I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done.
—Steve Jobs1
Steve was always looking for ways to nurture creativity. He had been inspired by the HP Way culture at Hewlett-Packard, and it had become a guiding light for him. His connection to HP went back a long way. As a teenager, Steve had written a letter to the cofounder of Hewlett-Packard, Bill Hewlett, requesting parts to build some sort of counter. Hewlett provided Steve with the parts, gave him advice on building the device, and offered him a summer job.
One day I suggested to Steve that we adopt a program that I was very familiar with from IBM: bringing in outside speakers—professors and business leaders—to help us develop a course that would highlight the way we wanted the leadership at Apple to lead, sort of the Apple Way. As a sidelight of developing this idea came the concept for Apple University, which would be a “university without walls.” We would invite some of the greatest thinkers and leaders to help in supporting the concept of the Apple Way. Though Apple already had a new employee orientation program, we had no leadership training.
Steve and I imagined a university that would promote novel management ideas, have a staff of people who were unique for the new type of corporation, and would be able to offer advice and counsel to its participants. Some of what we lined up was unique in corporate history. First, we had some very prominent professors, including Rosebeth Moss Kanter, who held (and still holds) the Arbuckle Professorship at Harvard Business School, where she specializes in strategy, innovation, and leadership for change. Her book Change Masters had caught my eye and made me believe she could help and could fit into the Apple culture. Her book was about how innovation had to become the key in American industry. In those days it was projected that the typical American family would soon have a Toyota in the garage and several Sony products in their home. I knew her take on this would really resonate with Steve.
We also had to find a new style of training that would fit our needs to be open. I saw a segment of the popular television investigative program 60 Minutes where a woman, approached on the street, was taught how to play tennis in 15 minutes by the author of The Inner Game of Tennis, Tim Gallwey. This book was about not getting caught up in how you thought you were supposed to hit the ball. Tim had found ways to focus the mind of the player on direct and nonjudgmental observation of the ball, the body, and the racquet in a way that would speed learning, heighten performance, and enhance the enjoyment of the process.
When Tim came to Apple, he taught me to play a game called bounce hit, and I was playing great tennis in about one hour.
Another one of our many Apple U professors was Jim Whittaker, the first American to climb Mount Everest. Even though he and his Sherpa, Nawang Gombu, ran out of oxygen, they managed to reach the summit. Once there, Jim became the first American to plant the U.S. flag. In 1965 he guided Robert Kennedy up the newly named Mount Kennedy in Washington. He was a freethinker, a risk-taker, and someone who could inspire even Steve Jobs.
We always completed the Apple U programs with an Outward Bound adventure that involved making your way through a course of ropes, trees, and hazards, teaching participants not only survival skills but also interpersonal teamwork and leadership skills.
Another part of Apple U was our leadership speaking program where we would bring in CEOs from other corporations to speak to the upper management of Apple. Part of my motivation in developing this program was to have Steve meet other industry leaders/CEOs one-on-one, to get some ideas about leadership from them. The two of us would meet with the CEOs for dinner the night before their presentation to the management team.
At almost all these dinners, Steve dominated the conversation, so not much leadership knowledge came out of it for him, though he did hear many valuable ideas. We had corporate leaders such as Fred Smith from Federal Express, Lee Iacocca from Chrysler, Bob Crandell from American Airlines, and Jim Henson, creator of the immensely popular Muppets television show. It was a very good program for the executives of Apple, even if it didn’t do much for Steve’s leadership style.
Another part of Apple U was the individual coaching we did for the executives. The most valuable and beloved of these coaches was the late Dr. Arynne Simon. Arynne had a unique style that I have never seen matched before or since. She believed that inside each of us was a basic goodness and decency, and that was where her coaching started. She aimed through her coaching and developing leadership skills to integrate humanity and productivity.
I was the gatekeeper for Apple U, and I was skeptical about this type of coaching, but Arynne’s impact on me and many Apple executives was permanent.
In a conversation with Steve not long before he first became ill, he said, “Jay, one of the many things I remember about your accomplishments at Apple was Apple U.”
“It was fantastic,” he said.
I felt the kind of warmth we all do when we’re rewarded with special praise, but it made me realize how rare praise was from Steve. My memory skipped back to the one other time he had lavished me with a precious compliment. In the 1984 Apple annual report, a one-of-a-kind masterpiece that set the standard for excellence in corporate annual reports, he highlighted what he considered the top creative corporate organizations in Apple. One of those was the group I headed, human resources, which he acknowledged for the Apple University program. It was the only time I was ever aware of that Steve bestowed compliments for creativity on administrative groups.
Another of Steve’s leadership ideas for nurturing creativity grew out of his recognition that new hires need to become quickly integrated into the Pirate way of thinking. Over a couple of months, he and I kicked around a number of ideas for doing this. Following the guidelines we worked out, I set up several tools, beginning with the newbie’s arrival on campus.
The new employees’ orientation program was designed to start implanting the Apple culture from the very first. Apple employees went through the new employee orientation program their first day on the job, with discussions about some of the programs, Apple history, and an inside look at how Apple operates.
The newcomers received the usual sort of information packet, an Apple T-shirt (to some readers that might sound a little tacky, but, as I’ve said, they were very popular), and an Apple sticker.
(I always laughed about those stickers. As a prank, when we took an airline flight, on deplaning we’d leave one on the back of an airplane seat. And as a taunt to IBM, once when I was in Paris on business, my walk from the hotel in the morning would take me past the IBM office building; I’d paste one of the Apple stickers on their door, then check on the following morning to see if it was still there. One time, the sticker remained on the door for four days—leaving me to wonder if the French IBMers were really that unobservant or just didn’t care.)
The second part of the orientation was to understand the products and master them. In the early days of Apple, the new employees were given an Apple II to take home for their own use. The only catch was that a month later there would be a test on using the product. If you failed, you would be terminated. The pass rate was 99.9 percent.
In Apple today new employees are given a computer and expected to be able to connect it to the network—even though no IT manager likes the idea of non-IT people hooking up to the company’s network. But if you are hiring the best, then they should be able to pass any test you give them about your products.
It was also important for new employees to be connected to people who really understood the Apple culture, so we would assign each new hire to someone in the organization—someone the person did not know—who would become the newbie’s “buddy.” The buddy’s job was to give answers and provide support or reassurance as needed, whenever the new hire had questions or concerns about Apple or his own job. The buddy was also available for more mundane things like helping the newbie learn her way around the building and the campus.
The buddy can be very valuable in helping the newcomer get through this awkward period. We would try to have buddies who were in another organization; a new programmer, for instance, might be assigned a buddy from the marketing organization. (After Steve’s return, he changed the name to iBuddy, for a reason that every Apple follower will understand.) I marvel that a program Steve and I started over 30 years ago is still relevant today. Although in today’s Apple secrecy is so paramount that some new hires are assigned to a cubicle in a different work area until their manager has enough confidence in their sense of security that they can be allowed to begin knowing about the work of the team they’re joining.
In the middle of 1970, the management of IBM asked me to take charge of designing a facility where all of IBM’s development programming talent and resources would be pulled together. It would have to be a place that could accommodate about 2,000 people. I was to assemble a task force to work with me in dreaming up and bringing to life a facility that would stimulate innovation, creativity, and social interaction.
I put together a group of IBM programming managers and programmers from coast to coast, and we worked together to conceive the best environment for programmers to work in, based on their own experience plus input from the employees in their own workgroups. Each of the 10 people in my group would have a single vote: there would be no pulling rank by the more senior people. Once my team had arrived at the design parameters, those would become the list of requirements that would be turned over to the architects.
Some of the key points the team arrived at form the basis for a list you might consider in planning a space for a team of innovators:
The programmers strongly expressed the need for spaces where team members could work together in discussions and brainstorming. These common areas would have amenities to stimulate thought and even a setup to allow for presentations by one or two members to the whole team.
In addition to the common area, each member would have his own individual workspace, where he could concentrate free of distractions.
Though it may at first seem a contradiction to the privacy requirement, the consensus was that each programmer’s office or private area should have a window, giving a view of the outside world. And that view was not to be an adjacent building or a parking lot, but some serene part of nature. So the immediate surroundings of the building would have to be handsomely landscaped, and the pressure would be on to find a setting that looked out on mountains or distant hills. The natural environment, I learned, was very important to programmers. (In the setting finally chosen, some of the windows looked out on a nesting area for bald eagles. It doesn’t get much better than that.)
Programmers also wanted opportunities to rub shoulders with programmers of other teams. We called for the cafeteria to be designed in a way that encouraged people to sit at random, free to join people they didn’t work with.
After months of research, opinion gathering, and deliberating, our final set of criteria for the lab called for a circular building with seven interconnected towers. Some 75 percent of the offices would have windows that looked out on nature, with all of the offices designed to be approximately the same size. At the ground level, the towers would surround an open space similar to the quad of Harvard and a few other major universities. Since the lab would be located in a rural area, we called for convenience services including a dry cleaners and a company store that would offer all kinds of personal items.
In late 1970, I presented the findings of my task force to the chairman and board of directors of IBM. The facility was approved, to be built in Northern California. Originally known as the Santa Teresa Labs, it was IBM’s first-ever development center built for software development and the first major IBM facility to be located outside of the headquarters area in upstate New York.
Opened in 1978, it was the most beautiful place I’ve ever worked. Following the guidelines my team had developed, 90 percent of the campus, including the hills in the background, was set aside as open space. But this tribute to nature wasn’t just left open for the IBM researchers to appreciate the natural beauty. A large part of the flat area was turned into a working orchard leased out to a farmer, and the hilly area was leased to a rancher who raised cattle on the land. We had set out to nurture creativity—admittedly a difficult challenge—but judging by the reactions I received from the developers who eventually worked there and from the outpouring of results from their work, we achieved the goal.
After my success with developing the criteria for the research center, I was invited to become part of an executive school for about 10 IBMers considered to have the potential to become high-level executives of the company. (One of my fellow students became the president of IBM, and four others became IBM division presidents. I was the only one of the group to leave the company, looking for a new opportunity at Apple.)
The very elite session was held at one of their executive centers in upstate New York, which we knew as the Guggenheim estate but these days is sometimes referred to as “a former IBM country club.”
One function I attended at the estate had major speakers from MIT, Harvard, and Columbia University, plus a lot of outside speakers—people such as Joseph Campbell, who specialized in the use of myths in literature and life, and Barry Commoner, an American biologist, college professor, and eco-socialist, as well as a one-time presidential candidate—a man whom many consider to be the father of today’s environmental movement. Another was the author/corporate consultant Peter Drucker, with whom I had had the clash described earlier. Conversations about society’s direction and vision were stimulating, and it was a very exciting opportunity to offer ideas and hear them discussed, along with gaining insights into the IBM business and how the company should approach the future.
As the final session of the gathering, the chairman and CEO of IBM, Frank Carey, came in and sat down with us for an open discussion of issues. I brought up my frustration over IBM not moving more toward the consumer market, which every sign showed was going to be a huge opportunity. That’s when he gave me the analogy that IBM was like a supertanker, taking a long time to make a change of course. His remark was what made me realize I did not want to be on the crew of a supertanker. It was just sheer dumb luck that I would eventually discover the satisfaction of sailing on a Pirate ship commanded by the greatest corporate Pirate of all time.
One aspect of creating an innovative team is almost always overlooked: providing a suitable space—a unique, distinctive workplace that sets the team apart and reduces the opportunities for interference from The Navy of the larger organization. An appropriate workspace can be critical to creating the innovative culture you are seeking. This is one aspect in which creating a start-up or entrepreneurial organization has an advantage over creating an innovative team within an existing company and its traditional culture: you get to begin fresh, without worrying about interference.
By the time I reached Apple, I had already lived through the challenge of what it’s like to create an appropriate working environment for a Pirate team surrounded by The Navy. One of the things that intrigued Steve when we first met was my story of developing the center for innovation at IBM—the whole concept of space designed to support innovation and creativity for developers.
In addition to providing a separate building for the Macintosh team, Steve came to understand the truth that the design and quality of the team’s workspace could have a lot to do with their productivity and success. He carried out the concepts well beyond what we had done as a team, going to extraordinary—in some ways almost laughable—lengths to provide a unique work environment where people would be focused on the product without distraction and would be distinctly separated from the rest of the company. He intuitively understood the key idea: space that promotes innovation is key to the innovative process.
The Mac building became the beginning of Steve’s interest in making sure that the facilities would play a role in sparking innovation and in keeping it alive. In the design of the working space, Steve’s focus was on making sure every aspect would contribute to enhancing creativity and fostering teamwork. He took into account a lot of the information I provided about what we had done at IBM. In fact, I arranged through an old IBM friend to sneak Steve and me into the Santa Teresa Lab so he could see for himself the features I had been describing.
One curiosity of that visit: Steve had not yet become famous and one of the most widely recognized faces in America. As we moved around the IBM facility, no one recognized Steve, but quite a few people remembered me from my IBM days. Steve was amused that for this one short span of time, I seemed to be more famous than he, the cofounder of a thriving start-up.
For the Apple Mac building, if you could have looked at it from overhead, you would have seen that the interior was designed as for an orchestra, with the leader (Steve) in the front of the building and work areas for the various teams fanned out like sections of the orchestra—the engineering group, then software, graphic design, and the admin group including finance and HR.
A common area offered electronic games and Ping-Pong, a piano, and plenty of snacks. And these weren’t just for scheduled break times: they were there to be used whenever any employee felt the impulse or desire.
Among the decorations in this area were some products Steve loved for their design, including a motorcycle of his, a historic BMW bike. The bike and other items were there to remind the Mac team about the importance of great design.
Free food and health drinks were always available. The drinks were from a company called Odwalla, a young California outfit; Steve, who was addicted to eating natural foods—a practice he followed all his adult life—had discovered Odwalla, became a great fan himself, and decided to stock the drink shelves in the Mac building with nothing but. His passion for Odwalla became an item for journalists, which resulted in the company becoming famous.
Of course, there wasn’t any need for “dress-down Fridays”—a practice that became popular at many companies, when formal business attire wasn’t required on Fridays and it was okay to show up in jeans and casual clothes. Steve was already dressing in what became his standard: a black turtleneck or mock turtleneck, jeans or shorts, and sandals. Almost all Apple employees except for the executives took that as permission to come to work in just about any type of clothing they wanted.
Still, Steve loved to throw TGIF parties—“Thank God It’s Friday”—that often included his favorite soul/rhythm-and-blues band.
While few companies are in a position to be so lavish in their workspace arrangements, the facilities for teams you hope will be innovative and creative should be as nurturing as you can afford to make them—the kind of place that has your people looking forward to coming to work each day.
Later, after the Macintosh was released, Steve was able to push the Apple board into a commitment to create a new Apple company headquarters and campus. (Ironically, the property that the company chose to build on was right across the street from the IBM Santa Teresa Labs software development center that I had been responsible for.)
It took a few years, of course, but once the new headquarters buildings at the made-up address of One Infinite Loop in Cupertino were finished and occupied, a few pieces of the old Pirate philosophy spread throughout the whole of Apple Computer. Conference rooms were identified by names sure to bring a smile because they were so anti-corporate and unconventional; names like Da Vinci, Inspiration, and Mission Impossible (after a popular television adventure show of the time). They also included brands of apples: Pippin, Sundance, Fuji, Granny Smith, and so on. Free popcorn was available from popcorn carts scattered throughout the buildings on every floor. Meetings held midday might have catered lunches brought in at company expense, and there were often several of these every day.
The business of the company got done, but it got done in a lighthearted, fun atmosphere that helped keep spirits high.
Other U.S. companies in more recent times have created their own versions of a novel setting to make the work environment a pleasing place to be. At the main offices of Google, known as the Googleplex, there is a playground-like atmosphere, with Astroturf on the floors, and bringing your bike or even your dog to work is okay. Employees don’t have to go to a gym; they can just head for one of the workout rooms right on campus, or for one of the swimming pools, or one of several volleyball courts where the games are played on soft beach sand instead of hardwood floors.
In some ways the place has more the feeling of an extraordinarily well-equipped college dorm, or an amusement park, thanks to all of the decorative objects in bright, neon colors. Much of the work is collaborative, often with three people sharing a cubicle. Others work in yurts—large round tents with vertical walls and conical roofs, a design imported from Central Asia and Mongolia.
The company’s New York offices, called Google East, are located in a vast, block-long former warehouse building across the street from the famous Chelsea Market. Want to save some time getting to your next meeting? Employees are welcome to use bicycles or skateboards in the hallways. The very large cafeteria offers a wide variety of food, and it’s open 24 hours a day. At the far end is an actual ice cream truck that used to roam the streets of New York; choose your flavor, and don’t forget to ask for one of their chocolate chip cookies—fresh baked and delicious.
In June 2011, the city council of Cupertino, California—where Apple has always had its main offices—was scheduled to hold a hearing on the company’s request to build a large new corporate campus. Steve was by then quite ill. But still putting a very high premium on the workspace of his innovators, he made the effort to personally present the case for approval of Apple’s plans for a massive, futuristic-looking building.
He was helped in from a back door dressed in his trademark black turtleneck and jeans. The bright lights of the room exaggerated how ill he looked, which for people who had known him when he was healthy and vital was especially painful to see. But he had felt the need to be there in person because he had come to believe way back in the Macintosh days how important the workspace is when you want to create an innovative culture.
He came knowing that Apple was the biggest taxpayer in the city, and so wielded a lot of clout, but also knowing that the council would only approve the construction if they were convinced that it was the right thing to do for the community. He knew that without their approval, Apple could not proceed. So Steve began with something of a sales pitch.
Explaining that Apple’s existing headquarters held only 2,800 people but that the company had a total of over 12,000 scattered around Silicon Valley, he said, “We’re just out of space [but] we’ve got a plan that lets us stay in Cupertino. As Hewlett-Packard has been shrinking lately they decided to sell [some] property and we bought it. We bought that and we bought some adjacent property that used to [be] apricot orchards, and we’ve got about 150 acres.”
Then he launched into a typical Steve Jobs sales pitch:
We’ve hired some great architects to work with, some of the best in the world I think, and we’ve come up with a design that puts 12,000 in one building. Think about that. That’s rather odd. 12,000 people in one building. We’ve seen these office parks with lots of buildings. They get pretty boring, pretty fast. So we’d like to do something better than that. It’s a pretty amazing building.
His next bit of description was picked up by most of the reporters who covered the appearance:
It’s a little like a spaceship landed. . . . It’s a circle. It’s curved all the way around.
In case anyone on the council had missed the point, he made it clear:
If you build things, this is not the cheapest way to build something. There is not a straight piece of glass in this building. It’s all curved.
In fact, Steve pointed out, for the Apple retail stores around the world, Apple’s contractors had developed extraordinary expertise in meeting the company’s demands for glass walls:
We’ve used our experience making retail buildings all over the world now, and we know how to make the biggest pieces of glass in the world for architectural use. We can make it curve all the way around the building. . . . It’s pretty cool.
The former HP campus, Steve told the council, was mostly office space, with only 20 percent of the property landscaped. The new campus, he said, would be 80 percent landscaping, with most of the parking underground.
The focus on being able to work in a beautiful environment, isolated from the city, obviously has Steve’s signature all over it. As I heard him explain the design, I couldn’t help but remember his preferred way of having one-on-one meetings: during long outdoor walks.
At the end of the presentation, Steve left immediately, with the same assistant helping him and with a guard to ensure his privacy. I felt a sense of joy for him finally having the design for the new campus he had been dreaming of for years, but I also felt great sadness over his condition.
His remarks at the city council session would be the last public appearance he would ever make. He had obviously put out a great personal effort to be there and had made the effort for a cause that meant so much to him and to the continued success of the extraordinary company he had created: a company of innovators, Pirates who in a few years would be sailing in a workspace that would continue to encourage great work.
He knew that this space-age building would be essential for keeping alive Apple’s spirit of innovation that he had worked so hard to create. It was like a treasure he was bequeathing to his shipmates.
Steve was to die only four months later.
Notes
1. Steve Jobs, “Steve Jobs Speaks Out,” an interview with Senior Editor Betsy Morris, Fortune, August 3, 2008.