The Restless Mind

BusinessWeek recently ran a post about Michael Lopp, a senior engineering manager at Apple who spoke at SXSW and sprinkled a few insider tidbits about their design process.

Basically, Lopp said:
-we do a few more mocks than other design departments
-we meet regularly to blue sky; we also have definition meetings
-we involve management, sometimes embracing what they say, sometimes blocking

Sound special to you? Not me. But then, I don’t think Apple actually does anything special to make their products. For instance:
-they hire from the same pool of engineers as everyone else
-they equip them with tools and processes much like everyone else
-they outsource to roughly the same companies as everyone else

What makes Apple special isn’t design. Or process. Or talent. It’s fear. Fear of the man who is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. (And sheathed in titanium.)

An engineer slaving away on the iPhone SDK isn’t concerned about the industry, his peers, or his boss. His relentless pursuit of “system elegance” is simply an animal’s instinct to avoid pain, manifested largely during the senior management review. A bad interaction with Jobs will haunt you your entire career, either because you’ll get fired or tarnished; a mark on your forehead for others to behold.

The iconic temper and aggression that surrounds Steve Jobs is Apple’s greatest asset. It is more powerful than the company’s history or its brand. (It should be factored in their P&L and their market cap.) Steve Jobs’ temperament molds the exquisite form factor we adore in iPods, Macs, and the iPhone—nothing else.

Lovers of French cinema will recognize a paradox at work. While pain is something we fear, we’re also attracted to it. Apple staff may fear humiliation from Jobs, but they’re bullish about rising above it—of not being humiliated (which is tantamount to praise at Apple). That bravado can stimulate neurons to do wonderful things.

Unconvinced? Take a peek at Apple under Sculley and Amelio. They had the same brand, staff, process, and suppliers. What they lacked was the Shakespearian tempest to drag greatness out of the mundane. They lacked character—in the broadest, most literary sense. After all, Jobs isn’t a person anymore. He’s an invention, a legend from the valley that has become a shorthand for what it takes to be great and make great things.

This fable is Apple’s greatest innovation and the reason no company can match it. What, precisely, provides demigod status to Sir Howard Stringer? Or Michael Dell? Or Ki Tae Lee? Would you cross the world to work for them? Ignore your family to impress them? Have a nervous breakdown because of them? Not likely.

As the press and bloggers continue to disambiguate what enables companies to innovate, they invariably point to Apple and their “process” as a rubric, however shrouded it may be. But there’s no there there. There’s no answer to the riddle.

The simple facts are that the vast majority of big companies can’t innovate simply because they’re big (if you want innovation, create a startup) and no other CEO is Steve Jobs. Not even Steve Jobs.

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Update: Wired news chief and longtime Apple biographer Leander Kahney posted a new article, How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong.

At most companies, the red-faced, tyrannical boss is an outdated archetype, a caricature from the life of Dagwood. Not at Apple. Whereas the rest of the tech industry may motivate employees with carrots, Jobs is known as an inveterate stick man. Even the most favored employee could find themselves on the receiving end of a tirade. Insiders have a term for it: the “hero-shithead roller coaster.” Says Edward Eigerman, a former Apple engineer, “More than anywhere else I’ve worked before or since, there’s a lot of concern about being fired.”

But Jobs’ 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.”