Team Integration: Sensitivity to Organizational Structure
One example of
how Steve Jobs’s leadership showed sensitivity to organizational culture can be
found in his interaction with Rupert Murdoch whose News Corp. owns such
newspapers as the Wall Street Journal
and New York Post, Fox Studios, and
the Fox News Channel. On February 24,
2011, at Steve Jobs’s 65th birthday dinner at his house, Steve Jobs
and Rupert Murdoch talked about the importance of infusing entrepreneurialism
and nimbleness into an organization’s culture.
Steve Jobs indicated that he used to believe that a big company was
unable to have a clear organizational culture.
However, he believed accountability and simplicity could be imbued in
Apple’s organizational culture.
For example,
Steve Jobs strictly enforced accountability after disheartening reviews of
Apple’s MobileMe service surfaced in the media.
He gathered the MobileMe team in the Town Hall Auditorium of Building 4
on Apple’s campus. This auditorium was a
venue Apple used to unveil products to a small group of journalists. For a half-hour, Steve Jobs berated this
group. Right on the spot, he named a new
executive to run it.
Steve Jobs
instilled simplicy in Apple’s organizational culture. The name of the company—Apple—evokes the
simplicity of a piece of pie. In
designing brochures for the Apple II, Steve Jobs chose an apple with a bite
taken out of it for its simplicity.
Steve Jobs repeatedly emphasized the simplicity in Apple’s products and
operations. Isaacson points out that
Steve Jobs felt that design simplicity should be associated with making
products easy to use. Making products
easy to use involved making them intuitively obvious to navigate, because
sometimes a device’s design can be so complex that a user finds it intimidating
to utilize it.
Steve Jobs
related simplicity with ease of use. He
praised the desktop metaphor being created for the Macintosh, because he felt that
such a metaphor could leverage the experience people already had regarding the
desktop. People knew how to deal with
the desktop intuitively.
Steve Jobs’s
design sensibility embracing simplicity arose from his devotion to Zen. He wrestled
with each new product design to see how much he could simplify it, aiming for
the simplicity that arises from conquering complexities, rather than ignoring
them.
Steve Jobs’s
obsession with simplicity as beauty could be seen in Apple’s retail stores and
its checkout process. The layout of
Apple stores and its checkout process minimize the number of steps. Steve Jobs believed simplicity and the lack
of distractions were important to a great store. Steve Jobs provided the recipe for the
simplicity of the retail stores’ checkout processes.
Another product
Steve Jobs focused on making as simple as possible for the user was the iDVD
application. Mike Evangelist, an Apple
software designer, had demonstrated to Steve Jobs an early version of the
interface to iDVD. After looking at a
number of screenshots, Steve Jobs drew a simple rectangle on a whiteboard,
indicating that a user would drag a video into that rectangle and click on a
button to copy a video on a computer to a blank DVD. This led to the simplicity of iDVD—an
application that allowed users to burn DVDs.
Steve Jobs also pushed
for simplicity in the development of the iPad.
He believed that the core essence of the iPad would be its display
screen. Everything that the iPad did
deferred to the display. Steve Jobs
sought to remove and simplify features and buttons so they posed no distraction
from the display. Steve Jobs had this to
say said at the announcement of iPad 2 regarding simplicity that came from
integration.
“It’s in Apple’s
DNA that technology alone is not enough. We believe that its technology married
with the humanities yields us the result that makes our heart sing. Nowhere is
that more true than in these post-PC devices. Folks are rushing into this
tablet market, and they’re looking at it as the next PC, in which the hardware
and the software are done by different companies. Our experience, and every
bone in our body, says that is not the right approach. These are post-PC
devices that need to be even more intuitive and easier to use than a PC, and
where the software and the hardware and the applications need to be intertwined
in an even more seamless way than they are on a PC. We think we have the right
architecture not just in silicon, but in our organization, to build these kinds
of products.”
To retain the
simplicity of the customer experience related to the iPhone, Steve Jobs
indicated that software developers outside of Apple would be permitted to write
iPhone applications. However, they would
have to meet strict standards. Apple
would test and approve them. These
applications could only be sold through the iTunes store.
Simplicity was
bred into Steve Jobs’s soul, propagating the architecture in the organization
Steve Jobs built. Steve Jobs attributed
his love of simplicity to his Zen training.
When he returned to Apple in 1997, his focus on simplicity led to
cutting all except a few core products to get Apple back on track. He eliminated buttons to make devices
simpler, features to make software simpler, and options to make interfaces
simpler.
One example of
how Steve Jobs’s leadership showed sensitivity to organizational culture can be found in his interaction with
Rupert Murdoch whose News Corp. owns
such newspapers as the Wall Street
Journal and New York Post, Fox
Studios, and the Fox News Channel: Isaacson, W. (2011) Steve Jobs. New York, New York:
Simon & Schuster
For example,
Steve Jobs strictly enforced accountability after disheartening reviews of Apple’s
MobileMe service surfaced in the media: Lashinsky,
A. (August 25, 2011). How Apple works: Inside the world's biggest startup. Fortune. Retrieved from http://fortune.com/2011/08/25/how-apple-works-inside-the-worlds-biggest-startup-2/
Steve Jobs
instilled simplicy in Apple’s organizational culture: Isaacson, W. (2011) Steve Jobs. New York, New York: Simon & Schuster
“…We think we
have the right architecture not just in silicon, but in our organization, to build
these kinds of products” (p. 527): Isaacson, W. (2011) Steve Jobs. New York, New York:
Simon & Schuster
Excerpt from: Universal Characteristics in The Leadership of Steve Jobs
Available at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B081J113NT
