How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong
Posted by Steve Laser on 03/22/08 in Apple, Opinion
Wired magazine’s Leander Kahney has written a wonderful article on Apple’s success gained while eschewing the rules that the rest of us abide by. For example, regarding Jobs’ parking his car at Apple headquarters:
But there is one Mercedes that doesn’t need to search for very long, and it belongs to Steve Jobs. If there’s no easy-to-find spot and he’s in a hurry, Jobs has been known to pull up to Apple’s front entrance and park in a handicapped space. (Sometimes he takes up two spaces.) It’s become a piece of Apple lore — and a running gag at the company. Employees have stuck notes under his windshield wiper: “Park Different.” They have also converted the minimalist wheelchair symbol on the pavement into a Mercedes logo.
Indeed, while the rest of the business world’s CEOs have been busy developing touchy feely relationships with their employees, Jobs takes a tyrannical approach, often dressing down employees to the point of crying. Apple segregates its hardware and software engineers so they don’t know what each other is doing. Nobody has a complete picture of the final product. Secrecy is paramount. Employees cannot tell their own families what they are working on. Micromanager Jobs is said to be so involved with every project that he dictates such things as whether corners are square or round on products and how many screws should be on the bottom of a laptop.
Yet his employees remain devoted.
That’s because his autocracy is balanced by his famous charisma — he can make the task of designing a power supply feel like a mission from God. Andy Hertzfeld, lead designer of the original Macintosh OS, says Jobs imbued him and his coworkers with “messianic zeal.” And because Jobs’ approval is so hard to win, Apple staffers labor tirelessly to please him. “He has the ability to pull the best out of people,” says Ratzlaff, who worked closely with Jobs on OS X for 18 months. “I learned a tremendous amount from him.”
The article is simply a great read. Check it out at Wired.
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I’d still rather work for Ballmer.