I recently (finally) finished both Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs and Aaron Shapiro’s Users Not Customers.
The HUGE CEO penned this article following Steve’s step down as CEO of Apple. Like his book’s vividly detailed focus, it boils Jobs as a leadership figure down to his single premise: “Never compromise the user experience.”
From UI to industrial design, it’s well known that Jobs would sweat every detail. Vic Gundotra recounts a great story about Steve calling him while he was in church to discuss the coloring on a single letter in one of his iPhone icons. The interviews in Isaacson’s book illustrate the interpersonal and emotional ramifications of his perfectionism. You can question his methods in specificity, but you can’t argue with the man’s results. For Steve, work was either completely brilliant or utter shit, with absolutely no delta between. He pushed the industry’s brightest minds to create the products that would dominate the market and a company that was poised to do the same well into the future.
I’ve always been torn on whether I’d like to work for a manager like Jobs. I’ve also been amused to find that the supervisory style of the Apple Retail structure is almost an exact rejection of his philosophy in practice. It’s gentle and mindful, with “negative general feedback” (ie: this is shit, you are shit) discouraged to the point of coddling. In every communication from daily meetings to yearly reviews, failings are glossed-over as “challenges,” while mild success is endlessly celebrated. I suppose it’s because encouraging a staff to create pleasant interpersonal customer experiences daily is a different matter than pushing them to create amazing digital ones, but the disparity is none the less interesting to reflect on.
Maybe I’m looking at “user experience” incorrectly in this context. Apple Retail is a phenomenal work environment, largely because the staff is “coddled” this way. We hear a lot about “enriching lives” and “growing careers,” and the average new-hire repeats the phrases with starry-eyed enthusiasm for months after their training has concluded. I can look back on similar conversations after I’d been hired and with friends that I’d refer in the years after. From delicate management style to excellent benefits, the “user experience” of an Apple Store is designed as much for the employee as the customer. That’s pretty rare, and it’s reflected in one of the lowest turnover rates in retail.
Still, there’s a ceiling on that enthusiasm that I’ve seen just as many friends and co-workers brush against with me. When the initial thrill falls away, you can quickly run out of “career” to grow, and the process of “enriching lives” can become formulaic and feel meaningless. Apple hires some of the brightest people into its retail staffs, but it doesn’t do a great job of providing the challenges that newer employees thrive on. Indeed, as the retail arm has swollen to overtake almost every other brick-and-mortar out there, I’ve seen some troubling compromises made on the low end (that I’m positive an NDA permits me from discussing in detail). I’ll suffice to say that the company starts to feel very bottom heavy, and has some work to do to deal with its rapid expansion.
Anyway, Shapiro’s take on Steve Jobs is an excellent distillation of what has fueled the company’s runaway success, and a great prescription for triumph in any pursuit. Making something “insanely great” is about turning a critical eye on everything outward and inward. Sometimes an external push makes all the difference, a reminder (or revelation) of true capability.
