My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to take the great people we have and to push them and make them even better, coming up with more aggressive visions of how it could be. . . . My job is to make the whole executive team good enough to be successors, so that’s what I try to do.
—Steve Jobs1
Some people are lucky enough to find a mentor who plays a big role in shaping their personal management style and validating their beliefs. Steve found a mentor in Bob Noyce, who was one of the pioneers of today’s technology as co-inventor of the microchip and cofounder of a leading manufacturer of the chips, Intel. I worked with Bob at Intel and in hindsight believe he may have been the closest visionary to Steve, and Steve’s best example of what it means to be the leader of a development team.
Bob’s perspective was, “You can’t really understand what’s going on now unless you understand what came before.” I always felt that Steve’s leadership style was the kind of thing that you can’t learn in a classroom but that he came to intuitively. I would define it as an absolute commitment to the product, supported by an intuition for leading people.
Steve had a certain swagger about him and was often accused of being very brash about his views of the future. But in fact he was a very shy person and this brashness was his way of expressing his commitment to his vision for the future.
In accompanying Steve to CEO meetings in Silicon Valley and to Stanford, I discovered that his swagger, his sense of self-assurance, when talking about the future of technology was almost overwhelming. Students loved it, but a lot of CEOs were not that happy.
Steve and I were once at a CEO luncheon in Palo Alto that the leaders of Intel were also attending. At one point, Steve commented, “The big problem with Silicon Valley and developing new products is old thinkers.” As for his own outlook, “I never trust anyone over 40 years old.” (Though around Apple he used to say, “Never trust anyone over 40, except Jay”—which of course pleased me as a huge compliment, but it also was a challenge, a reminder of what I needed to live up to.) Andy Grove took great exception to Steve’s remark, particularly since everyone in the room, except Steve, was over 40! Steve may have been one of the wealthiest people in the room but that did not alter his opinion of the future. And he always brought an entrepreneur’s energy with him.
Sometimes it’s not what you say but how you say it. Steve’s swagger was never more apparent than at product launches, where he would hold the audience spellbound. But his swagger was about the product, not himself, and that’s where his product leadership was most apparent.
Steve Jobs is almost universally thought of as one of the most inspiring and charismatic business figures in history. Every person in a leadership role wants to be charismatic, and the first step in becoming a charismatic leader is to be enthusiastic about what you do. Real—not forced—enthusiasm is tangible and transfers naturally to others, who cannot help but become more enthusiastic themselves. This leads to a more synergistic team.
Steve’s enthusiasm came from his strong entrepreneurial will, combined with risk-taking and the ability to act quickly, with absolute conviction that you are doing the right thing. When you’re able to do this, people will be willing to follow your lead.
Steve had an uncanny ability to make decisions that were both instantaneous and solid—often to the utter frustration of his engineers. Sometimes his decisions seemed arbitrary, like not having more than a hundred people on the Mac team—based on his claim that he couldn’t remember everyone’s name if there were any more people than that.
He also had product boundaries. When we visited Sony and they showed us hundreds of products, Steve warned Sony cofounder Akio Morita that they had way too many, so many that customers had to be getting confused.
It was the threat of customer confusion that drove Steve to say no—No Newton, no licensing of Macintosh technology for other companies to make Mac clones, and so on. These were obvious examples of making sure our product boundaries fit our ultimate vision for the product family. Steve had the reputation of being a micromanager; he was, but it wasn’t arbitrary. It was for a very good reason: he was looking out for the customer.
I read a story once in Fast Company magazine about a group that came to Apple prepared with page after page in a presentation about a new feature for the Mac, for burning DVDs—copying music or videos from the computer to a DVD disk. Steve saw a few slides, with mocked-up screen shots and various menus along with engineering documentation.
About two minutes into the presentation, Steve said, “No, you don’t get it.” He went to the whiteboard, drew a small rectangle, and said something like, “Here’s how it needs to look. It’s got one window, you drag the icon of your video into the window, and you click the button that says Burn. That’s it.” He got up and left.
A no from Steve was usually final. For the most part, the only exception was when one of his team members or team leaders could come back with a compelling, convincing reason for him to change his mind. Sometimes that took guts, especially if you were at a lower working level—and you damned well had better be able to explain your reasoning briefly but in a compelling way. But Steve did listen, and did sometimes change his mind.
Steve deeply believed that to drive excellence in an organization, you need not just talent but small teams, like that cap of a hundred people for the Mac team: When there was an essential need for another person, a current team member had to be moved to some other part of Apple.
As for his story of setting that limit because he couldn’t remember the names of more than a hundred people on a team—nobody was fooled. Though the actual number was arbitrary, his real motivation was that he could not keep closely in touch with the work being done if there were too many people for him to supervise personally.
When the iPhone was being developed, the iPhone team was quartered in a separate building, both to keep the team cohesive and to protect their work. But at the same time, a leader needs to recognize that the small teams have to be able to interact on lots of issues with people from the rest of the organization.
Innovation has nothing to do with how many R and D dollars you have in your budget. When Steve’s team developed the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R and D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, and how you lead.
Steve never faced a greater leadership challenge than when he returned to Apple. He had to turn himself into a leader who could establish methods to manage a complex strategic change in direction. Holding on to the Mac computer when he returned to Apple was one of these decisions. His predecessors had tried to sell the software, sell through distributors, and encourage other companies to license the technology and manufacture clones of the Mac. The idea of allowing other companies to offer inferior, lower-quality versions of the Mac or to market ill-designed products based on the Mac operating system simply wasn’t in Steve’s concept of how the universe should work. It simply didn’t match his mantra of always giving customers the best products you could conceive and create. Imitations by companies that didn’t adhere to Steve’s high standards would contradict everything he stood for.
Steve’s strategy was not about market share or finances; it was finding the next great product for his customers.
I keep coming back to the subject of innovation because it underlies so much of learning to be Steve-like.
Creating an environment that supports and encourages innovation is one of your most important roles as a leader. A Pirate team or Pirate company like the original Macintosh group is a fertile setting for this, but leaders need to remember the symbolic power of their actions. Again, Steve was as proud of the many products and product ideas that he gave the axe to over the years as the ones that he pursued and made into great successes—knowing that it can be tougher to say no and kill a promising idea than to say yes, and find yourself trying to do so many things at once that none of them are done to the highest standard of quality that Steve always insisted on.
One of my favorite stories of Steve encouraging innovation—or, rather, I should say demanding innovation—vividly illustrates his level of involvement in details of a product that most anyone else would have taken for granted. When he was shown an early model of the iPod, he said it was too large. His developers explained that they had used the absolute minimum size of case that would hold all the necessary components.
Steve carried the device to a fish tank and dropped the iPod into the tank. As it sank, a stream of air bubbles gurgled to the surface. Steve gestured to the bubbles and pointed out that if things were really packed tightly inside, there would not be any space left for the air that was streaming up. The team went back and made the iPod smaller.
Some other examples:
The night before the opening of the first Apple store, Steve didn’t like the look of the floor tiling. He had the tiles ripped up and the job redone.
Right before the iPod launched, he had all the headphone jacks replaced so that they were more clicky—the click sound assuring the user that the connection had been made.
These kinds of involvement in details by the leader send unmistakable signals about the expectation of innovation.
Inspiration comes from example, not just from words. One of America’s greatest football coaches, the revered Vince Lombardi, once said, “Leadership is based on a spiritual quality—the power to inspire, the power to inspire others to follow.”
Notes
1. Steve Jobs, “Steve Jobs Speaks Out,” an interview with Senior Editor Betsy Morris, Fortune, August 3, 2008.