Chairman Steve’s Little White Book: The Leadership Secrets ... WEINSTEIN Proposal.pdfChairman Steve’s Little White Book Leander Kahney Page 2 innovation. Chairman Steve’s Little

Represented by: Ted Weinstein Literary Management 35 Stillman Street, Suite 203 San Francisco, CA 94107 415.546.7200 [email protected]

Nonfiction Book Proposal

Business

Chairman Steve’s Little White Book: The Leadership Secrets of Steve Jobs

by

Leander Kahney Managing Editor, Wired News and

author of The Cult of Mac

Summary

Steve Jobs is the enfant terrible of the tech industry. He's the brash, mercurial renegade who launched a revolution -- the PC era -- but was thrown out of the company he co-founded in a boardroom coup. His next company, NeXT Computer, was a failure. Steve Jobs was an exiled has-been -- and Microsoft crushed Apple. That was a decade ago. Now, Steve Jobs is back -- with a vengeance. With the unprecedented success of Apple and Pixar, Steve Jobs is the model of how to build and manage innovative enterprises in the digital age. Steve Jobs revolutionized the way we use computers; now he’s revolutionizing the way we’re entertained. With unique humor and insight, Chairman Steve’s Little White Book reveals Steve Jobs’ principles for building killer products, attracting fanatically loyal customers, and managing some of the world’s most powerful brands. It teaches the great man’s great secrets and shows readers how to be a better leader, manager, and entrepreneur.

Proposal Contents

I. Overview ......................................................................................1 II. Target Audience ...........................................................................2 III. About the Author..........................................................................3 IV. Competitive and Comparable Titles.............................................3 V. Marketing and Promotion.............................................................6 VI. Detailed Table of Contents...........................................................7 VII. Sample Chapter ..........................................................................18

Chairman Steve’s Little White Book Leander Kahney

Page 1

I. Overview

In the mid ‘70s Steve Jobs dropped out of college to co-found Apple and launch the technology

revolution. In the next 30 years, computers have swept into every aspect of our lives, utterly transforming

the way we work, the way we communicate and the way we live. At heart, all computers are Steve Jobs’

Macintosh -- even if Microsoft calls them Window PCs.

Now Steve Jobs is revolutionizing the way we’re entertained. His smash hit iPod is turning music

into a purely digital market. Shortly, the iPod and iTunes will seal the fate of the CD the same way the

Macintosh and desktop publishing sent hot type to the trashcan of history. And he may well do the same

thing for TV and movies. Steve Jobs created one groundbreaking industry, and now he’s creating another.

How does he do it?

Chairman Steve’s Little White Book explains how Steve Jobs has, through strict adherence to 10

core principles and ideas, ignited two business revolutions as profound in their implications as the dawn

of the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century. Blending biography with business how-to, the

Little White Book is a rigorous and systematic examination of the keys to Steve Jobs’ remarkable career.

Titled with a playful allusion to Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book, it details Steve Jobs’ fundamental

business practices and provides readers with a clear, practical understanding of the guiding principles

underlying his phenomenal success.

Innovative thinking and disciplined execution are what make Steve Jobs’ Apple a market leader,

and his leadership secrets can help any business in any industry do the same. Each chapter covers a

different aspect of innovation with real-life stories that highlight its effectiveness, and offers valuable

ideas that lead managers through the process of implementing Steve Jobs’ practices. Blending

biographical sketches and illustrative anecdotes from Steve Jobs life with clear, detailed analysis

explaining how his techniques can be applied to any business situation, the Little White Book will teach

readers how to adapt Steve Jobs’ techniques to their organizations and develop their own culture of


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innovation. Chairman Steve’s Little White Book combines a compelling business story with prescriptions

for business success.

II. Target Audience

There are several primary markets for the Little White Book: Apple fans looking for a positive

biography of Steve Jobs, and managers and entrepreneurs wanting to know how to build and market

products in the digital age.

1. Fans of Steve Jobs, Apple and its products.

Apple doesn’t have customers, it has fans. Apple’s followers are famously loyal. Collectively

they’re known as Macheads, Macolytes, the Cult of Mac. And there are legions of them. Apple has an

estimated 30 million users worldwide, who are well heeled and well educated. As well as the computers

and iPods, they buy lots of Apple-related goods, including books. Books about Apple or its products

regularly top the bestselling lists for technology titles.

2. Students of the technology industry, corporation structure and methodology and the digital age.

The Little White Book will also appeal to anyone interested in the technology industry. Steve Jobs

is technology’s most famous CEO, who stands out in an industry run by uncharismatic geeks and nerds.

Jobs is also a poster boy for American business and entrepreneurship in the global economy. But he’s

more than a business leader, he’s a celebrity, and like all celebrities, his image sells newspapers,

magazines and books. (Steve Jobs has appeared on the cover of Time six times in the last two decades,

and has graced the cover of Fortune more than 10 times.) In addition, business people in any industry will

be attracted to the Little White Book for guidance on how to further their careers by following Steve Jobs’

example. Managers and entrepreneurs will buy the book for tips about how to outthink and outperform

the competition (or their coworkers).


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III. About the Author

Leander Kahney is the preeminent author writing about Apple today. He is the author of two

popular books about Apple and the culture of its followers: Cult of Mac (a four-color hardcover from a

niche publisher with a $40 cover price that has already sold 15,000 net copies

[from publisher’s royalty statements] and will be released in paperback this

Fall), and Cult of iPod, a four-color paperback detailing the iPod’s impact on

music, technology and culture. Both books have been translated into Italian and

Japanese, with Korean, French and German translations in process.

Leander is the managing editor of Wired News, the online sister

publication of Wired magazine, the technophile bible. As a reporter and editor, Leander has covered

Apple for more than a dozen years. He currently writes a biweekly column for Wired News about Apple

and is the primary author of the influential Cult of Mac blog, the most popular blog in Wired’s stable with

more than 500,000 monthly pageviews.

Leander is the acknowledged expert on Apple and is often tapped by other media for insight and

expertise. He has been quoted by many of the leading TV networks and publications, including CNN,

ABC News, New York Times, Fox News, BBC, CBC, the Guardian, Observer and dozens of trade

magazines and websites.

IV. Competitive and Comparable Titles

The Little White Book will compete in several popular business genres: books about Apple,

secrets of other successful companies, and management techniques of successful business leaders

(current, historical or fictional).

There have been several bestselling biographies of Steve Jobs and histories of Apple, including:


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• Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed

Everything, by Steven Levy (Penguin, 2000)

• The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, by Alan Deutschman (Broadway, 2001)

• Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made, by Andy

Hertzfeld (O’Reilly, 2004)

• iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business, by Jeffrey S.

Young, William L. Simon (Wiley, 2005)

The Little White Book will distinguish itself from these titles by its tone and the depth of its

analysis. To date, biographies of Steve Jobs have accentuated the negative aspects of his character. For

fans of Steve Jobs, recent biographies like iCon and The Second Coming of Steve Jobs are mildly

depressing reads. They are like catalogs of his tantrums and outbursts. There’s little in the literature that

celebrates Steve Jobs’ extraordinary methods and achievements.

There has also been very little analysis of his leadership techniques. The only analytical, how-to

book about Apple on the market, The Apple Way, by Jeffrey L. Cruikshank (McGraw-Hill, December

2005) is weak in its analysis and offers inconclusive, conflicting or nonsensical “insights” (“Even a know-

it-all doesn’t necessarily know it all. Even a genius know-it-all.” “When dealing with an elephant, write

tight contracts and move faster than the elephant.”)

The Little White Book is also comparable with books detailing the methods and strategies of

successful companies, such as:

• The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World’s Most Powerful Company Really Works--and How

It’s Transforming the American Economy, by Charles Fishman (Penguin Press, 2006)

• How Dell Does It, by Steven Holzner (McGraw-Hill, 2005)

• FedEx Delivers: How the World’s Leading Shipping Company Keeps Innovating and

Outperforming the Competition, by Madan Birla (Wiley, 2005)


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• The Microsoft Way: The Real Story of How the Company Outsmarts Its Competition, by

Randall E. Stross (Perseus, 1997)

However, except for the The Apple Way, there are no titles on the market focusing on Apple,

Pixar or Steve Jobs.

Finally, the Little White Book fits among the many books about the management techniques of

successful business leaders:

• Gates: How Microsoft’s Mogul Reinvented an Industry--and Made Himself the Richest

Man in America, by Stephen Manes, Paul Andrews (Touchstone, 1994)

• Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire, by James Wallace, Jim

Erickson (Collins, 1993)

• Trump: Think Like a Billionaire: Everything You Need to Know About Success, Real

Estate, and Life, by Donald J. Trump, Meredith McIver (Random House, 2004)

• Trump: The Best Golf Advice I Ever Received, by Donald J. Trump (Crown, 2005)

• The Warren Buffett Way, by Bill Miller (Wiley, 2004)

• Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, by Roger Lowenstein (Random House,

1996)

As an unofficial biography, the Little White Book will also share some characteristics of similar

leadership titles based on historical leaders or fictional characters:

• Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun, by Wess Roberts (Warner, 1990)

• Sun Tzu Was A Sissy: Conquer Your Enemies, Promote Your Friends & Wage the Real

Art of War, by Stanley Bing (HarperBusiness, 2004)

• If Harry Potter Ran General Electric: Leadership Wisdom from the World of the Wizards

by Tom Morris (Currency, 2006)

• If Aristotle Ran General Motors, by Tom Morris (Holt, 1997)


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There is no other book on the market like the Little White Book, which is sure to appeal to readers

-- Mac fanatics and others -- who are eager to learn from the twenty-first century's most fascinating

tycoon.

V. Marketing and Promotion

The Little White Book will easily capitalize on Steve Jobs’ celebrity. There is intense interest in

the man from both the public and the media, which treats him more like a rock star than a business leader.

The Little White Book will earn mention and reviews in a wide range of leading journals.

Leander’s previous books, Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, were the subject of features and reviews

in the New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, BBC News, Village Voice, Wired magazine, Paper

magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, Dwell magazine, The Age (Melbourne), and

Washington Times, among others.

Cult of Mac received a starred review by the Library Journal and was awarded a 2005 IPPY from

Independent Publisher for Most Unique Design. Cult of iPod won a 2005 design award from Step Inside

Design magazine. Leander was interviewed about both books by NPR’s Tech Nation with Dr. Moira

Gunn, BBC News, G4 TechTV and Leo Laporte’s syndicated radio show. The books were featured in all

the Mac-related trade magazines (Macworld, MacAddict, MacFormat, etc.) and leading Mac-oriented

websites. The cover of Cult of Mac was used as the cover image for the January 2004 edition of

Macworld UK, which ran an excerpt from the book as the edition’s lead feature. The Cult of iPod was the

subject of a lead feature in the August 2005 edition of MacFormat.

The Little White Book will be promoted through the Wired.com website (1.7 million readers), in

Leander’s biweekly column and the Cult of Mac blog (500,000 readers). The Cult of Mac blog, the

column and the author’s name are all highly ranked in Google on searches for keywords like Apple, Mac,

and iPod.


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Wired.com will offer a downloadable sample chapter, and Leander is happy to offer book

excerpts or write special freelance features. Macworld’s Playlist website ran a prominent feature on iPod

culture to coincide with the launch of Cult of iPod, which was widely read and linked-to online.

Leander is happy to make appearances at bookstores or company book readings. He conducted

several readings for Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, including talks at Macworld Expo and a special

promotion in conjunction with Paper magazine and the W Hotel in Los Angeles. Leander is also keen to

promote his books on virtual book tours, where he “appears” at websites in different parts of the country

to be interviewed or guest blog.

The Little White Book is likely to secure endorsements from prominent sources. Leander’s Cult of

Mac featured blurbs from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and former Apple marketing guru Guy

Kawasaki, and he expects to be able to get blurbs for the Little White Book from Guy Kawasaki, Steve

Wozniak, and Jeffrey Young (coauthor of iCon), with possibilities from other Apple luminaries or ex-

CEOs including John Sculley, Jean-Louis Gassée, Jon Rubenstein.

VI. Detailed Table of Contents

Introduction. Why Steve Jobs is like Jesus (and Buddha, Odysseus and Krishna).

"I was worth about over a million dollars when I was twenty-three and over ten million dollars

when I was twenty-four, and over a hundred million dollars when I was twenty-five and it wasn't

that important because I never did it for the money." -- Steve Jobs

This introductory chapter provides a biographical overview and a framework for the body of the

book, while illustrating the mythic qualities of Steve Jobs’ life. Jobs’ life story adheres closely to the

classic heroic adventure myths delineated by Joseph Campbell in The Hero With a Thousand Faces and

other works. Just like the legends of Odysseus, Jason, Krishna or Christ, the Steve Jobs mythology

contains the same key elements:

• The call to adventure: joining the Homebrew Computer Club.


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• A helper: Steve Wozniak.

• A wondrous journey: the explosive growth of the early PC industry.

• Trials: competition from IBM and failures like the Lisa and Apple III.

• More helpers: the engineers and artists who created the first Mac.

• Apotheosis: Jobs is anointed as the technology industry’s seer, a prophet.

• Flight: the expulsion from Apple and a decade in the wilderness at NeXT Computer.

• Resurrection: the return to Apple.

• The boon that restores the world – the iMac and subsequent hit products.

This chapter will describe each stage in greater detail and compare each element to other great

hero myths. It will also examine the quasi-religious aspects of Steve Jobs’ life story: the humble birth of

Apple in a garage (Bethlehem?); Steve Jobs deific status with the power to create or destroy (products);

the quasi-religious nature of his following -- the Mac cultists.

But while Steve Jobs’ story has mythic qualities, a deeper analysis reveals its all-too-human

qualities. One of the most fascinating things about Steve Jobs is how ’he has been able to use his gifts --

charisma, keen intelligence -- as well as his flaws -- elitism, perfectionism -- to his advantage. The next

part of the book examines in detail what he did and how he did it, and shows how his leadership can be

emulated.

The 10 Secrets:

1. Take Control of the Whole Widget

“I’ve always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do.” --

Steve Jobs

Each chapter will follow a similar format: a quote (or quotes) from Steve Jobs, biographical

anecdote(s), analysis and advice. The first chapter will begin with an expanded, more detailed version of


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this story: In 1984, Steve Jobs’ baby -- the first Macintosh computer -- shipped without an internal

cooling fan. The sound of a fan drove him nuts, so he insisted the Mac didn’t have one, even though all

his engineers strenuously objected to it (and even sneaked fans into later models without his knowledge).

To prevent their machines overheating, customers bought a “Mac chimney” -- a cardboard stovepipe that

was placed on top of the machine like a dunce’s cap. The chimney looked preposterous but it stopped the

Mac from melting down. The anecdote illustrates Steve Jobs’ no-compromise perfectionism, which has

led him and the companies he’s founded to pursue the same unique modus operandi: maintain tight

control over hardware, software and the services they access. From the very get go, Steve Jobs has always

closed his machines down. From the first Mac to the latest iPod, Steve Jobs’ systems have always been

sealed tight shut to prevent customers from meddling and modifying them. Even his software designs are

difficult to adapt. This approach is very unusual in an industry dominated by hackers and engineers who

like to personalize their technology. In fact, it’s been widely regarded as a crippling liability in the

Microsoft-dominated era of cut-price commodity hardware.

But now consumers want well-made, easy-to-use devices for digital music, photography and

video. Jobs’ insistence on controlling “the whole widget” is the new mantra in the technology industry.

Even Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who pioneered the commodity approach, is switching gears and emulating

Steve Jobs’ line of attack. Bill Gates and his outside partners are launching a new generation of “iPod

killers” that were developed in very close collaboration -- just like the hardware and software teams at

Apple -- with Microsoft’s Xbox 360 at the heart of the “digital hub.”

The chapter will compare Steve Jobs’ approach to design with Microsoft’s Bill Gates, and

Apple’s other co-founder, Steve Wozniak, the ultimate hackers’ hacker, who has always advocated

machines that are easily customized by their users. It will illustrate how controlling the whole widget may

have been the wrong model for the last 30 years, but is right model for the next 30 years -- the digital

entertainment age.


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2. Focus On What You’re Good At, Delegate What You’re Not

“I’m as proud of the things we don’t do, as the things we do,” -- Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs’ famous keynote speeches at Macworld appear to be casual, impromptu affairs. But

behind the scenes, Steve Jobs spends days writing and rehearsing his product presentations. The opening

anecdote will tell in detail Steve Jobs’ preparations for one of keynotes.

At both Apple and Pixar, Steve Jobs’ has focused on what he was good at -- developing new

products, negotiating contracts, giving presentations -- and delegated everything else. He doesn’t try to do

it all. Instead of finances or sales, Jobs spends most of his time developing new products -- the iMac,

iPod, iTunes.

Steve Jobs’ approach is reflected in Apple’s product strategy, which is defined by a sharp focus

on very few products. At Apple, Steve Jobs has ensured that the company doesn’t try to do everything,

unlike competitors such as Dell, which sells everything from computers to printers, MP3 players and big

screen TVs. By contrast, Apple has only a dozen major products.

The same is true at Steve Jobs’ other company, Pixar, the animation studio now owned by

Disney. Instead of cranking out three or four mediocre films a year, Pixar releases just one movie every

summer -- and they have all been hits.

3. Study the Human Factors

“We were very lucky -- we grew up in a generation where music was an incredibly

intimate part of that generation. More intimate than it had been, and maybe more intimate

than it is today, because today there’s a lot of other alternatives. We didn’t have video

games to play. We didn’t have personal computers. There’s so many other things

competing for kids’ time now. But, nonetheless, music is really being reinvented in this

digital age, and that is bringing it back into people’s lives.” -- Steve Jobs


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To hasten the development of the iPod, Apple bought hardware blueprints for the new device

from PortalPlayer, a little-known Silicon Valley startup. PortalPlayer's design worked well for basic tasks

like storing music files and playing them back, but the user interface -- the controls -- sucked. As the iPod

came together, Steve Jobs started taking weekly meetings to follow its progress, which soon became daily

ones. He focused on the user interface -- the way iPod owners would find songs, play them, pause them,

and fast-forward them. He would be horribly offended if he couldn’t get to the song he wanted in less

than three pushes of a button, or if the menus were not coming up fast enough. Every day Steve Jobs sent

orders to his engineers detailing how the iPod needed to be improved to make it nicer to use.

Steve Jobs has always worked hard to keep his hardware, software and services as simple and

easy to use as possible. The examples are numerous -- from his insistence on iTunes selling all songs for a

flat 99 cents to the slides he uses for his presentations. When developing new products, he always starts in

the same place: with the user experience. He always studies the way customers will use his product or

service. He took this approach from the academic study of “human factors,” the analysis of how people

interact with their machines. Then he works backwards, paring back anything that is unnecessary or

confusing.

Several successfully tech companies have emulated Steve Jobs’ approach. Jeff Hawkins, the

inventor of the wildly popular Palm Pilot, carried around a wooden block for several months and used it

as a rudimentary prototype for the Palm Pilot. All day, every day, he pretended to use it, jotting down

notes and recording calendars. It gave him a good feel for what the user experience would be like and

helped him to refine it.

This chapter will include a case study of a classic Apple interface -- the one gracing Apple’s iPod.

4. Don’t Imitate -- Innovate. And if You Have To -- Steal

“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” -- Steve Jobs


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“Pretty much, Apple and Dell are the only ones in this industry making money. They make it by

being Wal-Mart. We make it by innovation.” -- Steve Jobs

The only reason Apple hasn’t been overtaken in the MP3 market is because Steve Jobs has

ruthlessly competed with himself to develop newer, better, cheaper iPods. ’He has constantly come out

with better models that made the old ones look hopelessly outdated. What other business would obsolete a

successful product like the iPod mini after only 18 months on the market in order to introduce the nano?

’It has been a risky but incredibly successful strategy. Compare the iPod nano to the original iPod

-- they bear only a passing resemblance. Few other tech or consumer electronics manufacturers are so

ruthlessly competitive with themselves, and it’s paid off in spades. Apple owns 70-80 percent of the

rapidly growing market for MP3 players.

The chapter will also tell of Steve Jobs’ championing of object-oriented programming at NeXT.

NeXT was seen as a failure, but in fact it was one of Steve Jobs greatest, but least celebrated, triumphs. At

NeXT, Steve Jobs used object-oriented programming to lay the foundation for Apple’s groundbreaking

OS X operating system, which Microsoft is now struggling to copy in the upcoming version of Windows

Vista.

5. Be a Benevolent Benefactor

“The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to

create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay.” -- Steve Jobs

The opening anecdote will tell of the relaxed, collegial work environment at Pixar, which is

reinventing Hollywood with its approach to making movies. Instead of assembling teams of highly paid

freelancers for each new movie -- the way Hollywood does it -- Pixar sets the same core team of creatives

on each movie it produces. The result -- a string of distinctive, high-quality “Pixar movies” that have all

been blockbusters.


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Jobs is an elitist who believes a small “A Team” is far more effective than an army of engineers

and designers. Jobs has retained the same core executive team for decades -- in fact, Apple’s top

management is mostly executives he brought with him from NeXT. Steve Jobs has always chosen great

partners -- from his Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to the London-born design genius Jonathan Ives,

who is responsible for the iMac, iPod and other iconic designs.

The chapter will show how Steve Jobs’ success is heavily dependent on his creative partners --

Avie Tevanian at NeXT, John Lasseter at Pixar, and others. It will tell how he assembled the highly

creative team responsible for the Mac -- Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, et al, -- who worked under a

pirate flag at Apple HQ. Same at Pixar: creative chief John Lasseter is the brains behind blockbusters Toy

Story and Finding Nemo. Pixar is reshaping the way the movie industry works.

6. Always Be Looking Ahead

“You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you

get it built, they’ll want something new.” -- Steve Jobs

“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they

want until you show it to them.” -- Steve Jobs

In 1998, Steve Jobs introduced the world to the iMac, the world’s first “candy-colored computer.”

And while critics swooned over its distinctive good looks, there was a huge outcry about an odd design

quirk that was ordered by Steve Jobs personally: it had no floppy drive. At the time, floppy drives were

standard issue on all computers. A computer without a floppy drive would be like computer without a CD

or DVD drive today. But Steve Jobs had decided they were antiquated, and Apple’s customers wouldn’t

have them. “People aren’t thinking clearly,” he told BusinessWeek when asked about the missing floppy.

Steve Jobs has always had a seemingly magical ability to peer into the future. He seems to be able

to travel forward in time to see how technology will evolve and then return to the present to develop them


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at Apple. Take the iMac’s missing floppy drive: within a year, the floppy drive had given way to the CD

and the Internet. And Steve Jobs had seen it coming.

There’s no secret to Steve Jobs’ ability to see into the future. It’s simply a matter of paying

attention to the latest developments in the technology industry. Steve Jobs looks at technology markets,

identifies the problems and shortcomings, and finds simple, elegant solutions based on what he himself

wants. For example, in 1998, the PC market was dominated by ugly PCs with confusing connections.

Jobs wanted a very simple computer that was aesthetically pleasing – the iMac.

Same with digital music. The iPod wasn’t Steve Jobs’ idea, but he knew a good thing when he

saw it. Apple was late to the digital music revolution. The early iMac didn’t have a CD burner when

everyone was burning CDs. To catch up, Steve Jobs embraced the idea of a hard-drive based played that

allowed users to take all their music with them, instead of burning it to CDs.

7. When Marketing, Think Different

"The ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do." --

Apple's famous Think Different television commercial.

Just like everybody else, Steve Jobs has his heroes. Many are counterculture figures: Bob Dylan,

Muhammad Ali, and Mahatma Gandhi. When Apple needed a new advertising campaign, Steve Jobs

recruited his heroes to help sell computers. The now famous Think Different campaign eschewed the tech

industry’s typical feeds-and-speeds spots for something more inspirational. The model was Harley

Davidson, which had revived its flagging motorcycle business with advertising that convinced buyers

they could revel in Harley’s renegade sprit, even if they were dentists rather than outlaws.

Steve Jobs personally selected the footage for the Think Different TV ad, which featured archive

footage of historical figures. Richard Dreyfuss narrated a voiceover celebrating the “crazy ones.” Steve

Jobs edited the spot during a marathon all-night session and in the morning sat watching it with a reporter.


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He was crying. “It wasn’t trumped up,” recalls the reporter. “Steve was genuinely moved by that stupid

ad.”

Steve Jobs doesn’t do marketing like other tech executives. No “speeds and feeds” for Steve Jobs,

or dorky spokespeople like the Dell Dude. Steve Jobs’ marketing messages are always aspirational --

lifestyle ads with lots of countercultural rebellion. Featuring Bob Dylan, Jackie Robinson and Mohammed

Ali, Jobs’ “Think Different” campaign wasn’t about the speed of chips of the size of the hard drive. It was

about making a dent in the universe -- and how Apple helps you do it. Steve Jobs always sells the

experience, not the hunk of metal and plastic. It’s not the technology; it’s what the technology can do for

you. He has several other tricks up his sleeve, including hyperbole, surprises and good old-fashioned

storytelling.

Hyperbole: Jobs makes great use of infectious enthusiasm and hyperbole. When launching the

video iPod, Jobs said, “It’s the best music player we’ve made,” “It has a gorgeous screen,” “The color is

fantastic,” and “The video quality is amazing.”

Surprises: Jobs relies heavily on surprise announcements when introducing new products. His

surprises are carefully designed to generate word-of-mouth buzz and media attention. In 1996, after

returning to Apple, Jobs needed outside capital to revive the flagging company, and he got it from a most

unlikely source: Microsoft. The $450 million he got from Bill Gates was small change, but the

investment brought him a lot of confidence from customers, partners and Wall St.

The power of storytelling: All of Steve Jobs’ marketing materials and presentations tell stories,

often with three act structures. Take his Macworld keynote speeches, which have a clear beginning,

middle and end. (They always start with an overview, a product presentation, and conclude with a

surprise finale.) He used the same structure for the famous commencement address he gave at Stanford

recently: three personal stories that illustrated three life lessons.


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8. When Choosing Partners, Don’t be Promiscuous

"It will go down in history as a turning point for the music industry. This is landmark stuff. I can't

overestimate it!" -- Steve Jobs, on Apple's iTunes Music Store.

In 2005, at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, an annual conference for Macintosh

programmers, Steve Jobs walked onto the stage to deliver an opening speech and dropped a bombshell:

Apple would be switching its computers to run on Intel chips. To Mac users, Intel was the great Satan --

half of the unholy Wintel alliance (Windows-Intel) that had conspired to relegate Apple to a miniscule

share of the PC market. There were audible gasps in the audience and fierce debate that has raged for

more than year. The move was one of the gutsiest Steve Jobs has made. As well as shifting the

perceptions of Apple’s loyal customers, it requires that all the Mac software must be rewritten for the new

platform. No mean feat when it comes ot monster chunks of code like Adobe’s Photoshop. And Apple’s

business could have collapsed if customers had shunned current machines while waiting for the new Intel

ones.

Steve Jobs chooses his outside partners very selectively. The Intel move was tremendously risky,

but Jobs is looking forward 10 years to a computing future where Apple’s better served by Intel than

IBM, Motorola or even AMD.

His other partnerships -- Disney and Pixar, or U2 for the iPod and iTunes -- burnish Apple’s

image by association. He’s not promiscuous or careless about who he cuts deals with. He courts the best,

and he can be brutal and ruthless with them. He burned Disney and ended CEO Michael Eisner’s career

when negotiating a better distribution deal for Pixar, which had become one of Disney’s most reliable

revenue sources. He also ruthlessly undercut Motorola when he simultaneously unveiled the svelte iPod

nano on same day as Motorola introduced its Rockr iTunes phone.

9. Invoke a Higher Calling

“I want to put a ding in the universe.” -- Steve Jobs.


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This chapter will begin with a description of how, in 1983, Steve Jobs spent several months

courting an advertising executive from Pepsi to run Apple. Steve Jobs wanted John Sculley to apply his

marketing skills to the burgeoning personal computer market, and especially the Macintosh. The pair met

numerous times in Silicon Valley and New York. Finally, one evening, looking out over Central Park

from the balcony of Steve Jobs’ apartment, he turned to the older man and brazenly asked him: “Do you

want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?”

At every turn of his career, Steve Jobs has recruited employees, lured developers and snagged

customers by invoking a higher calling. For Steve Jobs, programmers don’t work to make nice, easy-to-

use software; they’re striving to change the world. Apple’s customers don’t buy an iBook to work on

spreadsheets, they’re making a moral choice against the evil monopoly of Microsoft.

In everything Steve Jobs does, there’s a sense of mission. Even his lifestyle reflects this: he’s a

non-smoking vegan/pescadarian who lives in a relatively modest house. But he also displays that great

leadership trait of not saying too much. But maintaining silence on issues like religion or politics, he’s

something of a blank canvas: followers project their own values onto him. He’s revered as a liberal man

of the people, but in actuality there’s little public evidence he’s anything more than a mega-wealthy

tycoon (who owns his own personal jet).

10. Great Aesthetes Are Made, Not Born

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” -- Steve Jobs

This chapter will describe how Steve Jobs learned to develop his celebrated sense of aesthetics.

He is famous for his impeccable good taste. Hit products like the iPod and iMac are hits largely because

of their great design. His ability seems innate -- a gift he was born with, an instinctive feel. But it was

entirely learned. He educated himself by seeking out the best in design, architecture and art, and studying

it closely.


Page 18

At NeXT he often wandered into the Sony offices next door to study the company’s marketing

materials. He would pocket piles of brochures and pay careful attention to the weight of the paper, the

language, the layout, the photography and the fonts.

Steve Jobs has had a long-running obsession with clean, functional German design -- BMW

bikes, Mercedes cars, Bosendorfer grand pianos. He has carefully applied the design language he learned

from studying Mercedes cars to his Macintosh computers. The chapter will describe how Steve Jobs

arranges visits for employees to inspirational art exhibits and famous pieces of architecture, and other

techniques he has used to learn – and teach others – to appreciate and in turn develop good design.

VII. Sample Chapter

Chapter 3: Study the Human Factors

“We were very lucky -- we grew up in a generation where music was an incredibly intimate part

of that generation. More intimate than it had been, and maybe more intimate than it is today, because

today there’s a lot of other alternatives. We didn’t have video games to play. We didn’t have personal

computers. There’s so many other things competing for kids’ time now. But, nonetheless, music is really

being reinvented in this digital age, and that is bringing it back into people’s lives. It’s a wonderful thing.

And in our own small way, that’s how we’re working to make the world a better place.” -- Steve Jobs in a

Rolling Stone interview, December 03, 2003.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall…

When Steve Jobs is developing new products, he looks in the mirror and asks his reflection,

“What do you want?”

It’s a deceptively simple strategy, and for Steve Jobs, a highly effective one. But oddly, he’s one

of the few people in Silicon Valley who practice it. Almost everyone else takes the opposite approach:

they develop new technologies and then go in search of problems for these technologies to solve.


Page 19

Take the internet bubble of the late-1990s, which was defined by this kind of thinking.

Entrepreneurs launched websites for selling pet food over the net, or built giant warehouses for delivering

groceries by van, before there was any inkling customers wanted to shop this way. And it turns out they

didn’t. The internet bubble burst, taking with it myriad websites that had developed solutions to problems

that didn’t exist.

By contrast, Steve Jobs defines the problem first and then figures out ways to solve it. He always

starts in the same place: what do I want. In this way, he transforms himself into Apple’s typical customer,

an everyman, the ideal consumer. Once he has decided on what he wants, he focuses on how he will use

it. Steve Jobs isn’t so much interested in the technology; he’s interested in the customer’s experience of

the technology.

In a 1996 interview, Steve Jobs said, “Design is a funny word. Some people think design means

how it looks. But, of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. To design something really well,

you have to ‘get it.’ You have to really grok what it’s all about.” Grok is a word invented by sci-fi author

Robert A. Heinlein, meaning to understand something completely, to achieve a complete, intuitive

understanding of your subject. The story of how Steve Jobs developed the iPod is a good example of his

unique approach.

iPods Everywhere

The iPod is a breakthrough device -- a technology that is transforming not just our listening

habits, but the entire music industry.

Thanks to its size, ease of use and ability to store a ton of music, the iPod is becoming the

signature technology of the digital music era, like the jukebox in the ‘50s and the Walkman in the ‘80s.

The word “iPod” is already a brand eponym; like Kleenex or Xerox, it has come to signify all MP3

players. And just as CDs killed the LP, the iPod may well spell doom for the silver platter.


Page 20

By June 2006, about four-and-a-half years after the iPod was introduced, Apple had sold more

than 45 million iPods. By comparison, Sony sold only 3 million Walkmans in its first three years. The

iPod commands an astonishing 80 percent of the market for hard drive players. “The iPod ranks as one of

the greatest consumer electronics scores of all time,” says Business 2.0 magazine.

Some analysts expect the market for digital music players to grow exponentially in the next few

years, from about 10 million units in 2002 to 100 million units in 2006. By 2010, there’ll be 500 million

digital music players -- one for every 15th person on the planet -- according to estimates published by

Business 2.0. And while Apple’s share must surely slip, the market for portable players is becoming truly

vast. At present, Steve Jobs owns it.

Playing Catch Up

The iPod seems to have sprung suddenly from Steve Jobs’ magic toy factory, but was in fact

inspired by one of his rare missteps at Apple, and a quick -- but methodical -- product development cycle.

The story of the iPod begins with the iMac, the world’s first all-in-one computer made from

bluish-green, translucent plastic. Debuting in 1998, the teardrop-shaped machine was a smash hit, selling

more than 6 million units (still a record in the computer industry), but by 2000, its fatal flaw was

showing: it couldn’t burn recordable CDs.

While iMacs were flying off shelves, the internet was helping a profound cultural revolution to

unfold: people were starting to share their music collections with one another online. It began quietly on

college campuses but soon spread to bedrooms and workplaces the world over. Thanks to file-sharing

software like Napster, tens of millions of people were suddenly acquiring music over the Internet.

It wasn’t legal, but very quickly peoples’ music collections began migrating from the CDs on

their shelves to MP3 files on their computer’s hard drives, In the early 2000s -- the heyday of file-sharing

-- it was easier to download a song from one of the file-sharing networks than it was to find the CD on

your shelf and copy it to your computer.


Page 21

Trouble was, there was no easy way to take those downloaded songs with you. They were

wedded to the computer, which probably had a pair of tinny speakers, especially when compared to the

sound system in the living room. Most people burned CDs. But if you owned an iMac, you were out of

luck.

This bothered Steve Jobs. Like everyone else, he wanted to take his digital music collection with

him, just as he’d done with his Sony Walkman or portable CD player. So he looked in the mirror, and

asked his reflection what he wanted. The answer was a small and light digital music player that could

hold a lot of songs and was easy to load up and use.

Steve Jobs also saw an opportunity. All the digital music players on the market in early 2001

were badly designed. Steve Jobs realized that Apple, with its expertise in crafting polished user

experiences, could do better. In an interview with the New York Times, Steve Jobs said the starting point

for the iPod wasn’t a small hard drive or a new chip, but the user experience. Cryptically, he added, “And

the pieces come together. If you start to work on something, and the time is right, pieces come in from the

periphery. It just comes together.”

Birth of the iPod

“It was about being very focused and not trying to do too much with the device -- which would

have been its complication and, therefore, its demise. The enabling features aren’t obvious and evident,

because the key was getting rid of stuff.” -- Jonathan Ive, Apple’s head designer.

But it didn’t “just come together.” Steve Jobs was looking for a small but capacious portable

music player, and when he met Tony Fadell, he knew a good thing when he saw it. Tony Fadell is an

engineer who had worked for Philips and General Magic designing and manufacturing handheld devices.

He tried to launch a startup in the 1990s that would sell a portable music player that would connect, via a

computer, to an online music store. When his startup failed to attract financing, he shopped the idea

around several Silicon Valley companies, including Sony, IBM and Apple. Only Steve Jobs would listen.


Page 22

In February 2001, Apple was woefully behind the digital music revolution, thanks to the inability

of the iMac to burn CDs, and Steve Jobs wanted to leapfrog the competition with a nifty new player that

would put Apple at the forefront once again. Steve Jobs ordered the head of Apple’s hardware division,

Jon Rubenstein, to develop a hard-drive music player and have it on sale by the coming holiday season.

The requirements: a very fast connection to load up songs; tight integration with Apple’s iTunes jukebox

software to make it easy to manage a music collection; and an interface that was very simple to use. Oh,

and it must be gorgeous.

Rubenstein hired Fadell to develop Steve Jobs’ music player in double quick time. Fadell was

initially brought on as an independent contractor, and then an Apple employee, and put in charge of a

small product-development team that eventually grew to about 35 members. To hasten the iPod’s

development, Fadell bought the basic design for the hardware from PortalPlayer, a little-known Silicon

Valley startup. PortalPlayer had developed plans and working prototypes for a range of digital music

devices, from a stereo component for the living room to a battery-powered portable player the size of a

cigarette pack.

PortalPlayer’s so-called “reference design” for a portable player was rough and unfinished, but

crucially, it included a rudimentary software operating system that worked well for basic tasks like storing

music files and playing them back.

PortalPlayer’s reference design was based on a brand new, tiny hard disk, which had just been

introduced to the market by Toshiba. At the time, most other digital music players were based on another

type of storage technology, “flash” chips, which held a lot less data -- about a dozen songs. Toshiba’s new

5-gigabyte drive, housed in a case measuring just 2- by 3-inches, could store about 1,000 songs.

PortalPlayer’s design used both a hard disk and a smaller flash memory chip, which was loaded

up with several songs when the listener was playing music. As well as providing about 20 minutes of skip

protection, this scheme prevented the energy-sucking hard drive from quickly wearing down the battery.


Page 23

At Apple, Fadell cleverly assembled all the parts of PortalPlayer’s reference design from about a

dozen off-the-shelf components on the market: the 1.8-inch hard drive from Toshiba; a thin, rechargeable

battery from Sony; and a flash memory chip from Sharp. Fadell added a circuit board with music

decoding chips from PortalPlayer and a Scottish company Wolfson; a FireWire connector from Texas

Instruments that hooked the iPod to a computer for loading new songs and charging the battery; and a

mechanical scroll wheel (which was later replaced with a thinner, solid-state wheel).

Steve Jobs’ Magic Touch

As the iPod came together, Steve Jobs took weekly meetings to follow its progress, which soon

became daily ones. “The interesting thing about the iPod, is that since it started, it had 100 percent of

Steve Jobs’ time,” recalled Ben Knauss, a former senior manager at PortalPlayer who acted as the chief

liaison between the company and Apple as the iPod was being developed. “Not many projects get that. He

was heavily involved in every single aspect of the project.”

The prototype had better audio quality than other MP3 player reference designs on the market,

Knauss said. One of its designers was an ex-sonar guy from a nuclear submarine with golden ears. But as

the hardware came together, it was clear that PortalPlayer’s user interface -- the controls -- sucked. “It

was a typical interface designed by engineers,” said Knauss.

Steve Jobs focused on fixing it. He concentrated on the way future iPod owners would navigate

the device: finding songs, playing them, fast-forwarding them.

One of the problems was how to scroll through very long lists of songs to find the right one to

play. According to Newsweek, Apple’s head of marketing, the avuncular Phil Schiller, suggested a wheel

that accelerated through menus as the user turned it. The longer the user twirled the wheel, the faster it

would scroll through the list. Schiller’s idea was a stroke of genius: by making it accelerate, it became a

breeze to whiz through thousands of songs, and select the right one by hitting a button in the center of the

wheel.


Page 24

Knauss said it occurred to Steve Jobs’ that the iPod could dispense with any other controls except

the scroll wheel and select button. “(Jobs) didn’t want to lift his finger off the wheel,” Knauss said. “He

wanted to do it all that with one button. He didn’t want a bunch of buttons.” In his daily iPod meetings,

Steve Jobs would be horribly offended if he couldn’t get to the song he wanted in less than three pushes

of a button, or the menus were not coming up fast enough. Every day he sent instructions to his engineers

detailing how the iPod needed to be improved to make it nicer to use.

Knauss recalled: “We’d get orders: ‘Steve doesn’t think it’s loud enough, the sharps aren’t sharp

enough, or the menu’s not coming up fast enough.’ Every day there were comments from Steve saying

where it needed to be.”

Knauss added: “(Fadell) was the big iron boot who would step in when things weren’t going in

the right direction. He would get reamed by Steve and pass those directives onto us… If Tony had a

problem, he would yell at me first.”

How Does Steve Jobs Do It?

In an interview with the New York Times about the origins of the iPod, Apple’s head designer,

Jonathan Ive, stressed the importance of Steve Jobs’ design process, which is based on constantly

building, testing and refining prototypes. According to Ive, there were no sudden breakthroughs, no

flashes of genius, no epiphanies. Just a concentration on the user experience, and a constant back and

forth with the hardware and software engineers until the user experience had been made as seamless as

possible.

“It’s not serial,” Ive told the Times. “It’s not one person passing something on to the next.”

Which is usually the case in most electronics companies. Engineers design the hardware and pass it to

industrial designers to slap a skin around it. The programmers throw in some software and the product is

moved to marketing, who decide the packaging and go-to-market advertising strategy.


Page 25

As Steve Jobs refined the iPod’s interface, he removed elements that prevented the simplest

operation of the device: extra menu items, confusing dialog boxes, even features like a FM/AM radio,

which was built into PortalPlayer’s reference design. Meanwhile, manufacturers of rival music players

were cramming in ever more features. Competitors boasted not just radios but the ability to record songs

as well as play them back. But Jobs insisted the iPod do one thing and one thing only: play digital songs.

“What’s interesting is that out of that simplicity, and almost that unashamed sense of simplicity,

and expressing it, came a very different product,” Ive recalled. “But difference wasn’t the goal. It’s

actually very easy to create a different thing. What was exciting is starting to realize that its difference

was really a consequence of this quest to make it a very simple thing.”

Before the iPod, the Mac

This desire to make a very simple thing -- and create a very distinctive product as a result -- was

also true of Steve Jobs’ first major design breakthrough two decades earlier, the Macintosh.

Andy Hertzfeld, one of the lead programmers, recalled how Steve Jobs refined the machine’s

distinctive, all-in-one industrial design through a painstaking, step-by-step process. The Macintosh team

originally had a conventional design in mind for the computer, which at the time was a flat, lunch box

shape with a fold-down keyboard, like the popular Osborne I. But Steve Jobs wanted a classic look,

something distinctive but wouldn’t go out of style. “It’s got to be different, different from everything

else,” Hertzfeld remembers Steve Jobs declaring. Steve Jobs suggested the design of the Porsche, which

struck the team as odd. No one compared computers to sports cars.

Steve Jobs decided the Macintosh would be vertical, not horizontal like other computers, with its

screen sitting above the hard drive. It was an unusual choice, but meant the Mac would take up only a

small portion of the desks it sat on, and would feature a detachable keyboard.

When the designer, Terry Oyama, had made a first plaster model, Steve Jobs gathered the team

for its unveiling. He invited everyone to give their opinions. “I thought it was cute and attractive, looking


Page 26

a lot like an Apple II, but with a distinctive personality all its own,” Hertzfeld said. “But, after everyone

else had their say, Steve cut loose with a torrent of merciless criticism.”

Hertzfeld recalls Steve Jobs saying, “It’s way too boxy, it’s got to be more curvaceous. The

radius of the first chamfer needs to be bigger, and I don’t like the size of the bezel. But it’s a start.”

Hertzfeld said he didn’t even know what a chamfer was (it’s the edge where two surfaces meet), but

clearly Steve Jobs did. “(He) was evidently fluent in the language of industrial design, and extremely

demanding about it,” Hertzfeld said.

Under Steve Jobs’ guidance, the design was refined over the next few months. About once a

month, Oyama produced a new plaster model. Each time, Steve Jobs gathered the team for their opinions,

and all the previous models were lined up for comparison. ”By the fourth model, I could barely

distinguish it from the third one, but Steve was always critical and decisive, saying he loved or hated a

detail that I could barely perceive,” Hertzfeld recalled. One notable improvement Hertzfeld clearly

perceived was the addition of a carrying handle at the top of the case.

Hertzfeld said Steve Jobs signed off on the design only after Oyama had created five or six

models. Even today, the care that went into creating the Mac’s casing may strike some as excessive. It

took six months of effort just to refine the outside of the machine. Once that had been decided on, the real

work began -- turning the plaster model into a practical, manufacturable plastic case. According to

Herzfeld, it was the first major component of the Macintosh to be completed.

Hertzfield’s story illustrates Steve Jobs’ demanding aesthetics and his perfectionism, but it also

shows his commitment to the customer’s experience of the product, as well as the process of how he got

there.


Page 27

The Process

Steve Jobs’ design methodology can be traced back to his work on the Macintosh in the early

‘80s, and the influence of Jef Raskin, a maverick computer science professor who is credited with

bringing a focus on “human factors” to Apple.

In the late ‘70s, Raskin was a computer science professor at the University of California, San

Diego, when he met Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak at the West Coast Computer Faire, a glorified swap

meet for early computer hobbyists.

Steve Jobs hired Raskin to write a manual for Apple’s newly introduced Apple II. Raskin joined

the fledgling company in 1978 as employee number 31. While writing documentation for the Apple II,

Raskin was convinced the machine was far too difficult for most people to use. To get it to perform even

the simplest tasks, users needed to know programming. Through a series of memos, Raskin lobbied for a

truly easy-to-use personal computer, one that would be more of a “consumer appliance.” Raskin urged the

company to look into a radically new computer designed from the outset to be easy to use, with a “human

interface.”

Before joining Apple, Raskin had been a visiting academic at Xerox PARC, the copier giant’s

well-funded research lab in Palo Alto. Several leading computer scientists, who were free to follow their

wildest ideas, staffed the lab. Building on earlier academic work by the inventor of the mouse, Doug

Engelbart, the Xerox team had created a wildly imaginative graphical user interface that introduced all the

elements we are familiar with today -- windows, icons, mice and pointers, which they summarized with

the acronym, WIMP.

“I didn’t have to be sold on the idea that UI and graphics were of primary importance to the

future of computing’“ he later wrote.

In 1979, Raskin persuaded Apple’s management to let him start work on an appliance computer,

which would be based on some of the interface elements pioneered at Xerox PARC. Raskin named the

project after his favorite type of apple: the succulent Macintosh. Raskin later wrote that his work was


Page 28

based on a “design and implementation philosophy, which demanded generality and human usability over

execution speed and efficiency.”

“This at a time when the main aim of computer science courses was to teach you to make

programs run fast and use as little memory as possible,” he wrote. “When I put human usability as a

major goal, I was off on my own.”

According to Raskin, the term “human usability” didn’t enter the lexicon of computer science

until later. An important early work, “The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction,” wasn’t

published until 1983.

Raskin wanted a very simple, stripped-down appliance, something more akin to an electric

typewriter than a general-purpose computer. If he’d got his way, Raskin’s Macintosh would have had

only a few basic applications for typing or calculating. The applications would have been accessed by

hitting certain function keys, not using a mouse, which Raskin wanted to dispense with altogether.

But when Steve Jobs took over the Macintosh project (much to Raskin’s chagrin), he expanded

the interface into a full implementation of the WIMP paradigm, embracing the mouse instead of Raskin’s

keyboard shortcuts. He also turned it into a fully-fledged computer, capable of a wide range of tasks, from

calculating spreadsheets to laying out the pages of newspapers and magazines.

The Macintosh, released in 1984, was the first commercially successful product to use a graphical

user interface. When other computers presented a blinking cursor on a green screen, the Macintosh used

pictures and icons. The Mac used the metaphor of a desktop, where files looked like pieces of paper and

directories appeared as folders. Files were deleted by dragging them to a trashcan sitting at the bottom of

the screen. It included a set of “Desk Accessories” for common tasks, like a notepad, a calendar and a

calculator.

Crucially, Steve Jobs had adopted Raskin’s focus on the “human interface” -- the way the user

would interact with the machine. The result was a machine that was dead easy to learn. It was friendly. It

had personality.


Page 29

The Human Factors

Steve Jobs’ Macintosh has become the standard for the way all computers work today. Even if

Microsoft’s Bill Gates calls his operating system “Windows,” it’s a facsimile of the Mac. At the same

time, the study of “human factors” has become a major discipline in computer science, embracing

ergonomics, interface design and human-computer interaction.

Nowadays, there are few computing devices or major software applications that are designed

without the help of experts in human factors. The scientific study of how people interact with computers

has revealed two core principles that Steve Jobs knew intuitively:

1. The design of complex machines cannot be conducted solely by logic, common sense, intuition

or guesswork. It requires the study of how people interact with the system. In the past, the typical

engineer would guess at human behavior, or ignore it altogether. These days, human factors has

developed a set of methods for identifying mismatches between man and machine, and processes for

resolving them.

2. The human-factors approach is characterized by trial and error. While human factors aspires to

a scientific method, its techniques in the field are more empirical than theoretical. Human factors

designers tend to create prototypes that are tested and refined. The layout of the telephone keypad is a

good example. The phone’s keypad may appear logical and obvious, but it’s the result of hundreds of

hours of stringent design and testing. Designers tried every combination of keys imaginable and tested

them on volunteers: circular, two rows of five buttons, five rows of two buttons, a diagonal pattern. They

tried ordering the numerals top to bottom, then bottom to top. They experimented with left to right, and

right to left. They played with the font of the numerals, their size and color, as well as those of the letters.

And every other factor imaginable, from the size of the keys to their spacing. After extensive testing, it

was found that increasing the numbers from top to bottom (the opposite of desktop calculators) made it

easier to dial numbers and make less mistakes.


Page 30

One of the few people to take a similar approach to product design is Jeff Hawkins, the inventor

of the Palm Pilot. Hawkins carried around a wooden block for several months and used it as a

rudimentary prototype for the Palm Pilot. All day, every day, he pretended to use the block of wood,

jotting down notes and recording calendars. Even at the dentist, Hawkins would pretend to write an

appointment on his block of wood. People thought he was crazy, but it gave him a feel for what the user

experience would be like and helped him to refine it.

The Lessons: Focus on the User Experience

What do you want?

Ask yourself what you want. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes -- become an everyman and

ask what kind of product, or service, or experience you’d want. It’s a great starting point, because it’s

likely that you want is also what others will want.

Obsess about the customer: For Steve Jobs, the customer’s interaction with his machines has

always been a key focus. There’s a famous story about the development of the first Macintosh, and how

the Mac’s painfully slow boot-up time bothered Steve Jobs. He couldn’t bear the thought of the user

twiddling their thumbs waiting for the computer to get started.

One afternoon, Steve Jobs went into a programmer’s office and exhorted him to make the Mac

boot faster. “You know, I’ve been thinking about it,” he said, according to Andy Hertzfeld, one of the

lead programmers on the Mac team. “How many people are going to be using the Macintosh? A million?

No, more than that. In a few years, I bet five million people will be booting up their Macintoshes at least

once a day.

“Well, let’s say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time,” Steve Jobs continued. “Multiply

that by five million users and that’s 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that’s probably

dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you’ve saved a dozen lives. That’s really

worth it, don’t you think?”


Page 31

Focus on the experience.

Worrying about boot times won’t save lives, but it will shift products. Thinking about the

customer’s experience of your product or service is crucial in this complex digital age. Steve Jobs has said

he isn’t worried about competition for the iPod from companies like Samsung or Dell, because they’re

focusing on the wrong thing. Instead of the user experience, they compete on tangibles, like hard drive

capacity or price. “The Dells of the world don’t spend money (on the user experience),” he said. “They

don’t think about these things.” They should, because the iPod’s ease of use is what sets it high above its

rivals.

Be your own guinea pig.

Steve Jobs takes a shortcut by making himself the subject of his own human factors experiments.

He’s like the mad professor in the lab, experimenting on himself instead of others. As evidenced by the

iPod, this often works well, but it sometimes has idiosyncratic effects. For example, the iPod is louder

than most MP3 players because Jobs is partly deaf, according to PortalPlayer’s Knauss. “They drove the

sound up so he could hear it,” Knauss said.

Be empirical, not theoretical.

Steve Jobs relies on a certain amount of trial and error. Many areas of human creativity take the

same approach-- in business it’s known as brainstorming, in Artificial Intelligence it’s called “generate

and test.” You throw out a lot of ideas and later go back and selecting the best. Many artists and writers

work this way. They bash out a rough draft, then go through and edit it. The design guru Don Norman, an

ex-Apple designer who is now a leading Silicon Valley consultant, likens good design to good writing.

The more effort the writer puts into a piece of writing, the easier it is for the reader.


Page 32

Don’t Skimp the Edit.

Unfortunately, most companies skimp on the editing part. They throw something together and

stop when it’s good enough. Sometimes this is because of time pressure, like orders from management or

the need to get a product on the market before a competitor. Microsoft is infamous for this kind of product

development. There’s an old adage that says Microsoft never gets its software right until version three. It

rushes out the first version, smoothes the rough edges in the second, and by the third has a polished

product. By contrast, Steve Jobs tends not to release the product until it’s gone through quite a lot of

refinement inside the company.

Conclusions:

Ask yourself what you want. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes, become an everyman and ask

what kind of product, or service, or experience you’d want. It’s a good starting point.

Brainstorm. Throw ideas out. Generate as many ideas, or as many prototypes, as you can.

Anything goes, no matter how crazy they are.

Edit your ideas. Go through the work at least three times, refining it and improving it. Be your

own harshest critic. Identify the flaws and fix them. Don’t gloss over problems.

Polish. Who else but Steve Jobs would be concerned with the speed at which the iPod’s menus

come up? Well, you should be. Pay fanatical attention to detail. It’s the way to create a great customer

experience.

Set a deadline. Not even Steve Jobs can get away with tinkering forever. With the iPod, Steve

Jobs wanted it on sale by the holiday season, which gave Apple less that a year to get the device together.

And not just the hardware, but the packaging, the marketing, everything. Of course, the product has been

in constant development since then. It has been improved and tweaked every six months to become the

polished fashion item it is today: see the next chapter.

Documents

Chairman Steve’s Little White Book: The Leadership Secrets ... WEINSTEIN Proposal.pdfChairman Steve’s Little White Book Leander Kahney Page 2 innovation. Chairman Steve’s Little