projects at a distance?
Build high-trust relationships with your team and your peers to keep communication freely flowing?
Define the vision and strategy for an entire organization rather than a team?
Communicate that vision and strategy?
Adapt your organization to deliver that vision and strategy, or build an entirely new team to do so if necessary?
You know. The simple things.
Just as the role of manager is preparation for being a manager of managers, the role of director is preparation for being an executive. I spent over eight years in various manager-of-managers roles at Apple. At the time I felt I wasn’t progressing quickly enough, but as it turned out, it was just right.
In our second act, your perspective is that of a seasoned first-line manager who has recently moved into a senior management position. You’ve figured out the leadership role, but now it’s time to up your game. Politics, the good and the bad, is now part of your daily diet. Communication downward and upward has always been important, but now you must communicate sideways—and now it’s time to give away your Legos.