Steve Jobs: Great team dynamics
meIn this interview, Jobs describes the dynamic of a team that strives to excel—that is, to excel beyond average. Some team leaders claim that a great team is all about smiles and agreement. But at best it will only lead to stagnation or marginal improvement. It's groupthink.
Productive teams that bring out the best thinking in every member foster the friction we need to grow into something innovative. The following is a lightly edited portion. Steve Jobs: The Lost InterviewLaunched in 2012, it explains what teams need to achieve excellence.
One of the big blows to Apple was that after I left, John Sculley became very seriously ill. I have seen other people get the disease too. A really good idea is 90% of the work, and if you tell other people, “I have this great idea,” you assume that they can act on it.
And the problem is that there is a huge amount of craftsmanship between a great idea and a great product. And as you develop that great idea, it changes and grows. It never comes out as good as it starts, because as you dive into its subtleties you learn more and also discover that there are enormous trade-offs you have to make. There are certain things electrons cannot do. There are some things that plastic, glass, factories, and robots cannot do. And as you dive into all of this, designing a product means holding 5,000 concepts in your head and trying to fit them all together and combine them again and again in new and different ways to get what you want. And I discover something new every day. It's a new problem or a new opportunity to combine these things a little differently. And that process is the magic. So we had a lot of good ideas when we started.
But what I've always felt is that a team of people doing something they really believe in is like… When I was young, there was a man who was a widower who lived down the street. And he was in his 80s. He looked a little scary. And I got to know him a little bit. I think he paid me to mow the lawn or something. Then one day he said, “Come into my garage. “I want to show you something.”
And he took out a dusty old stone tumbler. It was a motor, a coffee can, and a little band in between. And he said, “Come with me.” We went out to the back and got some rocks. Plain, old, ugly rocks. Then put it in a can with some liquid and some sand powder. And we closed the can and he turned on this motor and said, “Come back tomorrow.”
And this can was spinning and making a racket. Then he came back the next day, opened the can, and pulled out an incredibly beautiful polished stone. The same ordinary stones rub together like this, causing a little friction and making a little noise, and this beautiful smooth rock is created. And that's always been a metaphor in my mind for a team working really hard on something they're passionate about. It's through teams, through groups of incredibly talented people bumping into each other, arguing, sometimes fighting, fussing, working together to refine each other and refine their ideas, and the result is this. These are really beautiful stones.
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Posted by Michael McKinney at 9:17 AM
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