Jobs talks about this in https://youtu.be/l4dCJJFuMsE. I wish more leaders understood this. I interpret his words that people who do, understand and care are more valuable than those who only focus on process and politics.
Steve Jobs has great points again. I love to hear him talk about what really matters for success of great tech companies.
Process is required to get mediocre talent to churn out reasonable content, which is Steve's references to HP/IBM/etc.
Most people think they're putting out great content. But that's obviously false. One side of Steve's point about letting elite talent do their work presupposes that the talent is elite. Mediocre talent will do much worse work if not bound to process, and Steve was very, very good at rooting out what he thought was mediocre talent.
but, but, but ... they are remarkably similar in execution, the difference is the trade offs they chose.
if you pay 200+ bucks per mouth you want something amazing, and that usually means you pick from a fixed menu (interestingly your choices likely be a lot more limited compared to McDonald's), and that restaurant then does the well rehearsed dance and prepares the fancy food for you, with a lot more attention to detail, than what you would find (or need) in a McDonald's fast kitchen.
both are examples of 'process'
just as coming up with a new interesting-innovative-1-2-3-star entree or coming up with a new McD menu item are examples of a creative design process.
I think this dynamic is different depending on 1. how elite that elite talent actually is (I think of elite athletes here, where one might be elite enough to be on the roster of a top level team, but not elite enough to be the de-facto best on the team - they have a whole bunch of rules to follow, but the best of the best on that team can effectively do as they please); and more importantly, 2. what stage the company is at. A small company with an elite team or elite performer has a whole different set of challenges or structure to deal with versus an elite team or performer at a large established behemoth like Apple.
Everytime a soccer team, or any other team, is built around one individual, it is only ever as good as said individual. If that is done, no titles are won and no great accomplishments achieved.
Barcelona's 2008-2012 and 2014-2017 teams would probably disagree - they were built around Messi being able to do whatever he wanted, wherever he wanted....including going on an unbothered stroll for as long as he wanted, whenever he wanted. His whole MO is that he has the unique ability to flip a switch from walking around aimlessly to getting the ball and tearing an entire midfield and defense to shreds in the blink of an eye.
I think they did pretty well, didn't they win a few big titles?
But sure, the only super star during that period was Messi...
The 2017/18 team had, in addition to Messi, Iniesta, Suarez and Alba
But again, of course it was only Messi who carried them. Sure.
But even if he did, which he did not, there are only two players like this in his generation, Ronaldo and Messi. That means the vast majority of "rockstar" emoloyees by definition cannot be in that league.
Xavi, Busquets, Iniesta, and in 2014 Neymar. Messi is the GOAT, but Barca is one of the worst teams to say built to allow one player to do what he wanted. Barca built an entire system and slotted the greatest single-team field of all time players to play that system.
Insightful, and it’s worth also pointing out that even if 90% of your staff are unquestionably elite, the rest can easily (without process and guidance) make mistakes whose consequences will overshadow everything else you accomplish, for instance by checking in code which causes a catastrophic data breach because your code review policies are casual and optional.
Of course, this is a contrived example and even rockstars make mistakes too, but many mistakes are detectable/foreseeable and that’s the kind of thing good process is meant to help with.
> Mediocre talent will do much worse work if not bound to process
Maybe top talent also does worse work sans process, but they get away with it. That's my experience: Many take advantage of their power to disregard process (sometimes as a demonstration of power), which hurts the team, and undermines and creates extra work for others, but the top talent's contributions create a net gain.
I feel like I'm experiencing this in a distant way at a small company I'm working at.
We're working at instituting some process, it's a good thing as we've been cowboying out code for a long time, it's not sustainable, it's hard on everyone for all the usual reasons when a small company begins to grow and there haven't been a lot of processes. Tech debt, weird code, poor code reviews (if any ... mostly none), what is testing?, what documentation?, everything is in a few people's heads, and so on.
Having said that, I'm working on a new feature with another programmer and asking questions about this new feature we're working on together. Some of the ideas behind it just don't jive, I don't believe this thing will do what the customer needs (possibly not at all)... and certainly not in the best possible way. Now we're on the same page about a few things, mostly that we don't have enough information, but the response is different.
The other programmer thinks that we just need a better and more detailed user story as per the processes we're trying to put in place. To them that's the start and end of it. However, even that won't be good enough to me. A "better" user story built out of the ideas we have so far is just as flawed, there are already issues with what we've been told. At worst this will end up re-written because it does nothing the customer needs, or it does it in a really awkward and wonky way.
The other programmers response is "well that's the fault of the person who wrote that user story" and they would seem to just rather we write it as requested and roll on.
Not entirely wrong as far as just the business process goes ... but I'd rather actually solve the problem, and talk to the customer, get the details, talk it out with all involved so we can construct something more flexible, re-usable, and ... works.
But there is that process, that "it's this group's responsibility, not ours" that is such an easy out, entirely how things could work "correctly", and also in this case a plan for failure.
Steve said the folks who care about the content are a pain in the butt to work with, and I've got a few dozen questions I need to hammer some folks with about this new feature... they're not going to like it (they thought they were done with this when they made the request), but the questions need to be asked to do it right.
Your coworkers have a large company attitude prematurely living in a small company.
“That’s not my job” is how a company loses time, customers, and money. A large company has customers, time, and money to spare. How much runway or VC money can the company afford to spend going in the wrong direction?
Hammer away with you questions. Because if they can’t convince you of their correctness, how can they convince a customer who is under no obligation to shift through their bullshit?
Yup, cog in the wheel type situation. I'm sure some guys like working like that... it has to be comfortable, but I don't like it when the end result is not good.
I watched a small company building great tech hire experienced managers from big professional firms to put the proper process in place. We didn't have the sales yet, nor the headcount to warrant such efforts.
That was fatal. They didn't need the process and couldn't afford the overhead.
It's worth giving serious thought to whether your company is successful enough to survive this new strategy. It may be time to look for the exit.
Which period are you referring to? Because he got fired from a company he founded, that’s the ultimate humiliation. It’s hard press to say Jobs was given free passes.
Compaq piggybacked on IBM’s success. Not much of vision there, and ended up being swallowed by HP. Apple is the most valuable company today, in large part thanks to Jobs’s vision and execution (iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, OS X)
Apple very nearly catered. Nobody would be quoting Job had that happened (NeXT was dying too which is why Apple could buy it). There is a crazy amount of survivor bias here.
The first success (Apple) may have been in large part right-place/right-time (and by right place: friend of Wozniak).
But his second big success (Apple's rebirth) I kind of have to give Jobs all the credit. It looks as though none of the CEO's that came before Jobs could save the company the way Jobs seemed to single-handedly come back and do it.
To be sure though he had wandered the desert for years and learned a lot of hard truths. That no doubt made him the capable decision maker he turned out to ultimately be in the end.
Being fired at that time was the best thing that could happen both to Apple and Jobs.
If it didn't happen, our business mythology today would full of tales about Jobs, the lose cannon that destroyed apple with his megalomanic and narcissistic ego.
The Steve from the Second Advent of Jobs was a dramatically improved version of him, seasoned in no small part by this "humilliation".
> Being fired at that time was the best thing that could happen both to Apple and Jobs.
Easy to say in hindsight. Canion, who was worshipped by the GP, also got fired by Compaq but never bounced back.
Or may be that’s a testament to Jobs’s ability to learn and adapt.
> the lose cannon that destroyed apple with his megalomanic and narcissistic ego.
I doubt it. Apple was Jobs’s number one priority, even to the detriment of its employees, including himself. He literally worked until his death. He has been labeled many things. Apple destroyer wouldn’t be one.
It's true Canion got fired by the board of Compaq, but before that he ran the company such that it was the fastest to a billion in revenue in history.
Nobody wants to remember the boring business IBM compatible market but not only did Compaq make the first 386 (redefining what a PC was) they also got the other manufacturers to rally around things like the EISA bus which abruptly stopped IBM's dominance of the PC standard and made a truly open market that not only swallowed PCs, but took the minicomputer industry out at as well and everything you have on your desktop and server room is still rooted in those seminal Compaq products.
It was Eckhard Pfieffer who eventually screwed the pooch and put Compaq into HPs grasp. If Canion had been allowed to flesh out his strategy for lower cost PCs that might never have happened.
Apple was always a 10% of the market sideshow until they made the iPhone.
i am not a fan of jobs but i don't see how you can look at his career and see a string of failures. breakout, apple ii, lisa, macintosh, laserwriter, next, pixar, ipod, iphone, ipad. he was an asshole who cheated and abused other people to manipulate them into realizing his visions, but he manipulated them successfully. astoundingly successfully actually
In the 80s it was an astounding success with the Apple ][ then it all went to shit funded by that machine. He didn’t invent the LaserWriter.
Jobs was great at seeing the potential of tech but he was a terrible CEO until NeXT fell to pieces and he learned some humility to go with that famous reality distortion field.
Canion is so underrated. Unlike Jobs he simply kicked IBM in the nuts and redefined the entire computer business.
he didn't invent shit, he certainly didn't invent the apple ii, he didn't even invent the blue box he and woz sold! but he did force apple to do the adobe deal to ship the laserwriter even though it meant sinking a large chunk of cash into risky startup equity. i don't think apple's post-apple-2 jobs-driven trajectory in the 01980s (bringing guis, desktop publishing, vector graphics, and laser printers to the masses) can be fairly described as 'it all went to shit' in terms of jobs's goals. from the perspective of user freedom and empowerment, plausibly, and that improved dramatically when they kicked jobs out
next didn't fall to pieces. it birthed the world-wide web, then merged with apple, replacing apple's then ceo, and provided the software stack that currently powers the macintosh line, ipod, iphone, and ipad. i can understand why you would describe next as a failure if it was 01996 and we were having this conversation on compuserve or fidonet, but in retrospect it seems obvious that next was at least the second most important software firm of the 80s and early 90s
I find this an interesting debate. I think both are true:
NeXT was a failure: because it didn’t make a profit, and its products were wildly overpriced for everyone but a tiny niche market like university CS departments and researchers, which didn’t provide it enough of a market to survive on its own. If it had been successful, NeXT could have bought Apple, not the other way around. Or more likely, just carried on by itself, IPO’d or whatever.
NeXT was a huge success: because tech developed there was hugely influential to future technology used even decades later.
it was successful at delivering apple back into the control of steve jobs; it wasn't successful for investors along the way who bought stock at a higher price than the 427 million dollars apple eventually paid, but we weren't talking about whether steve jobs's investors were successful, but about whether steve jobs was successful. investors like canon were his cannon fodder. even a good slice of the investors ended up getting rich, tho
it's hard to imagine what would have counted as a bigger success for steve jobs
rod canion redefined the entire computer business once: he made open platforms dominant for personal computers. steve jobs did it four times: in 01977 by converting personal computers from hobbyist machines to home appliances; in 01984 by making the wimp gui the dominant interaction paradigm; in 01998 by redefining personal computers from home appliances to fashion accessories; and in 02007 by replacing the open-platform wimp gui with non-end-user-programmable sealed prisons with multitouch and always-on mobile internet access
obviously none of these involved him inventing anything, and most of them are at best morally ambiguous, but certainly he set out to do each of those things and then successfully did them
Apple in its early days nearly failed at every stage of its development. See "Return To The Little Kingdom" by Moritz.
Jobs was a very quick learner, though. For example, he soon realized he needed outside management help.
> We could all be Jobs level if we had the sandboxes he was gifted in the 1980s
Jobs saw opportunity where everybody else did not (including Woz). I worked at a company in the 70s that was far better positioned to develop an Apple-like computer, but utterly failed to see the opportunity. This was hardly unique.
The flipside is that not everyone can afford to not give up.
It's very easy to dimiss successful people as lucky without acknowledging the perseverance that goes into pushing through all the failures until you get a success, but it's also easy to dismiss people who never hit that success as lacking that perseverance.
It's an important point. In the broader context, most new businesses fail in relatively early stages due to running out of capital, ie time. Which is to say, most entrepreneurs fail due to running out of money. There is no doubt that there is a diminishing return factor that kicks in, but it would be interesting to see how many more success stories are produced if the runway is N longer (for each increment of capital, how many more successful outcomes are there).
You'll see some cynical takes such that: well if an entrepreneur had a really great thing, they'd have no terminal money problem to begin with (just show it to a VC, insta check). That's pretty blatantly false however, as the capital equation is a whole 'nother skillset and luck/chance/network factor that goes to work for or against your efforts.
Despite his ruthlessness (or maybe because), Jobs greatest skilks seemed to be his ability to read people and assign them to the right position. Leaving Tim Cook behind as a CEO was a phenomenal move.
Steve Jobs has great points again. I love to hear him talk about what really matters for success of great tech companies.