That was the fundamental principle Jobs and Ive shared. Design was not just about what a product looked like on the surface. I t had to reflect the product"s essence. "In most people"s vocabularies, design means veneer," Jobs told Fortune shortly after retaking the reins at Apple. "But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers."
As a result, the process of designing a product at Apple was integrally related to how it would be engineered and manufactured. Ive described one of Apple"s Power Macs. "We wanted to get rid of anything other than what was absolutely essential," he said. "T o do so required total collaboration between the designers, the product developers, the engineers, and the manufacturing team. We kept going back to the beginning, again and again. Do we need that part? Can we get it to perform the function of the other four parts?"
The connection between the design of a product, its essence, and its manufacturing was ill.u.s.trated for Jobs and Ive when they were traveling in France and went into a kitchen supply store. Ive picked up a knife he admired, but then put it down in disappointment. Jobs did the same. "We both noticed a tiny bit of glue between the handle and the blade," Ive recalled. They talked about how the knife"s good design had been ruined by the way it was manufactured. "We don"t like to think of our knives as being glued together," Ive said. "Steve and I care about things like that, which ruin the purity and detract from the essence of something like a utensil, and we think alike about how products should be made to look pure and seamless."
At most other companies, engineering tends to drive design. The engineers set forth their specifications and requirements, and the designers then come up with cases and sh.e.l.ls that will accommodate them. For Jobs, the process tended to work the other way. In the early days of Apple, Jobs had approved the design of the case of the original Macintosh, and the engineers had to make their boards and components fit.
After he was forced out, the process at Apple reverted to being engineer-driven. "Before Steve came back, engineers would say "Here are the guts"-processor, hard drive-and then it would go to the designers to put it in a box," said Apple"s marketing chief Phil Schiller. "When you do it that way, you come up with awful products." But when Jobs returned and forged his bond with Ive, the balance was again tilted toward the designers. "Steve kept impressing on us that the design was integral to what would make us great," said Schiller. "Design once again dictated the engineering, not just vice versa."
On occasion this could backfire, such as when Jobs and Ive insisted on using a solid piece of brushed aluminum for the edge of the iPhone 4 even when the engineers worried that it would compromise the antenna. But usually the distinctiveness of its designs-for the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad-would set Apple apart and lead to its triumphs in the years after Jobs returned.
Inside the Studio.
The design studio where Jony Ive reigns, on the ground floor of Two Infinite Loop on the Apple campus, is shielded by tinted windows and a heavy clad, locked door. Just inside is a gla.s.s-booth reception desk where two a.s.sistants guard access. Even high-level Apple employees are not allowed in without special permission. Most of my interviews with Jony Ive for this book were held elsewhere, but one day in 2010 he arranged for me to spend an afternoon touring the studio and talking about how he and Jobs collaborate there.
T o the left of the entrance is a bullpen of desks with young designers; to the right is the cavernous main room with six long steel tables for displaying and playing with works in progress. Beyond the main room is a computer-aided design studio, filled with workstations, that leads to a room with molding machines to turn what"s on the screens into foam models. Beyond that is a robot-controlled spray-painting chamber to make the models look real. The look is spa.r.s.e and industrial, with metallic gray decor. Leaves from the trees outside cast moving patterns of light and shadows on the tinted windows. Techno and jazz play in the background.
Almost every day when Jobs was healthy and in the office, he would have lunch with Ive and then wander by the studio in the afternoon. As he entered, he could survey the tables and see the products in the pipeline, sense how they fit into Apple"s strategy, and inspect with his fingertips the evolving design of each. Usually it was just the two of them alone, while the other designers glanced up from their work but kept a respectful distance. I f Jobs had a specific issue, he might call over the head of mechanical design or another of Ive"s deputies. I f something excited him or sparked some thoughts about corporate strategy, he might ask the chief operating officer Tim Cook or the marketing head Phil Schiller to come over and join them. Ive described the usual process: This great room is the one place in the company where you can look around and see everything we have in the works. When Steve comes in, he will sit at one of these tables. I f we"re working on a new iPhone, for example, he might grab a stool and start playing with different models and feeling them in his hands, remarking on which ones he likes best. Then he will graze by the other tables, just him and me, to see where all the other products are heading. He can get a sense of the sweep of the whole company, the iPhone and iPad, the iMac and laptop and everything we"re considering. That helps him see where the company is spending its energy and how things connect. And he can ask, "Does doing this make sense, because over here is where we are growing a lot?" or questions like that. He gets to see things in relationship to eachother, which is pretty hard to do in a big company. Looking at the models on these tables, he can see the future for the next three years.
Much of the design process is a conversation, a back-and-forth as we walk around the tables and play with the models. He doesn"t like to read complex drawings. He wants to see and feel a model. He"s right. I get surprised when we make a model and then realize it"s rubbish, even though based on the CAD [computer-aided design] renderings it looked great.
He loves coming in here because it"s calm and gentle. I t"s a paradise if you"re a visual person. There are no formal design reviews, so there are no huge decision points. Instead, we can make the decisions fluid. Since we iterate every day and never have dumb-a.s.s presentations, we don"t run into major disagreements.
On this day Ive was overseeing the creation of a new European power plug and connector for the Macintosh. Dozens of foam models, each with the tiniest variation, have been cast and painted for inspection. Some would find it odd that the head of design would fret over something like this, but Jobs got involved as well. Ever since he had a special power supply made for the Apple I I , Jobs has cared about not only the engineering but also the design of such parts. His name is listed on the patent for the white power brick used by the MacBook as well as its magnetic connector with its satisfying click. In fact he is listed as one of the inventors for 212 different Apple patents in the United States as of the beginning of 2011.
Ive and Jobs have even obsessed over, and patented, the packaging for various Apple products. U.S. patent D558572, for example, granted on January 1, 2008, is for the iPod Nano box, with four drawings showing how the device is nestled in a cradle when the box is opened. Patent D596485, issued on July 21, 2009, is for the iPhone packaging, with its st.u.r.dy lid and little glossy plastic tray inside.
Early on, Mike Markkula had taught Jobs to "impute"-to understand that people do judge a book by its cover-and therefore to make sure all the trappings and packaging of Apple signaled that there was a beautiful gem inside. Whether it"s an iPod Mini or a MacBook Pro, Apple customers know the feeling of opening up the well-crafted box and finding the product nestled in an inviting fashion. "Steve and I spend a lot of time on the packaging," said Ive. "I love the process of unpacking something. You design a ritual of unpacking to make the product feel special. Packaging can be theater, it can create a story."
Ive, who has the sensitive temperament of an artist, at times got upset with Jobs for taking too much credit, a habit that has bothered other colleagues over the years. His personal feelings for Jobs were so intense that at times he got easily bruised. "He will go through a process of looking at my ideas and say, "That"s no good. That"s not very good. I like that one,"" Ive said. "And later I will be sitting in the audience and he will be talking about it as if it was his idea. I pay maniacal attention to where an idea comes from, and I even keep notebooks filled with my ideas. So it hurts when he takes credit for one of my designs." Ive also has bristled when outsiders portrayed Jobs as the only ideas guy at Apple. "That makes us vulnerable as a company," Ive said earnestly, his voice soft. But then he paused to recognize the role Jobs in fact played. "In so many other companies, ideas and great design get lost in the process," he said. "The ideas that come from me and my team would have been completely irrelevant, nowhere, if Steve hadn"t been here to push us, work with us, and drive through all the resistance to turn our ideas into products."
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN.
THE iMAC.
h.e.l.lo (Again).
Back to the Future.
The first great design triumph to come from the Jobs-Ive collaboration was the iMac, a desktop computer aimed at the home consumer market that was introduced in May 1998. Jobs had certain specifications. I t should be an all-in-one product, with keyboard and monitor and computer ready to use right out of the box. I t should have a distinctive design that made a brand statement. And it should sell for $1,200 or so. (Apple had no computer selling for less than $2,000 at the time.) "He told us to go back to the roots of the original 1984 Macintosh, an all-in-one consumer appliance,"
recalled Schiller. "That meant design and engineering had to work together."
The initial plan was to build a "network computer," a concept championed by Oracle"s Larry Ellison, which was an inexpensive terminal without a hard drive that would mainly be used to connect to the Internet and other networks. But Apple"s chief financial officer Fred Anderson led the push to make the product more robust by adding a disk drive so it could become a full-fledged desktop computer for the home. Jobs eventually agreed.
Jon Rubinstein, who was in charge of hardware, adapted the microprocessor and guts of the PowerMac G3, Apple"s high-end professional computer, for use in the proposed new machine. I t would have a hard drive and a tray for compact disks, but in a rather bold move, Jobs and Rubinstein decided not to include the usual floppy disk drive. Jobs quoted the hockey star Wayne Gretzky"s maxim, "Skate where the puck"s going, not where it"s been." He was a bit ahead of his time, but eventually most computers eliminated floppy disks.
Ive and his top deputy, Danny Coster, began to sketch out futuristic designs. Jobs brusquely rejected the dozen foam models they initially produced, but Ive knew how to guide him gently. Ive agreed that none of them was quite right, but he pointed out one that had promise. I t was curved, playful looking, and did not seem like an unmovable slab rooted to the table. "I t has a sense that it"s just arrived on your desktop or it"s just about to hop off and go somewhere," he told Jobs.
By the next showing Ive had refined the playful model. This time Jobs, with his binary view of the world, raved that he loved it. He took the foam prototype and began carrying it around the headquarters with him, showing it in confidence to trusted lieutenants and board members. In its ads Apple was celebrating the glories of being able to think different, yet until now nothing had been proposed that was much different from existing computers. Finally, Jobs had something new.
The plastic casing that Ive and Coster proposed was sea-green blue, later named bondi blue after the color of the water at a beach in Australia, and it was translucent so that you could see through to the inside of the machine. "We were trying to convey a sense of the computer being changeable based on your needs, to be like a chameleon," said Ive. "That"s why we liked the translucency. You could have color but it felt so unstatic. And it came across as cheeky."
Both metaphorically and in reality, the translucency connected the inner engineering of the computer to the outer design. Jobs had always insisted that the rows of chips on the circuit boards look neat, even though they would never be seen. Now they would be seen. The casing would make visible the care that had gone into making all components of the computer and fitting them together. The playful design would convey simplicity while also revealing the depths that true simplicity entails.
Even the simplicity of the plastic sh.e.l.l itself involved great complexity. Ive and his team worked with Apple"s Korean manufacturers to perfect the process of making the cases, and they even went to a jelly bean factory to study how to make translucent colors look enticing. The cost of each case was more than $60 per unit, three times that of a regular computer case. Other companies would probably have demanded presentations and studies to show whether the translucent case would increase sales enough to justify the extra cost. Jobs asked for no such a.n.a.lysis.
T opping off the design was the handle nestled into the iMac. I t was more playful and semiotic than it was functional. This was a desktop computer; not many people were really going to carry it around. But as Ive later explained: Back then, people weren"t comfortable with technology. I f you"re scared of something, then you won"t touch it. I could see my mum being scared to touch it. So I thought, if there"s this handle on it, it makes a relationship possible. I t"s approachable. I t"s intuitive. I t gives you permission to touch. I t gives a sense of its deference to you. Unfortunately, manufacturing a recessed handle costs a lot of money. At the old Apple, I would have lost the argument. What was really great about Steve is that he saw it and said, "That"s cool!" I didn"t explain all the thinking, but he intuitively got it. He just knew that it was part of the iMac"s friendliness and playfulness.
Jobs had to fend off the objections of the manufacturing engineers, supported by Rubinstein, who tended to raise practical cost considerationswhen faced with Ive"s aesthetic desires and various design whims. "When we took it to the engineers," Jobs said, "they came up with thirty-eight reasons they couldn"t do it. And I said, "No, no, we"re doing this." And they said, "Well, why?" And I said, "Because I "m the CEO, and I think it can be done." And so they kind of grudgingly did it."
Jobs asked Lee Clow and Ken Segall and others from the TBWAChiatDay ad team to fly up to see what he had in the works. He brought them into the guarded design studio and dramatically unveiled Ive"s translucent teardrop-shaped design, which looked like something from The Jetsons, the animated TV show set in the future. For a moment they were taken aback. "We were pretty shocked, but we couldn"t be frank," Segall recalled.
"We were really thinking, "Jesus, do they know what they are doing?" I t was so radical." Jobs asked them to suggest names. Segall came back with five options, one of them "iMac." Jobs didn"t like any of them at first, so Segall came up with another list a week later, but he said that the agency still preferred "iMac." Jobs replied, "I don"t hate it this week, but I still don"t like it." He tried silk-screening it on some of the prototypes, and the name grew on him. And thus it became the iMac.
As the deadline for completing the iMac drew near, Jobs"s legendary temper reappeared in force, especially when he was confronting manufacturing issues. At one product review meeting, he learned that the process was going slowly. "He did one of his displays of awesome fury, and the fury was absolutely pure," recalled Ive. He went around the table a.s.sailing everyone, starting with Rubinstein. "You know we"re trying to save the company here," he shouted, "and you guys are s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g it up!"
Like the original Macintosh team, the iMac crew staggered to completion just in time for the big announcement. But not before Jobs had one last explosion. When it came time to rehea.r.s.e for the launch presentation, Rubinstein cobbled together two working prototypes. Jobs had not seen the final product before, and when he looked at it onstage he saw a b.u.t.ton on the front, under the display. He pushed it and the CD tray opened. "What the f.u.c.k is this?!?" he asked, though not as politely. "None of us said anything," Schiller recalled, "because he obviously knew what a CD tray was."
So Jobs continued to rail. I t was supposed to have a clean CD slot, he insisted, referring to the elegant slot drives that were already to be found in upscale cars. "Steve, this is exactly the drive I showed you when we talked about the components," Rubinstein explained. "No, there was never a tray, just a slot," Jobs insisted. Rubinstein didn"t back down. Jobs"s fury didn"t abate. "I almost started crying, because it was too late to do anything about it," Jobs later recalled.
They suspended the rehearsal, and for a while it seemed as if Jobs might cancel the entire product launch. "Ruby looked at me as if to say, "Am I crazy?"" Schiller recalled. "I t was my first product launch with Steve and the first time I saw his mind-set of "I f it"s not right we"re not launching it.""
Finally, they agreed to replace the tray with a slot drive for the next version of the iMac. "I "m only going to go ahead with the launch if you promise we"re going to go to slot mode as soon as possible," Jobs said tearfully.
There was also a problem with the video he planned to show. In it, Jony Ive is shown describing his design thinking and asking, "What computer would the Jetsons have had? I t was like, the future yesterday." At that moment there was a two-second snippet from the cartoon show, showing Jane Jetson looking at a video screen, followed by another two-second clip of the Jetsons giggling by a Christmas tree. At a rehearsal a production a.s.sistant told Jobs they would have to remove the clips because Hanna-Barbera had not given permission to use them. "Keep it in," Jobs barked at him. The a.s.sistant explained that there were rules against that. "I don"t care," Jobs said. "We"re using it." The clip stayed in.
Lee Clow was preparing a series of colorful magazine ads, and when he sent Jobs the page proofs he got an outraged phone call in response.
The blue in the ad, Jobs insisted, was different from that of the iMac. "You guys don"t know what you"re doing!" Jobs shouted. "I "m going to get someone else to do the ads, because this is f.u.c.ked up." Clow argued back. Compare them, he said. Jobs, who was not in the office, insisted he was right and continued to shout. Eventually Clow got him to sit down with the original photographs. "I finally proved to him that the blue was the blue was the blue." Years later, on a Steve Jobs discussion board on the website Gawker, the following tale appeared from someone who had worked at the Whole Foods store in Palo Alto a few blocks from Jobs"s home: "I was s.h.a.gging carts one afternoon when I saw this silver Mercedes parked in a handicapped spot. Steve Jobs was inside screaming at his car phone. This was right before the first iMac was unveiled and I "m pretty sure I could make out, "Not. f.u.c.king. Blue. Enough!!!""
As always, Jobs was compulsive in preparing for the dramatic unveiling. Having stopped one rehearsal because he was angry about the CD drive tray, he stretched out the other rehearsals to make sure the show would be stellar. He repeatedly went over the climactic moment when he would walk across the stage and proclaim, "Say h.e.l.lo to the new iMac." He wanted the lighting to be perfect so that the translucence of the new machine would be vivid. But after a few run-throughs he was still unsatisfied, an echo of his obsession with stage lighting that Sculley had witnessed at the rehearsals for the original 1984 Macintosh launch. He ordered the lights to be brighter and come on earlier, but that still didn"t please him. So he jogged down the auditorium aisle and slouched into a center seat, draping his legs over the seat in front. "Let"s keep doing it till we get it right, okay?" he said. They made another attempt. "No, no," Jobs complained. "This isn"t working at all." The next time, the lights were bright enough, but they came on too late. "I "m getting tired of asking about this," Jobs growled. Finally, the iMac shone just right. "Oh! Right there! That"s great!" Jobs yelled.
A year earlier Jobs had ousted Mike Markkula, his early mentor and partner, from the board. But he was so proud of what he had wrought with the new iMac, and so sentimental about its connection to the original Macintosh, that he invited Markkula to Cupertino for a private preview.
Markkula was impressed. His only objection was to the new mouse that Ive had designed. I t looked like a hockey puck, Markkula said, and people would hate it. Jobs disagreed, but Markkula was right. Otherwise the machine had turned out to be, as had its predecessor, insanely great.
The Launch, May 6, 1998.
With the launch of the original Macintosh in 1984, Jobs had created a new kind of theater: the product debut as an epochal event, climaxed by a let- there-be-light moment in which the skies part, a light shines down, the angels sing, and a chorus of the chosen faithful sings "Hallelujah." For the grand unveiling of the product that he hoped would save Apple and again transform personal computing, Jobs symbolically chose the Flint Auditorium of De Anza Community College in Cupertino, the same venue he had used in 1984. He would be pulling out all the stops in order to dispel doubts, rally the troops, enlist support in the developers" community, and jump-start the marketing of the new machine. But he was also doing it because he enjoyed playing impresario. Putting on a great show piqued his pa.s.sions in the same way as putting out a great product.
Displaying his sentimental side, he began with a graceful shout-out to three people he had invited to be up front in the audience. He had become estranged from all of them, but now he wanted them rejoined. "I started the company with Steve Wozniak in my parents" garage, and Steve is here today," he said, pointing him out and prompting applause. "We were joined by Mike Markkula and soon after that our first president, Mike Scott," he continued. "Both of those folks are in the audience today. And none of us would be here without these three guys." His eyes misted for a moment as the applause again built. Also in the audience were Andy Hertzfeld and most of the original Mac team. Jobs gave them a smile. He believed he was about to do them proud.
After showing the grid of Apple"s new product strategy and going through some slides about the new computer"s performance, he was ready to unveil his new baby. "This is what computers look like today," he said as a picture of a beige set of boxy components and monitor was projected onthe big screen behind him. "And I "d like to take the privilege of showing you what they are going to look like from today on." He pulled the cloth from the table at center stage to reveal the new iMac, which gleamed and sparkled as the lights came up on cue. He pressed the mouse, and as at the launch of the original Macintosh, the screen flashed with fast-paced images of all the wondrous things the computer could do. At the end, the word "h.e.l.lo" appeared in the same playful script that had adorned the 1984 Macintosh, this time with the word "again" below it in parentheses: h.e.l.lo (again). There was thunderous applause. Jobs stood back and proudly gazed at his new Macintosh. "I t looks like it"s from another planet," he said, as the audience laughed. "A good planet. A planet with better designers."
Once again Jobs had produced an iconic new product, this one a harbinger of a new millennium. I t fulfilled the promise of "Think Different."
Instead of beige boxes and monitors with a welter of cables and a bulky setup manual, here was a friendly and s.p.u.n.ky appliance, smooth to the touch and as pleasing to the eye as a robin"s egg. You could grab its cute little handle and lift it out of the elegant white box and plug it right into a wall socket. People who had been afraid of computers now wanted one, and they wanted to put it in a room where others could admire and perhaps covet it. "A piece of hardware that blends sci-fi shimmer with the kitsch whimsy of a c.o.c.ktail umbrella," Steven Levy wrote in New sw eek, "it is not only the coolest-looking computer introduced in years, but a chest-thumping statement that Silicon Valley"s original dream company is no longer somnambulant." Forbes called it "an industry-altering success," and John Sculley later came out of exile to gush, "He has implemented the same simple strategy that made Apple so successful 15 years ago: make hit products and promote them with terrific marketing."
Carping was heard from only one familiar corner. As the iMac garnered kudos, Bill Gates a.s.sured a gathering of financial a.n.a.lysts visiting Microsoft that this would be a pa.s.sing fad. "The one thing Apple"s providing now is leadership in colors," Gates said as he pointed to a Windows- based PC that he jokingly had painted red. "I t won"t take long for us to catch up with that, I don"t think." Jobs was furious, and he told a reporter that Gates, the man he had publicly decried for being completely devoid of taste, was clueless about what made the iMac so much more appealing than other computers. "The thing that our compet.i.tors are missing is that they think it"s about fashion, and they think it"s about surface appearance," he said. "They say, We"ll slap a little color on this piece of junk computer, and we"ll have one, too."
The iMac went on sale in August 1998 for $1,299. I t sold 278,000 units in its first six weeks, and would sell 800,000 by the end of the year, making it the fastest-selling computer in Apple history. Most notably, 32% of the sales went to people who were buying a computer for the first time, and another 12% to people who had been using Windows machines.
Ive soon came up with four new juicy-looking colors, in addition to bondi blue, for the iMacs. Offering the same computer in five colors would of course create huge challenges for manufacturing, inventory, and distribution. At most companies, including even the old Apple, there would have been studies and meetings to look at the costs and benefits. But when Jobs looked at the new colors, he got totally psyched and summoned other executives over to the design studio. "We"re going to do all sorts of colors!" he told them excitedly. When they left, Ive looked at his team in amazement. "In most places that decision would have taken months," Ive recalled. "Steve did it in a half hour."
There was one other important refinement that Jobs wanted for the iMac: getting rid of that detested CD tray. "I "d seen a slot-load drive on a very high-end Sony stereo," he said, "so I went to the drive manufacturers and got them to do a slot-load drive for us for the version of the iMac we did nine months later." Rubinstein tried to argue him out of the change. He predicted that new drives would come along that could burn music onto CDs rather than merely play them, and they would be available in tray form before they were made to work in slots. "I f you go to slots, you will always be behind on the technology," Rubinstein argued.
"I don"t care, that"s what I want," Jobs snapped back. They were having lunch at a sushi bar in San Francisco, and Jobs insisted that they continue the conversation over a walk. "I want you to do the slot-load drive for me as a personal favor," Jobs asked. Rubinstein agreed, of course, but he turned out to be right. Panasonic came out with a CD drive that could rip and burn music, and it was available first for computers that had old-fashioned tray loaders. The effects of this would ripple over the next few years: I t would cause Apple to be slow in catering to users who wanted to rip and burn their own music, but that would then force Apple to be imaginative and bold in finding a way to leapfrog over its compet.i.tors when Jobs finally realized that he had to get into the music market.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT.
CEO.
Still Crazy after All These Years.
Tim Cook.
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple and produced the "Think Different" ads and the iMac in his first year, it confirmed what most people already knew: that he could be creative and a visionary. He had shown that during his first round at Apple. What was less clear was whether he could run a company. He had definitely not shown that during his first round.
Jobs threw himself into the task with a detail-oriented realism that astonished those who were used to his fantasy that the rules of this universe need not apply to him. "He became a manager, which is different from being an executive or visionary, and that pleasantly surprised me," recalled Ed Woolard, the board chair who lured him back.
His management mantra was "Focus." He eliminated excess product lines and cut extraneous features in the new operating system software that Apple was developing. He let go of his control-freak desire to manufacture products in his own factories and instead outsourced the making of everything from the circuit boards to the finished computers. And he enforced on Apple"s suppliers a rigorous discipline. When he took over, Apple had more than two months" worth of inventory sitting in warehouses, more than any other tech company. Like eggs and milk, computers have a short shelf life, so this amounted to at least a $500 million hit to profits. By early 1998 he had halved that to a month.
Jobs"s successes came at a cost, since velvety diplomacy was still not part of his repertoire. When he decided that a division of Airborne Express wasn"t delivering spare parts quickly enough, he ordered an Apple manager to break the contract. When the manager protested that doing so could lead to a lawsuit, Jobs replied, "Just tell them if they f.u.c.k with us, they"ll never get another f.u.c.king dime from this company, ever." The manager quit, there was a lawsuit, and it took a year to resolve. "My stock options would be worth $10 million had I stayed," the manager said, "but I knew I couldn"t have stood it-and he"d have fired me anyway." The new distributor was ordered to cut inventory 75%, and did. "Under Steve Jobs, there"s zero tolerance for not performing," its CEO said. At another point, when VLSI T echnology was having trouble delivering enough chips on time, Jobs stormed into a meeting and started shouting that they were "f.u.c.king d.i.c.kless a.s.sholes." The company ended up getting the chips to Apple on time, and its executives made jackets that boasted on the back, "Team FDA."
After three months of working under Jobs, Apple"s head of operations decided he could not bear the pressure, and he quit. For almost a year Jobs ran operations himself, because all the prospects he interviewed "seemed like they were old-wave manufacturing people," he recalled. He wanted someone who could build just-in-time factories and supply chains, as Michael Dell had done. Then, in 1998, he met Tim Cook, a courtly thirty-seven-year-old procurement and supply chain manager at Compaq Computers, who not only would become his operations manager but would grow into an indispensable backstage partner in running Apple. As Jobs recalled: Tim Cook came out of procurement, which is just the right background for what we needed. I realized that he and I saw things exactly the same way. I had visited a lot of just-in-time factories in j.a.pan, and I "d built one for the Mac and at NeXT . I knew what I wanted, and I met Tim, and he wanted the same thing. So we started to work together, and before long I trusted him to know exactly what to do. He had the same vision I did, and we could interact at a high strategic level, and I could just forget about a lot of things unless he came and pinged me.
Cook, the son of a shipyard worker, was raised in Robertsdale, Alabama, a small town between Mobile and Pensacola a half hour from the Gulf Coast. He majored in industrial engineering at Auburn, got a business degree at Duke, and for the next twelve years worked for IBM in the Research Triangle of North Carolina. When Jobs interviewed him, he had recently taken a job at Compaq. He had always been a very logical engineer, and Compaq then seemed a more sensible career option, but he was snared by Jobs"s aura. "Five minutes into my initial interview with Steve, I wanted to throw caution and logic to the wind and join Apple," he later said. "My intuition told me that joining Apple would be a once-in-a- lifetime opportunity to work for a creative genius." And so he did. "Engineers are taught to make a decision a.n.a.lytically, but there are times when relying on gut or intuition is most indispensable."
At Apple his role became implementing Jobs"s intuition, which he accomplished with a quiet diligence. Never married, he threw himself into his work. He was up most days at 4:30 sending emails, then spent an hour at the gym, and was at his desk shortly after 6. He scheduled Sundayevening conference calls to prepare for each week ahead. In a company that was led by a CEO p.r.o.ne to tantrums and withering blasts, Cook commanded situations with a calm demeanor, a soothing Alabama accent, and silent stares. "Though he"s capable of mirth, Cook"s default facial expression is a frown, and his humor is of the dry variety," Adam Lashinsky wrote in Fortune. "In meetings he"s known for long, uncomfortable pauses, when all you hear is the sound of his tearing the wrapper off the energy bars he constantly eats."
At a meeting early in his tenure, Cook was told of a problem with one of Apple"s Chinese suppliers. "This is really bad," he said. "Someone should be in China driving this." Thirty minutes later he looked at an operations executive sitting at the table and unemotionally asked, "Why are you still here?" The executive stood up, drove directly to the San Francisco airport, and bought a ticket to China. He became one of Cook"s top deputies.
Cook reduced the number of Apple"s key suppliers from a hundred to twenty-four, forced them to cut better deals to keep the business, convinced many to locate next to Apple"s plants, and closed ten of the company"s nineteen warehouses. By reducing the places where inventory could pile up, he reduced inventory. Jobs had cut inventory from two months" worth of product down to one by early 1998. By September of that year, Cook had gotten it down to six days. By the following September, it was down to an amazing two days" worth. In addition, he cut the production process for making an Apple computer from four months to two. All of this not only saved money, it also allowed each new computer to have the very latest components available.
Mock Turtlenecks and Teamwork.
On a trip to j.a.pan in the early 1980s, Jobs asked Sony"s chairman, Akio Morita, why everyone in his company"s factories wore uniforms. "He looked very ashamed and told me that after the war, no one had any clothes, and companies like Sony had to give their workers something to wear each day," Jobs recalled. Over the years the uniforms developed their own signature style, especially at companies such as Sony, and it became a way of bonding workers to the company. "I decided that I wanted that type of bonding for Apple," Jobs recalled.
Sony, with its appreciation for style, had gotten the famous designer Issey Miyake to create one of its uniforms. I t was a jacket made of ripstop nylon with sleeves that could unzip to make it a vest. "So I called Issey and asked him to design a vest for Apple," Jobs recalled. "I came back with some samples and told everyone it would be great if we would all wear these vests. Oh man, did I get booed off the stage. Everybody hated the idea."
In the process, however, he became friends with Miyake and would visit him regularly. He also came to like the idea of having a uniform for himself, because of both its daily convenience (the rationale he claimed) and its ability to convey a signature style. "So I asked Issey to make me some of his black turtlenecks that I liked, and he made me like a hundred of them." Jobs noticed my surprise when he told this story, so he gestured to them stacked up in the closet. "That"s what I wear," he said. "I have enough to last for the rest of my life."
Despite his autocratic nature-he never worshipped at the altar of consensus-Jobs worked hard to foster a culture of collaboration at Apple.
Many companies pride themselves on having few meetings. Jobs had many: an executive staff session every Monday, a marketing strategy session all Wednesday afternoon, and endless product review sessions. Still allergic to PowerPoints and formal presentations, he insisted that the people around the table hash out issues from various vantages and the perspectives of different departments.
Because he believed that Apple"s great advantage was its integration of the whole widget-from design to hardware to software to content-he wanted all departments at the company to work together in parallel. The phrases he used were "deep collaboration" and "concurrent engineering."
Instead of a development process in which a product would be pa.s.sed sequentially from engineering to design to manufacturing to marketing and distribution, these various departments collaborated simultaneously. "Our method was to develop integrated products, and that meant our process had to be integrated and collaborative," Jobs said.