Steve Jobs: the principles behind Apple's remarkable comeback

Executive overview

Most companies rot from the inside when a monopoly removes the pressure to keep building great products. Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 knowing this — and rebuilt the company around the opposite bet: focus relentlessly on product quality, remove everything else.

The framework is simple: cut the product line to what only Apple can do, staff every remaining product with A players, protect those teams from organisational noise, and never stop grinding the details.

Turn your personality traits into a business philosophy — Apple is Steve Jobs with 10,000 lives.

The return: what Jobs found and what he cut

• Apple had dozens of overlapping products; after three weeks Jobs still couldn't explain when to buy one over another
• His test: if I can't figure it out, customers can't figure it out
• Cut the line to four product platforms so every team could be staffed with A players instead of B and C players
• Apple was making printers profitably — killed it anyway: someone else can make a printer just as good as us; no one can make a better computer
• Laid off thousands; simplified the org chart until accountability was clear
• Maxim: focus means saying no

On product quality and design

• Design is not how it looks — it is how it works; you have to truly grok what a product is about
• Simplicity is not ignoring complexity; it is resolving it
• Most people stop at convoluted solutions that kind of work; great designers keep going until they find the elegant answer
• A great carpenter doesn't use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet even though no one sees it
• Jobs and team spent six months refining scroll bars; he compared mock-ups pixel by pixel
• What looks like magic to others is someone willing to embrace the grind that others won't

On people and hiring

• Only have A players; recruiting is one of the few things a founder can personally contribute that nothing else replaces
• Once you have the best people, your job is to remove obstacles and shield them from the rest of the organisation
• Jobs went directly to the engineer he needed regardless of hierarchy
• Andy Hertzfeld: Jobs erected a giant shit-deflecting umbrella that protected the project from the suits

On marketing and communication

• If you believe your product improves people's lives, you have a moral obligation to get good at marketing
• The Apple brand was a core asset being wasted; the answer was "Here's to the Crazy Ones" — celebrate the creative people who would use the product, not the specs
• Crystal clear communication: a thousand songs in your pocket; a dollar a song — anyone immediately understands the benefit
• Jobs' communication style had zero ambiguity; Ken Kocienda called him the Oracle, but one who gave crystal-clear answers, not riddles

On motive, passion, and not giving up

• HP's goal was to make great products; money was a byproduct — Jobs held the same principle at Apple
• Without a moral reason to do the work, you will give up when it gets hard
• Jobs was full of doubt during the turnaround: "I wouldn't be honest if some days I didn't question whether I made the right decision"
• His decision framework, crystallised by Andy Grove: do you actually give a shit about this, and is it a good thing to have in the world? If yes to both, you have to do it
• He looked to Dylan, Picasso, Edwin Land, da Vinci — people who kept risking failure rather than coasting on past success

On product monopolies and the danger of success

• Apple's graphical UI monopoly in the 1980s sowed the seeds of its near-demise
• When a monopoly removes competition, the product people get replaced by sales and marketing people
• Then the monopoly expires and the product talent is gone; the company either survives or doesn't
• The antidote: never shift focus away from building the best product

On integration as a strategic moat

• The iPod was harder to copy than the Walkman because it was a whole ecosystem: hardware, software, iTunes store
• Apple designs the entire thing — hardware, software, developer relations, marketing — no other company in the industry does this
• That integration lets Apple innovate faster than anyone else
• The place Apple has stood for two decades is exactly where consumer electronics and computing are converging: "The other side of the river is coming to us"

On deep historical knowledge as a competitive advantage

• Jobs constantly referenced history: what was Walt Disney doing 50 years ago, what did Edwin Land prove, what can da Vinci and Michelangelo teach about combining art and craft
• Land: "I could see what the Polaroid camera should be as if it was sitting in front of me before I'd ever built one" — Jobs said he saw the Macintosh the same way
• Both Land and Jobs believed they didn't invent products; they discovered products that had always existed
• The best founders have encyclopedic historical knowledge of their industry and combine it with attention to where new technology is emerging