when Vince Lombardi joined the Green Bay Packers in 1959 the team had gone 11 straight Seasons without a winning record upon arriving at training camp as their new head coach Lombardi made an immediate and indelible first impression after leading the players to a meeting room Lombardi waited in front of a Blackboard as the player sat down he
picked up a piece of chalk and began to speak gentlemen he said we have a great deal of ground to cover we're going to do things a lot differently than they've been done here before we're going to to relentlessly Chase Perfection knowing full well we will not catch it because Perfection is not attainable but we are
going to relentlessly Chase it because in the process we will catch Excellence he paused and stared his eyes moving from player to player the room was silent I'm not remotely interested in being just good he said with an intensity that startled them all Lombardi soon followed up with a clear-cut description of the specific thing they would perfect
one play one single running play gentlemen this is the most important play we have it's the play we must make go it's the play that we will make go it's the play that we will run again and again and again this is the power of focusing on and perfecting one thing you wouldn't think there was so much to say about a single running play but John
Madden described attending a coaching Clinic where Lombard talked about the power sweep and only the power sweep for 8 hours through practice after practice drill after drill game after game and season after season the Packers honed and refined Lombard's power sweep even though opposing teams knew the play was
coming they couldn't stop it Lombardi built his victories on an openly declared challenge to beat the Packers you must beat the power sweep over the the following seven years the Packers won five championships a stepbystep year-by-year progression through the ranks from worst to best to Legends all built on the foundations of one humble
running play initially described on the Blackboard and then executed exquisitly on the field over and over again in any of the sentence is so important in any complex effort communicating a well articulated vision for what you're trying to do is the starting point for figuring out how to do it it may seem like a stretch to draw a comparison
between winning football games in Green Bay and developing web browser software in copertino but a significant part of attaining excellence in any field is closing the gap between The Accidental and intentional to achieve not just a something or even an everything but a specific and well-chosen thing to take words and turn them into a vision and
then use the vision to Spur the actions that create the results Vince Lombardi was the Steve Jobs of football coaches that is an excerpt from a book that I've read three or four times now and the one I'm going to talk to you about today which is creative selection inside Apple's design process during the Golden Age of Steve Jobs and it was
written by Ken Kenda okay so before I jump back into the book I want to tell why I'm reading this book for the third or fourth time so even though this is episode 281 there's actually more than 281 episodes of Founders there's at least eight unnumbered bonus episodes and one of those unnumbered bonus episodes is an episode that I've
previously done on the book that I'm holding on my hand and so not numbering the bonus episodes was a giant mistake because I can't reference them as you hear over and over again how I'm constantly referencing uh past episodes of Founders because I don't think about this as separate episodes I just think about this as just one giant 400h hour
long conversation on the history of Entre rip that you and I are having and so I want to jump into the introduction where Ken tells us what this book is about this book is about my 15 years at Apple my efforts to make great software while I was there and the stories and observations I want to relate about those times if you want to know what it
was like to give a demo to Steve Jobs or what made Apple's products culture special read on every day at Apple was like going to school a design focused Hightech product creation University and he talks about how intense the work environment was and that Steve had unbelievably high standards and everything which we're going to go into
a lot today most of my highlights I'm going to really focus the highlights on just the parts of the book that are about Steve Jobs there's a lot of great detail in here for anybody building a product but most of it is going to be about Steve Jobs today with that intensity came an insistence on doing things right and without explicitly
trying to do so we developed an approach to work that proved particularly effective and so the intensity of Steve Jobs jumps off the pages of this book when I got to this section it made me think of one of my favorite quotes by Warren Buffett and he shares that same intensity he says intensity is the price of excellence and so a main theme of the
book is that Steve did not want to sit around and have a bunch of meetings and talk about hypotheticals he wanted to physically see the work so they pushed all their work forward through a series of demos and in many cases him telling you specifically hey what I want to see next so he says uh there weren't any
company handbooks describing these elements so he was just naming I skipped over a bunch but he's just naming like you know some traits that uh Apple used to develop their product but this is the main point there weren't any company handbooks describing these elements nobody outlined this list in a new employee orientation our approach
flowed from the work this happened from the top down stemming from the unquestioned authority and uncompromising vision of Steve Jobs we never waited around for brilliant flashes of insight that might solve problems in one swoop and we had very few actual Eureka moments Instead This is the main point of the book instead we move forward in step wise fashion from
problem to design to demo to shipping product taking each promising concept and trying to come up with new ways to make it better this next section I've thought about for years so according uh to Amazon I first ordered this book on January 7th 2019 I probably read it shortly after I received it there's a lot of reasons I
admire Steve Jobs why I consider him the greatest entrepreneur of all time when it comes to building products and building a valuable company he's brilliant this if I had to say this the single trait I admire the most about him and the one that I don't even understand how it's capable that uh he was able to do it is his Clarity of thought Steve is
the clearest thinker out of any single other person that I've covered so far in the podcast and when I think of Steve's Clarity of thought I think about this quick story from Ken's book Steve was at the center of all circles he made all the important product decisions he used these demo reviews as his chief means of
deciding how Apple software should look and feel and function from my standpoint as an individual programmer demoing to Steve was like visiting the Oracle of Deli the demo was my question Steve's response was the answer while the pronouncements from the Greek oracle often came in the form of confusing riddles that wasn't true with Steve he
was always easy to understand he would either approve a demo or he would request to see something different next time although Steve's opinions and moods could be hard to anticipate he was this is such I love this he was utterly predictable when it came to his passion for products he wanted Apple's products to be great and he insisted on being
involved in the process as it went along whenever Steve reviewed a demo he would say often with highly detailed specificity what he wanted to happen next he was always trying to ensure the products were as intuitive and straightforward as possible and he was willing to invest his own time effort and influence to see that they were
through looking at demos asking for specific changes then reviewing the changed work again later on and giving a final approval before we could ship Steve could make a product turn out like he wanted much like the Greek oracle Steve foretold the future and so Ken is going to describe what it was like to demo to Steve Jobs this there's a bunch
of highlights over several pages this part of the book is absolutely fantastic and I love how he's going to end this section because Steve only speaks four sentences goes back to CLA being really easy to understand and there's no like there's no ambiguity in what Steve wants to happen next and in this case Ken um
previously he' worked on he helped create the Safari browser this is like you know maybe 10 years before where we are in the book uh worked on the the original keyboard for the iPhone in this case he is demoing this is right very soon before about a year year and a half before Steve dies unfortunately he's demoing the keyboard on the iPad which
has not been released yet where we are in the story and I should tell you so I was going back through the index of the book after I was done um last night with all my my uh highlights and I just went through the index to make sure I hit all the Steve Jobs parts and I thought this was fantastic because this part is this
is in the chapter called the demo right the part is not described the demo in the index this part is described uh in the index as the decisiveness of Steve Jobs which is the perfect description of it cuz we're going to go into right now right he goes his eyes met mine his look wasn't obviously unfriendly or threatening but surely he knew his
unblinking gaze could intimidate people in my position and it certainly had that effect on me this idea that when Steve would stare at you he wouldn't blink uh I've heard like dozens of stories about this in you know the 10 or so books I've read on him I saw his look as a signal that he wasn't going to let me pull the
wool over his eyes he was now ready ready to see my demo Scott stood up and crossed behind Steve's chair okay let's look at the demo Steve this is Ken he worked on the iPhone keyboard he has some tablet keyboard designs to show you Steve was still looking at me continuing the demo introduction from where Scott left off I said right there are two
designs one has more keys like a laptop keyboard and the other has bigger Keys like a scaled up iPhone we're thinking of offering both try the zoom key to switch between them Steve then slowly swiveled his chair around to the demo table he looked down in front of him the iPad was in landscape Steve moved his eyes all over the iPad screen rotating
his head slowly in small figure eights in what I took to be an attempt to get a view of every corner of the display after several long moments of study he reached out to tap the zoom key to switch the keyboard to my bigger Keys design no reaction no hint of what he was thinking Steve was like an expert high stakes poker player checking his
whole cards for the first time after receiving them from the dealer now that the screen looked different Steve started his study all over again he took his time taking a solid 30 seconds to absorb every detail on the screen he turned to look straight at me we only need one of these right not what I was expecting Steve was still looking at me
and so with a half shrug I said yeah uh I guess so Steve sized me up a little and then asked which one do you think we should use a simple question clearly directed at me and only me Steve didn't shift in his chair or motion toward anyone else in the room it was my demo and he wanted me to answer well I've
been using these demos for the past few days and I've started to like the keyboard layout with the bigger keys I think I could learn to touch type on it and I think other people could too Ste there's a picture there dra all these gold drawings in the book and one of this is just Steve staring directly at you on the previous page and this is
what I think of uh This what I think of when when um when Ken's about to describe what happens next Steve continued looking at me as he thought about my answer he never moved his eyes to anyone or anyone else he was completely PR it there he was seriously considering my idea about the next Big Apple product it was thrilling he
thought for a few seconds then he announced the demo verdict okay we'll go with the bigger keys that was it the Oracle of Apple had spoken the demo was over before I read a few more sentences go back to what the index describes this part I'm going to go back to a few pages where I I jotted it down the decisiveness of Steve Jobs remember this
when Ken Compares and contrasts the way Apple builds products you relying on the taste and Judgment of the founder with how Google makes their products so then once he says the demo is over Scott walked a couple steps towards the door giving me the cue that it was time for me to go and Ken talks about hey when you're doing demos to Steve this is the
price to be in the room if he feels you have no valuable insight you're never going to see him again Ken was able to demo several times he says you have to make substantive uh contributions to the discussion to discussion with him uh as a way that's the way to earn future invitations that is the price to be in the room can you make substantive
contributions to the discussions on the products and help push them forward help make them better that's all Steve cared about I'm going to go to the punchline which happens a few pages later he's describing Ken is describing again a main theme of the book why these demos uh are so important Apple must make great this is know enough of myself
years ago Apple must make great software to get there they use a series of iterations in the form of demos now Ken says demo served as the primary means to turn ideas into software this statement includes the assumption that Apple made made making great software an important goal to begin with we did and that came
straight from Steve he set the company's priorities and he stressed in public statements and internal Communications that making great software was a core corporate Focus what's more Steve wasn't merely interested in paying lip service to this goal he demanded action and so the software team produced Demos in a steady stream and whenever there was
interesting new work Steve found the time to attend a demo review so he could see it he's showing through his actions right actions Express priority right one of the best maxims that I've ever come across actions Express priorities he's showing through his actions what's important his time is extremely valuable he's like hey I'm in this room I'm
reviewing on a very micro level what all parts of this product are going to look feel and operate like right Steve found the time too uh to attend a demo review so he could see it his involvement kept the progress and momentum going all of this everything I'm reading to is happening over many many pages after the demo
because we're we're learning like what Ken learn from this demo with Steve right and he go he's going into detail two things he's going to pull out that was important to Steve you have to put yourself in your customer shoes and you have to hack away the unessential Steve looked carefully at the software and asked me succinct questions to see if
the work could be made simpler this push for Simplicity had a purpose even though he was a high-tech CEO Steve could put himself in the shoes of customers people who cared nothing for the ins and outs of the software industry he never wanted Apple software to overload people especially when they might already be stretched by the bustle of their
everyday lives this is something Steve talked about over and over again from the time he was a young man in the 1980s till right before he died consider a mom who's they just people just do not care about your product as much as you do you have to make it simple and easy to use right from the get-go and so this idea
of putting yourself in the customer shoes and even attaching like a specific specific example of a customer helps you make better product decisions this is an example of that consider a mom who's busy with her daily routine on a day she was worried about her 16-year-old son who was homesick from high school and
was taking care of himself she was running a few minutes late getting to the office because there was bad traffic on the road she had her report do later in the afternoon and she was trying to fit in one more em email reply as she headed down the hallway towards the next meeting Steve believed she would do better with a product that wasn't loaded
down with every thingamabob the product designers could dream of this is hacking away the unessential this is some Bruce Lee right here he believed that stripping away non-essential features made products easier for people to learn from the start and easier to use over time he wanted products and their software to speak for themselves he
realized that nobody would be standing over the shoulder of a person who is having their first experience with software carefully describing every Nuance of every feature now that is a huge uh really important so what they're talking about there is like hey let's say you're you're the one coming up with the demo you're the programmer Steve's
not going to let you sit there and describe your thinking behind it because you're are you going and he uses this example um one time he called I read this book called insanely simple I I I made a podcast about it uh in the past and it was a guy that did uh that worked in for the ad on the ads for apple and he and he Steve did this exact same
thing with him too in meetings he would try to say okay this is the thing behind this ad campaign Steve's like shut up just show me the ads and he says something like are you going to be there when I see this in a magazine or on a billboard no then shut up I don't want to hear it I'm going to experience it like the customer is going to experience
so same thing here he's like he realized that nobody would be standing over the shoulder of a person who's having their first experience with software carefully describing every Nuance of every feature and so his point is wouldn't it be better if software was clear and intuitive right off the bat and this ends the section this is what I
absolutely love I chuckle to myself over how much time I've spent thinking about this iPad demo and how much Steve taught me in one meeting where he spoke just four sentences so now he goes back in time one of the first things he worked on was creating the Safari browser at this time in Apple history I think this is the maybe late
1990s maybe early 2000s they were still if you bought an Apple device it would have Microsoft Internet Explorer on it as part of the deal that uh that g uh Steve worked out with Bill Gates when he got that invent investment from Microsoft I think it was 1997 if I'm not mistaken and in this case they're like okay we're going to make our own browser
and as with classic uh like very classic Steve Jobs he's not going to give you a series of priorities he's going to give you one priority the name of this chapter is one simple rule and says Steve Jobs himself had decided how he would judge our browser as a product the focus would be on one thing speed Steve wanted our browser to be fast to be
really fast much faster than Microsoft Internet Explorer which is the product that we aim to replace and this is why Steve reason that a speedy new Apple browser would be the best way for a customer to feel good about our replacement our replacement browser right away Steve thought speed was the long-term key to better browsing so
making a high performance browser became our top priority our definition for greatness and so as a result of Ken's work on the Safari browser he got a chance to see how Steve prepared for these product announcements these product presentations just want to read one paragraph uh this is not going to surprise you or I because me and you
have been talking about this the importance of practice over and over and over over again and it shouldn't surprise you or I that Steve practiced a lot I would learn more about how Steve prepared for these big splash product announcements three three weeks or a month before the keynote itself Steve would start rehearsing with portions of
his slide deck slowly day by day he would build the show by stepping through it as he wanted to present it at the keynote this was one of Steve's great secrets of success as a presenter he practiced a lot he went over and over and over in the material until he had the presentation honed and he knew it cold and then throughout the book Ken
also adds these stories of some some ideas that Steve would talk about uh both publicly and internally that he thought were very valuable this is one of them the fact that Steve Jobs did not believe on resting on your loyal Laurels that once you do something great then you can the next uh the next step is try
to do something else that's great at Apple there was never much time to save her success Steve Jobs explained this aspect of the company ethos in an interview with Brian Williams Williams asked Steve where he thought he fit in the American family of thinkers and inventors at first Steve attempted to brush off the question but when Williams
pressed him Steve said I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good then you should go do something else wonderful and not dwell on it for too long just figure out what's next and then Ken says I found Steve's approach could work as well after a failure as he as it could after a success and so then
Ken goes into great detail how difficult it was to build the keyboard on the iPhone so the iPhone internally was uh code name purple and I just want to pull out because I want to pull out a few paragraphs here because I think this is the main uh the main idea really the main idea behind the entire book which is demos just help you push the
evolution of your product forward because the one essential demo expectation was progress so he says exactly how we collaborated mattered it reduced to a basic idea we showed demos to each other every major feature on the iPhone started as a demo and for a demo to be useful to us it had to be concrete and specific we needed concrete and
specific demos to guide our work since even an unsophisticated idea is hard to discuss constructively without an artifact to illustrate it at Apple we built our work on this basic fact demos made us react and the reactions were essential direct feedback on one demo provided the impetus to transform it into the next demo OS were the Catalyst
for Creative decisions and we found that the sooner we started making creative decisions the more time that's such an important point the sooner we started making creative decisions the more time there was to refine and improve those decisions to backtrack if needed to forge ahead if possible concrete and specific demos were the handholds and
footholds that helped boost us from the bottom of the conceptual Valley so we could scale the heights of worthwhile work making a succession of demos was the core of the process of taking an idea from the intangible to the tangible making demos is hard it involves overcoming apprehensions about committing time and effort to an idea
that you are not sure is right at Apple we had to expose that idea excuse me at Apple we then had to expose that idea in demo to the scrutiny of sharp eyed colleagues who were never afraid to level pointed criticism the psychological hurdle only grows taller with the knowledge that most demos almost all of them fail in the absolute
dead deadend sense of the word the purple team which is the iPhone team the iPhone team rarely worked without concrete and specific artifacts that's important to you and I because the iPhone is the most successful consumer product of all time literally we had to demonstrate our idea we couldn't get away with telling we were required to
show we combined some inspiration craft taste and decisiveness and we shared our results we had to work like this because the team didn't anything unless it was concrete and specific a demo showing what we want what we meant then we tried out each other's demos and said what we liked and what we didn't and offered suggestions for improvements which led
to more demos and more feedback this virtuous collaborative cycle another Insight that Steve Jobs had was the fact that great products make people happy almost all the time and rarely do the opposite I'm going to I'm going to read this section and I'm going to pull up something from what I feel is the best I mean every single
biography on Steve Jobs I've read I thought was absolutely fantastic the best one if you could only read one and I wouldn't just read one but if you only had to read one that' be uh becoming Steve Jobs which I just read for the second time on episode 265 and I'll get to Steve's idea of the Apple experience which you and I can use in our
businesses uh it'll make sense in one second let me go to Ken uh Ken says we all own devices that had too many ill-considered overlapping and inscrutable features making the product nearly impossible to understand or use Apple's whole ident was bound up in not having this problem over time and this is an important part designing an excellent user experience
was as much about preventing negative experiences meaning you know how frustrating would it be if you were using a device had what what he just called ill-considered overlapping and inscrutable features you're going to be angry like temporarily frustrated right you don't want to do that to your customers uh designing an excellent user
experience was as much about preventing negative experiences as facilitating positive ones great products make people happy almost all the time and do the opposite rarely if at all why is that important or more importantly why did Steve think that was important because Steve said every interaction a customer has increases or decreases the opinion
of the company he calls this idea which I'm about to read to you comes from becoming Steve Jobs the Apple experience it is brilliant and it's simple too the simple transaction of buying a song and handing over a credit card to Apple in order to do so became part of what Steve had begun calling the Apple experience
as a great marketer Steve understood that every interaction a customer had with apple could increase or decrease his or her respect for the company as he put it a corporation could quote accumulate or withdraw credits from its reputation which is why he works so hard to ensure that every single interaction a customer customer might have with
apple from using a Mac to calling customer support to buying a single from the iTunes store and then getting built for it was excellent why because one bad experience might undo dozens or 100 positive experiences that a customer previously had with your C with with your company so in a few minutes we're going to get to the difference in design
uh the way uh Steve wanted to design or Steve did design products in apple uh compared with like the data driven approach that Google uses and a lot of this goes down there's like several pages and essentially it's just like a lot of this comes down to taste to having good taste which is really hard to figure out like what is how do you
develop good taste and something that I thought was interesting is like you you can compare what what you feel was good taste at this point in your career with great work for the past so this is why Ken Ken you and I do this you know professionally right this is what all everything what Founders is about it's
like we study great work from the past because there's all these insights that you and I can use in present day and Ken even adds another layer to why you should study great work for the past because it gives you something to compare to to see like to to calibrate your taste studying great work from the past provides the means of comparison
and contrast and lets us tap into the collective creativity of previous generations the past is a source of the Timeless and enduring when I study the past I make a point of deciding what I like and sometimes this builtup catalog of refined like responses about past Works find a suitable outlet and a natural expression in my present day
work and so I was wrong I thought the next uh section was about uh the difference between Google and apple we'll get there there's actually uh now we get this this won't take that long this is the uh Ken's favorite thing that Steve Jobs ever said and it's this idea this quote from Steve that design is how it works and so Ken says making software
and products appear beautiful in the sense of being virtually visually attractive only goes so far Steve Jobs once said design is how it works in fact this is my favorite thing I've ever heard him say and in the context he provided around this statement when when he originally made this claim uh it was a 2003 New York Times interview
discussing the iPod Steve drove this point home or excuse me Steve drove his point home most people make the mistake of thinking design is what a product look like looks like people think it's this veneer that the designers are handed this box and told make it look good that's not what we think design is it's not just what it looks like and
feels like design is how it works now Ken jumps in his message is clear and I agree with it shallow Beauty in products does not serve people product design should strive for a depth for a beauty rooted in what a product does not merely in how it looks and feels form should follow function even though this might seem like a strange notion for pixels on
a screen but it's not if you believe the appearance of a product should tell you what it is and how to use it objects should explain themselves it is impossible to overstate how much this matters okay so now we go into what is really the anti- Steve Jobs model the not I left myself a few years ago I think is still really good more data
will never be enough you need conviction you need a point of view and it's been what let's see almost three years maybe two and a half years since I last read or or at least uh made a podcast on this book and I think I'm I'm even deeper in that conviction that like taste is something that's very real I mean Paul
Graham talks about that you know decade after decade in his essays that building a great product is not scientific it's not something that could just derived from data alone you have to have taste and one way to develop taste is through years of practice which he talks about a lot and I think it's uh hackers and Painters which is um not not just the
book but the actual essay so it says I'll soon show share more ideas about what made our Apple approach special but first I'll discuss a counter notion an example of a process that cannot produce iPhone like Excellence for this I turned to Douglas Bowman who was a designer who started at Google in 2006 becoming one
of its early uh visual design leaders here is how he justified his departure from Google almost 3 years later so he is describing this product development path this method of product development that Ken finds I think grotesque so it says uh this is the designer Google now uh without a person at or near the helm who thoroughly understands the
principles and elements of design a company eventually runs out of reasons for design decisions so this is again the anti- Steve Jobs model what is the the uh subtitle of this book inside Apple's design process during the Golden Age of Steve Jobs Steve Jobs played this role that was lacking at Google so it says Uh there's nobody at
the home who thoroughly understands the principles and elements of designs the company eventually runs out of reasons for design decisions without conviction or without taste doubt Creeps in instincts fail when a company is filled with Engineers it turns to engineering to solve problems they reduce each decision to a simple logic problem
remove all subjectivity and just look at the data we just Ken just described the demo process of Steve literally trusting his judgment trusting his taste what data was involved when he was doing the demo for the iPad Keys there's two keyboards Steve trusted his taste and pick the one that that he liked the most right he got some feedback from the
designer from the from the person that actually created which is Ken so okay yeah we're going to go with that I trust my taste and that's what shows up in the actual product it's the opposite of that sentence remove all sub subjectivity and just look at the data data in your favor okay launch it data shows negative
effects back to the drawing board and that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision yes it is true that a team at Google could not decide between two Blues so they're testing 41 Shades between each blue to see which one performs better now Ken jumps in with his opinion on this 41 shades of blue sounds like a lot but if they were
willing to go that far Google why not test for 100 or a thousand if some data is good more must be better right as Bowman suggest or as Bowman excuse me as Bowman suggests it isn't Google factored out taste from its design process the note I left right and in the in between these two paragraphs is so he writes Google factored out taste from its
design process I wrote while Apple relied on Steve's Personal Taste at Apple we never would have dreamed of doing that and we never stag any AB test for any of the software on the iPhone when it came to choosing a color we picked one we used our good taste and we moved on I read Johnny I's biography back on episode 178 he tells an exact very
similar story in that book working with Steve I can't remember the name of the computer it was like um I don't know if they were I think it was maybe early IMAX when they used to come they're like they were way way bigger than they are now but they'd come in like all these different colors I'm pretty sure this happened in the late '90s and there's a
line from that book where it says Johnny was amazed at the speed with which jobs gave his approval to the new colors in most places that decision would have taken months Steve did it in a half hour so it's another example he's just I'm going to trust my taste I know that I like in especially at that point in his
career he's had you know two maybe two and a half Decades of practice and experience with designing insanely great products in other words Steve worked himself into a position where he could trust his judgment and so then Ken goes back into this idea of really explaining the way that they push their their products forward the importance of demos
I'm going to read this to you because I think um first of all he does a good job of tying in that that that story the Vince Lombardi story from the very beginning it's one of Steve job's most famous quotes which is focus is is about saying no and so that's what came to mind when I read this section there are innumerable ways creative selection can
become bogged down since this working method must be applied consistently over a period of time to yield results consequently our success was was as much about what we did not do as what we did mostly we avoided falling into any of the typical product development traps common in Silicon Valley for example we did not talk about projects without
examples to ground the discussion we didn't Shuffle around printed specifications or unchanging paper mockups for weeks on end we did not have an imbalance between influence and involvement where a senior leader might try to mimic the commanding role of Steve Jobs without the corresponding level of personal engagement so again
goes back to that idea that Steve demonstrated with his actions how he dedicated his time what was important to him it was the opposite of this is really funny he calls this the seagull the seagull manager and says so this is like the opposite of Steve Jobs a detached highlevel manager making all the key decisions is such a widespread
Affliction detached remember Steve is not detached he's in there he's making very minute decisions right uh it's such a wides spre spread Affliction that is that has its own uh meme it's called the seago manager it describes a to top executive I who is rarely around but flies in occasionally and unexpectedly
from who knows where lands on your Beach squaws noisily flaps its wings all over the place launches itself back into the air circles overhead and drops a big pile of you know what on everyone and then flies away leaving the rest of the team to clean up the mess more things they did not do we did not establish large cuttingedge software research
departments sequestered from and with a tenuous connection too the designers and Engineers responsible for creating and shipping the real product s Steve Jobs famously disbanded such an organization at Apple which was called the Advanced Technology Group shortly after he reasserted control over the company in 1997 these kinds of anti- patterns can
prevent creative selection from functioning correctly since they bought block the steady accumulation of positive change in the form of demos while developing a product and this is where he ties this all together beautifully for you and I we manag to sear clear of all such pitfalls if I were to take a stab at explaining the
why I would say that our Clarity of purpose kept us on track in much the same way that Vince Lombardi won football games and Steve Jobs pushed us to make a speedy first version of safari since our focus on making great products never wavered if for no other reason then that's what Steve demanded perhaps concentrating keenly on what to do
helped us block out what not to do and then this is Steve preaching an idea over and over again throughout the company uh know life myself many years ago which I think still works is the power of ideas Edwin land Steve the founder Polaroid Steve Jobs hero changed Apple Steve took one of Edwin L's ideas and built his company around it and then
repeated it and make sure he taught everybody else in the company why this is important the intersection is the title of this chapter it it was an idea that it was an idea that helped us it speaks to the way that Apple valued expertise in both technology and liberal arts building a company at the intersection of technology and Liber
Arts is literally something Edwin land talked about and did something Steve Jobs learned from Edwin land and then Steve Jobs used it at Apple this is the power of ideas we use this notion to guide our efforts as we developed and lived on our gadgets so that they turned out to be more than an glomeration of the latest CPU sensors and software
manufactured to scale we hope to make our products meaningful and useful to people unlike the unspoken idea of creative selection we did talk about working at the intersection among ourselves there was even a formal Apple University course on the topic a a moderated halfday session to discuss melding technology and liberal arts the
reason the reasons it might be difficult to work at this intersection and why it was essential to keep trying since the effort lay at the core of the notion excuse me of the at the core of the Apple notion of a great product also Edwin L's notion of a great product right Not only was the inter intersection freely discussed inside the
company but OD Sly for Apple the discussion did not stop at the edge of the copertino campus Steve Jobs told everyone what he thought about this topic himself on stage during the keynote presentation to announce the original iPad mentioned it multiple times he mentioned it in in um in interviews back in the 1980s when he was
still in his 20s mentioned it in the Walter isson book that he's writing in collaboration with isson as he knows he is dying this is a a fundamental idea uh important idea to understand the life and work of Steve Jobs this is what Steve said about that the reason that apple is able to create products like the iPad is because we've always tried
to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts to be able to get the best of both to make extremely Advanced products from a technology point of view but also have them be intuitive easy to use fun to use so that they really fit the users the users don't have to come to them they come to the user that's a really important idea a few pages later
is repeated Steve Jobs did not say products should thort the user he said products should come to the user and then the book ends on a sad note Ken had been doing a series of demos with Steve he's talking to his boss uh Henry and it says several months later in one of my regularly scheduled one-on-one meetings with Henry to
discuss my continuing iPad work I suggested to him that it might be a good idea to have another demo with Steve to show him multitasking gestures again now that the software was closed to its final form uh it would give him one more chance to give feedback before we shipped the upgrade of the the the update to iOS Henry responded with a
shake of his head and a matter of fact at this point I think we should go with the multitasking gestures as they are we finished our chat a few minutes later and when I left Henry's office and made my way down the hall I heard his words again in my mind at this point then it hit me Henry knew Steve wasn't coming
back about 6 weeks later Steve resigned from his position as CEO of Apple about 6 weeks after that he was gone and then it only takes Ken one sentence to describe the impact that Steve had on him that he's had on me that he's had on you and millions of other people Steve Jobs provided his single minded focus on making great products and his vision
motivated and that is where I'll leave it for the full story read the book anybody building a product should read this book it should be uh in your library it is a no-brainer recommend ation if you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes you'll be supporting the podcast at the very same time if you want to use the same app
that I use to store all of my highlights I have over 20,000 highlights from the books I read and I have a bunch of books I still have to put in there I use an app called readwise and you can test it for 60 days for free to see if you like it as much as I do the link is down below it's uh you can just go straight to the URL which is readwise i/f
Founders I spent some time organizing maybe the next 10 or 12 books that I'm covering for the podcast I'm calling it the murderer row of History's Greatest Founders you can you will not believe the lineup that I have coming so I'm looking forward to that that is 281 books down 1,000 to go and I'll talk to you again soon