the onda

I've written before about how product rules and how it's really nice to see bosses from big cos. who get it. Last week while flying back from California I happened to read a great cover article in Businessweek on Steve Jobs and his role in setting the elements for success at Apple and Pixar. Not surprisingly there are lessons in what he does that go far beyond the success of a big company:

Product Matters more than anything

"The great thing about Steve is that he knows that great business comes from great product," says Peter Schneider, the former chairman of Disney's studio. "First you have to get the product right, whether it's the iPod or an animated movie."

When I was VP of Engineering at a photobook manufacturer in New York, we used to make the Apple iPhoto books. Every release, we'd have a fire drill around the "Steve meeting" where he'd supposedly want to get into everything: software, templates, printing, binding, service time, etc. After a couple of releases I began to think that the Steve thing was a ploy used by the Apple product managers to get their vendors to perform.

Imagine my surprise then, at a conference a couple of years later when I ran into Steve and decided to test my theory. I told him we were really happy about the way our partnership with Apple was working and expected him to answer with a typical executive platitude. I was just floored when he responded with a set of issues that convinced me he knew more about our product than a lot of our own people. As I was reeling from that it also occurred to me that Apple was a $10 billion business and our piece was-- well a tiny piece of that-- and yet he knew all sorts of important details about it. Oh yeah, product rules.

People Matter

Ever since the days when he marveled at Stephen G. Wozniak's engineering skill while building the first Apple computer, Jobs believed that a small team of top talent can run circles around far larger but less talented groups. He spends a lot of energy working the phones, trying to recruit people he has heard are the best at a certain job.

So I don't have any first-hand accounts of the recruiting tactics that have been implemented at Apple, but my favorite Steve story where this is concerned is from when he tried to convince Linus Torvalds to abandon the Linux kernel for the Mach microkernel that NEXT had brought back to Apple in 1998 (apparently Linus has corroborated this in his book about the story of Linux). I do know from my various visits to the Apple campus that Apple seems to have invented pampering the key employees and betting on their own talent to out-execute much bigger teams.

Strategy Matters but you've got to believe

So what is Jobs' secret? There are many, but it starts with focus and a near-religious faith in his strategy. For years, Jobs plugged away at Apple with his more proprietary approach, not worrying much about Wall Street's complaints. In fact, one of his first moves was to take an ax to Apple's product line, lopping off dozens of products to focus on just four.

You've got to believe even if it means being unpopular or seeming crazy. He did it with the Apple ][, he did it with the NEXT cube-- he even did it with the Mac cube. It's taken a while for the integrated approach to start to work again (some would argue that even a broken clock is right twice a day) and it's nice to see Apple consistently stick to their guns while other computer company brethren (say Sum) flip-flop like a fish on a boat deck.

I'm not trying to turn this post into a Steve love-fest but instead want to make the point that it's a really nice thing to see a big company "executive" who can still act like an entrepreneur. Product, people, and faith in the strategy. This stuff is hard enough to keep straight in a small company-- I can't even begin to imagine how hard it must be in a big company.