by Daniel Lyons
Next we go over some iPhone FPPs (Fake Product Prototypes) that we’ll be distributing around Apple and to some of our suppliers to keep people confused about what the actual product is going to look like. Even with our fake products I insist on the highest standards and so I give him my usual critique: “These are total shit,” I say.
He just shrugs and gives me his usual weary smile, the one that says, “Steve, you’re the toughest boss I’ve ever had, but I love you because you push me to bring out the best in myself. And if I ever find you asleep and there’s no one around, I am going to kill you.”
We finish up with twenty minutes of hanging upside down in gravity boots, doing some brainstorming. No big ideas emerge.
I have the afternoon blocked off for Ross Ziehm, our PR guy. Ross is the ultimate flack, a cross between a pit bull and a weasel, but with the face of a schoolboy. He began his career at IBM, then moved on to the National Rifle Association. After that he worked for Pacific Gas & Electric during the years when they were being sued by Erin Brockovich for putting chemicals into groundwater that caused cancer. His spin on that? “First, the science was flawed. Second, nobody forced these people to live in this town and drink the water.” Talk about balls. Nothing fazes this guy. He’s perfect.
The great thing about Ross is that although he has a heart of pure evil, on the outside he looks like the nicest guy you’d ever meet. Soft-spoken, never swears, uses words like “gosh.” He grew up in Long Beach, and is a total Southern California surfer kid. He’s in his forties now but he still surfs, down at Maverick’s in Santa Cruz, and he’s still got the look—tousled blonde hair, whitened teeth, tall and lean, good-looking in that tanned movie-star kind of way. Drives an old beat-up Subaru Outback wagon with his board on the roof and his wetsuit in the back and loads of leftie bumper stickers.
Ross’s take on how to handle the Sonya Bourne resignation is to pretend it didn’t happen. No announcement, no press release.
“Who pays attention to the general counsel? Just bury it in some SEC filing at the end of the year,” he says.
He shows me the draft of the press release we’re going to put out announcing that we’ve brought in a team of lawyers to conduct our internal investigation. I do what I always do. Without even looking at the paper I say, “This is shit. Too wordy. Fourth sentence makes no sense. Transitions need work. Do it again and bring it back.”
I make him do his rewrites at a desk outside the Jobs Pod, so I can watch him through the glass wall and bombard him with suggestions via iChat and email. Makes him nuts, but that’s how people get creative. You’ve got to get them a little bit crazy. After five drafts over three hours I sit back in my chair and read the whole thing, very slowly. Then roll it up into a ball and tell him I liked the first one best, so go with that.
He laughs his ass off and says, “Oh, Steve, you know what? I love you, man! What a process! I can’t believe it!”
We call the management team together and hand out copies for everyone to review. Ross gives everyone the usual speech about how all press inquiries should be routed to him. He also explains our timing. We’re going to put the news out on Thursday, right before the Fourth of July holiday weekend.
“We’ll wait until the end of the day West Coast time, after the markets have closed,” he says. “The papers back East will have a couple of hours to close their stories before their deadline hits, and their editions will mostly be locked up by then, but I’m sure they’ll be able to get some kind of brief item into the paper.”
I thank Ross for his excellent presentation and then explain to the team that the really insanely great thing about doing it this way is that people will have all day Friday, the first day of the long Fourth of July holiday weekend, to digest the news, and since the holiday isn’t until Tuesday, they’ll have at least four more days to mull over this important information. A lot of people will be taking all of next week off, so when they’re on the beach with their kids they’ll definitely be able to give this story their full attention, and by the time people come back from their break, nearly two weeks from now, they’ll know that we here at Apple are really serious about this, um, thing with options or whatever that happened a while ago and we said we are looking into it.
“Steve,” says Pete Fisher, our senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, “once again I bow to your genius. What can I say? You’re brilliant. Brilliant.”
Jim Bell, our COO, says he couldn’t agree more. Same with Paul Doezen and Lars Aki. Stephane Villalobos, our head of sales, says he’s not a native English speaker but he’d still like to compliment me on how well-written the press release is. Ross Ziehm pipes up to say that he concurs, that I absolutely have a gift for language, which is especially amazing because I’m also such a hardcore electronics genius.
“You could have been one of the great ones,” Ross says. “Tolstoy, Steinbeck, Hemingway. Heck, you still could, whenever you decide to write the great American novel.”
“Okay,” I say, “great meeting. Great feedback. Thanks for your honesty. Really valuable.”
By the time we’re done it’s past six and most people are heading home. But my day is just beginning. I’m off to the Tassajara meditation room with the iPhone circuit board again. Yes, I’m still obsessing about this board. But this product is more important than anything we’ve ever made. Right now we are living in the middle of what people in the Valley call an extreme inflection point. Every kind of information is going digital. Phone calls, movies, TV shows, music, books. To produce and consume digital media, you need computers. Which means everything around you becomes a computer. Your phone, your TV, your stereo.
Who better to rule this new world than me? Everything I’ve done during my entire life has been in preparation for this. The past thirty years at Apple were like Act One in a play. Now we are beginning Act Two. Today we are doing twenty billion a year in sales and we have an eighty-billion-dollar market value. Which is great. But it’s nothing compared to where we can be in ten years.
Which is why I’m here on a Monday night, trying to perfect this circuit board. What am I searching for? It’s hard to put it into words. The thing is, anyone can make a phone, just like anyone can make a computer. But that’s not good enough for Apple. Part of what makes us different—and, yes, better—is the way we create products. For example, we don’t start with the product itself. We start with the ads. We’ll spend months on advertisements alone. This is the reverse of how most companies do it. Everybody else starts with the product, and only when it’s done do they go, “Oh, wait, we need some ads, don’t we?” Which is why most advertising sucks, because it’s an afterthought. Not here. At Apple, advertising is a prethought. If we can’t come up with a good ad, we probably won’t do the product.
Once we’ve got the ad campaign, then we start work on the product. But we don’t start with the technology. We start with design. Again, different. Lars Aki will bring me fifteen iPhone prototypes. I take them into my meditation room and I go into a trance. Here’s the key part: I don’t think about them. I don’t think about anything. Not so easy to do, to think about nothing. But after years of practice I can empty my head and get into this non-thinking state in just a few minutes.
I’ll sit for hours, non-thinking about the fifteen prototypes. Gradually, very gradually, one will begin to emerge from the others as the best of the bunch. When that happens I’m done. I’ll send the emergent design, as we call it, back to Lars Aki and tell him to start all over, making a hundred or so new prototypes that branch off from this one. From those his team will winnow down the pool to another batch of fifteen winners. I return to the meditation room once again and empty my mind and choose the next emergent design. This process can go on for months, with round after round of emergent designs, and it’s all based on non-thinking, intuitive interpretation.
When we finally settle on a physical prototype, we start working on chips and software. We make our own special chips, our own special softwa
re. We put the chips and software into the physical design and I do some more non-thinking meditation. Unfortunately it often occurs that the software is amazing but it doesn’t feel right in this physical package, and so we have to go back and redesign the phone all over again, employing the same emergent design process. Then there’s the color issue. You can’t imagine how many shades of black there are. And white. Then we have to consider finishes. Satin, matte, glossy, high-gloss. I’ll spend weeks working eighteen-hour days looking at color chips and be drained at the end of each day.
Then there’s packaging. We put as much thought, maybe more, into the packaging of the product as we do into the product itself. What we’re looking to achieve is this magical sequence that takes place when you open the box. How does the box open? Is there a tongue? Two side slots? What color is the box? Which grade of cardboard do we use? How does it feel to your fingers? And what about inside? Does the iPhone lie flat? Is it tilted up? Is there plastic over it? Do we put a sticky thing over the screen that you have to peel off?
With the iPhone, we’d got all the way through all of these processes. Everything was done. We were ready to ship. But one day I was visiting the hardware lab and I happened to see a circuit board lying out on a workbench. I said, “You’re kidding, right? That’s not the actual board, is it?”
So I returned to the meditation room. It’s maddening for the team. I get a huge amount of grief from the engineers. But this is how I do things. This is my process. And this is why Apple products are special. If you want something non-special, you can buy a Dell.
Mike Dinsmore is the VP of engineering in charge of the iPhone project. He’s also a flat-out genius and a huge legend in the Valley, a former professor at UC Berkeley who once won a Turing Award, which for geeks is on a par with the Nobel Prize. He not only developed a version of UNIX but he also designed one of the first RISC microprocessors. He’s also a freak of nature: six-foot-five, a big bright shock of Bozo-red hair, Howdy Doody freckles and skin so white he appears fluorescent. And he has absolutely no regard for personal appearance or personal hygiene. If I hadn’t hired him ten years ago he’d still be stuck in some lab at Berkeley building tinker toys and living in some crap apartment in Oakland and scaring the bejesus out of girls from the local escort services. Instead, thanks to me, he’s a millionaire many times over, living in Atherton with an incredibly hot wife who has enough class not to cheat on him openly and a pack of little fish-pale red-haired kids who are every bit as glow-in-thedark scary as he is.
He’s waiting for me outside the development lab when I arrive on Tuesday to announce the huge breakthrough I’ve had.
He’s wearing black shorts, a black T-shirt and huge black sunglasses. I can’t tell if he dresses this way in order to look even more freaky or if he actually believes black clothes look good next to super-pale skin. He’s here to escort me into the building. Believe it or not, even though I am Dictator for Life here, there are some buildings that even I am not authorized to enter alone, and this is one of them.
“Welcome,” he says, injecting just enough irony into his voice to let me know he doesn’t really mean it, because honestly, I’m never welcome in the engineering labs. All I ever do is cause trouble for these guys.
The iPhone team works in a cement-block bunker with no windows and a lead-lined roof to prevent companies from spying on us from airplanes. The hallways are designed like a maze, which deflects sound waves and makes it more difficult for someone to eavesdrop electronically from outside. The whole place gets swept for bugs once a week.
There are only two doors into the building and both have bag scanners and metal detectors, just like at the airport, and they’re manned by former Israeli commandos. We go inside and pass through the retina scanner and then into the security foyer. The Israelis glare at us and say nothing.
The iPhone is so secret that we refer to the project only by its code name, Guatama. We don’t use the word “phone” or “iPhone” in email or in conversation. To make things even more secure, three-quarters of our engineers aren’t even working on the actual iPhone. They’re working on FPPs. Even the engineers themselves don’t know if they’re working on real products or fake ones.
Mike leads me through the concrete maze to the building’s conference room. His engineers are in there gobbling pastries and slurping coffee, waiting for us and looking pissed off.
“Namaste,” I say to the engineering dorks, bowing slightly from the waist with my hands pressed together, pretending that I have great respect for their big math-loving brains. “I honor the Buddha inside you.”
They grumble and grunt. A couple of them do the “namaste” thing back to me. I’m pretty sure they’re taking the piss out of me. One thing I’d forgotten to mention: engineers are the world’s biggest assholes.
“So I pulled half of an all-nighter last night,” I tell them, “and I’ve come up with some ideas on the circuit board. We’re going to need a complete redesign.”
Groans all around, and Mike says, “Steve, before we get into the design review, I’d just like to say that we all have huge amounts of respect for your genius, but the board is designed the way it is because that’s the best way to move the signals through the circuit. It’s an optimized design. You can’t just change it because you don’t like the way it looks.”
I remind him that, first of all, I can do anything I want, and second, I know they want to kill me but they have to admit that I know how to design products, and I’m sorry but this circuit board for the iPhone is way too ugly.
“There’s no balance,” I say. “You’ve got this long piece on the left—”
“That’s a memory chip,” one of the engineers says, interrupting me.
“And you’ve got nothing on the right side to balance it out. And the big chip—”
“That’s the microprocessor,” the smart-ass says, interrupting me again.
I stop and look at him. He’s a fat guy with a ponytail and a little soul-patch juice-mop beard and a Dead Kennedys T-shirt.
“The big chip,” I say, “should be right in the middle, not off-center. The two little gold pieces on the right should be lined up straight. You’ve got all these little skinny lines on one side then big fat lines on the other, with loads of space. Come on, guys. Go back and redo this. I want it perfectly symmetrical.”
Mike says if we arrange the chips the way I’m suggesting, the circuit won’t work. “We’ll get signal bleed,” he says.
“Just try it,” I say. “Do it and let’s see.”
The know-it-all guy says, “With all due respect, we’re electrical engineers, okay? I think we might have a little insight into what we’re doing.”
He gets up out of his chair and goes to the whiteboard and starts trying to give me a lesson in how electric current flows through a circuit. I know he thinks he’s being the big hero, standing up to the tyrant boss. What he doesn’t notice is that all of the other guys are staring down at their hands, like a little herd of sheep averting their eyes when one of their fellow sheep is about to be picked off by a wolf.
I press my hands together in my prayer position. I go all very weird and quiet. When he’s done with his lecture, I say, in the softest voice I can produce, “Excuse me, but what is your name?”
“Jeff,” he says.
“Jeff. Good. Jeff, please put down that marker and leave the building. Drop your badge at the security checkpoint. Mike will process your paperwork this afternoon.”
“What? I’m fired?”
“You know,” I say, “you pick things up fast. You must be an engineer, right?”
Later in the day Mike Dinsmore comes to see me and tells me Jeff didn’t mean to be rude but he’s having a tough time at home, his wife has some terminal illness and they’ve got three kids and one of them is in a wheelchair and needs a special van, blah blah blah.
“Oh,” I say, “I had no idea.”
He stands there. I let him wait.
Finally he says, “So
?”
I go, “Mike, who’s your supervisor?”
“Ted Reibstein.”
“Okay. Hold on.”
I press my speakerphone and buzz Ja’Red and tell him to get Ted Reibstein from engineering on the phone.
When Ted picks up I say, “Ted, this is Steve. I’m here with Mike Dinsmore. I’m sending him down to your office so you can fire him and process his paperwork. And there’s a guy who works for him, Jeff something, who also needs to be fired. Mike will explain.”
“Sure thing,” Ted says.
Mike stands there with his jaw hanging open. I spin around in my chair, facing away from him, and start checking my email. When I turn back he’s still standing there, towering over my desk like some freako red-haired giant from Lord of the Rings, clenching and unclenching his fists.
I call Ja’Red again and tell him to have security send up Avi and Yuri. “Tell them to bring their Tasers,” I say. That sends the big freak running.
I’m often asked about my management style, especially since I gave that amazing commencement speech at Stanford and everyone realized what an incredibly deep thinker I am. I’ve seen those Internet rumors about how I didn’t really write that speech, how I hired some ghostwriter. All I can say is: Please. The guy fixed some grammar errors and punched it up a bit. But I’m the one who spent half a day in Longs Drug Store reading Hallmark cards to gather material.
Like everything else at Apple, my management approach is a little bit different. I never subscribed to the conventional wisdom of the East Coast management experts like Jack Welch. For example, Welch says do a lot of reviews and always let people know where they stand. I say, No way. In fact, quite the opposite. Never let people know where they stand. Keep them guessing. Keep them afraid. Otherwise they get complacent. Creativity springs from fear. Think of a painter, or a writer, or a composer working furiously in his studio, afraid he’s going to starve to death if he doesn’t get his work done. That’s where greatness comes from. Same goes for the people at Apple and Pixar. They come in every day knowing it could be their last day. They work like hell; trust me.