After a recommendation (in Polish) from a friend of mine - TesTeq I decided to read yet another book about Steve Jobs (I already read iCon, inside Steve’s Brain and iWoz from his Apple co-founder). I’m a sucker for biographies of very successful people so I read it happily. My friend didn’t like the book so much and I agree with him that the author was a little “over the top” about himself but the points he makes about Steve are worth noting:
“Cannot be done” doesn’t exist.
Steve is like this mob boss. He doesn’t listen to the word “No”. He asked several times his engineers that the iPhone should have only one button. Every time they said “this can’t be done” he asked them again. Well, look at the iPhone now. And there are even rumors that this only “Home” button will be removed in iPhone5. Time will tell.
It relates a lot to my last blog post about pushing people. I think Steve does it really well. He knows how to push his engineers to make great stuff. How to push his designers and his talented Jonny Ive to create even more beautiful products. (I should know, I’m typing this on my beautiful Macbook Air).
Prototype Cars and tough reality
In the book Steve mentions how he’s constantly disappointed by the car manufacturers. They build these beautiful prototypes, these “automobiles of the future”… and years later they manufacture cars that hardly resemble the prototypes they had in mind. I totally share Steve’s point here. I’m a fan of the automobile industry and I’m so disappointed every time…
Steve explains: The designers show the prototype to the engineers and they say “it can’t be done” and modify the design. Later the engineers show the modified designs to the manufacturing team and they say “it can’t be done” and the design is being modified yet again… It’s a shame.
What we can learn from Steve
To push ourselves and push people we work with. To dream fantastic products and focus on the details. We are about to ship the new beta version of our Nozbe desktop app and there are still many details to be worked on… and our team can’t let them be like this. We love this product and we want it to be as close to perfection as possible. And we want it to be something so much different to what you’ve seen until now. So we push ourselves and we hope to make this happen. The Steve Jobs way.
By the way, can’t wait for the OSX Lion from Apple :-)
And you? What did you learn from Steve? I mean, His Steveness? :-)