Icon Ambulance
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Yet imagine your boss calling you on a Sunday and saying, "So I was reviewing the DBA's data model for the new product, and I really don't like how he's called the columns with customers identifiers 'cust_id' instead of 'customer_id.' We use 'customer_id' in all our other tables. It's just wrong and and I'm going to have him fix it tomorrow. Is that okay with you?" And then you get an e-mail called 'Customer Column Naming Convention Ambulance' five minutes later.
I mean... if you got a call like this from anyone else, wouldn't it be absolutely absurd? How did Jobs manage to put his own mark on design decisions like this without totally micro-managing or hit-and-run-managing everything?
Whereas most other bosses that might make a similar request would seem capricious for nitpicking over one issue while ignoring a bunch of (probably more important) issues.
Not a long time ago, I worked under a manager. At that time during the start of the project, we had to learn a lot of new technologies to get started. One of the technologies was Perl. Now typically managers leave it to the developers to do all this. But not with this manager, before asking anybody learn it, he took a a week's holiday. When he was back next week, he called for a meeting and started training all the junior guys. And demonstrated what he expected from everybody by doing it himself. His motto was simple, he would never demand from others at work what he couldn't give himself.
He ensured we got know everything that was required. Anytime we were stuck, he would personally ensure we were unblocked. He worked, conducted meetings, did his managerial duties and still wrote programs with us. He would stay with us, if things went on late in the night. He would sweat with us.
Net result, whenever a request came from him we would do it no matter what it took.
At the very same time, I have also worked under extremely arrogant people with no clue about management and seen how things go. No plans at hand, no ways to measure and track. Assign work, and come after a month or so and just pick up fight with developers for simple issues just to assert authority. Fight and demoralize people until you have ensured you get the feeling that you have the developer feel that you are the boss. When people make mistakes you are supposed to counsel them, not demoralize and abuse them to assert authority and get job done by force.
Now what respect would such people command, even their legitimate demands are looked in a negative angle.
Its all about how you deal with people, people skills are a requisite for every job that requires dealing with people in a way or the other.
Years ago I worked for a CEO who didn't know how to code, but if he ever asked us to stay back late, he'd stay there with us and check in to make sure we had enough food and beverages to keep us going, go buy packs of cigarettes if that's what needed, etc.
He couldn't code to save his life, but he earned the respect of us coders pretty quickly.
If he didn't have a track record of success on the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, his demanding and aggressive personality wouldn't go over as well.
Most people with his type of personality come off as extremely abrasive more than they come off as "genius".
It's all about being right - a lot. When you're the man who introduced the world's most popular music player ever, followed by a complete revitalization of its flagging computer brand, and then invent a completely new product category that your competitors are breaking their necks trying to catch up to... your demands suddenly become more acceptable.
But I've also worked for a couple of people who were simply masters of their craft who demanded excellence. One was a shop and drafting teacher. The other was a farmer. Both had the experience in their area to know what was "right" and was empowered to do things their way... But it was deeper than just that.
"Attention to detail" to achieve excellence is much different than micromanagement, which is typically an expression of a manager's personal insecurity.
Everyone believes they're doing the former, but many are really doing the latter.
Then there are those doing the former that are simply wrong - their customers don't actually find their nitpick all that important or valuable.
I've dealt with all three kinds. And I've tried to emulate attention to detail for product excellence, but I'm sure people thought I was just a nitpicking insecure jackass.
My hat is off to those rare individuals who can do it very well.
But in the end, when I think about leadership, passion and attention to detail, I think back to the call I received from Steve Jobs on a Sunday morning in January.
Its something like a Painter who has build up a reputation over the years through his paintings because of which people view him with a very high regard.
I have a cousin who I view in a very high regard when it comes to photography. I listen to him when he says something about photography and sometimes it takes me a few months to apply some of his imparted knowledge which he said casually as one-liners. It wasn't always like that. He built up that reputation through his work over the years.
If I ever get a call from my cousin about a photo I took and he suggests something about it, I'll be all ears and would be eager to include his suggestion the next time I try taking a similar photo.
I picture it going down like this: Steve doesn't like the yellow color in the icon. Steve asks an Apple employee to get it done. Apple employee says he can't get anyone at Google to pick up the phone or bother with a little detail like this. Steve calls a Google executive to nuke the logjam.
Steve may have a meticulous eye for detail, but I also don't see him wasting time calling high-level executives at other companies (and wasting their time) unless there was no other alternative.
TLDR: When executing something which is not risky and not very innovative and/or cannot have high impact by nature (niche market) but takes a lot of grunt work, high attention to detail does not pay off.
The less the details matter, the easier it is to scale and abstract the business by hiring sub-managers and not worrying about implementation details.
If you know the man who calls you on a Sunday deeply cares about the product's finish, you better be part of the perfection than spoil it.
Note that such achievements are not mutually exclusive with batshit nuttery. See Howard Hughes, for instance.
> When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers,
> you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even
> though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll
> know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of
> wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic,
> the quality, has to be carried all the way through.The only reason why, it develops the habit of leaving fingerprints on parts and leaving clean watches out in the open.
If you don't strive to be clean, efficient, and build beautiful products that you enjoy looking at and working on, even when they are broken or where no single person outside of you and your colleagues are going to see it, then you will start making mistakes by leaving fingerprints and broken code snippets on the side where your customers are going to notice.
http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Air-13-Inch-Mid-2011-...
http://www.macnews.de/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/MacBook-Air...
you find some pretty netbook-line innards with a big, flat battery. I've certainly seen laptops with less attractive innards, but the main thing I see when I look inside the MBA is non-replaceable components. I actually had the white plastic Macbook in mind in my original comment. Those have more stuff in them and a lot like a PC laptop with a bit more reinforcement than average.
It is infinitely annoying when I'm writing SQL to have to stop and check to see if the account ID is "account_id", "acid", "Account_ID", or "acct_id".
The mistake everyone else makes is believing only the tip of the iceberg matters.
If it stayed in a programmer further down the line would have to spend a few moments trying to decide if s/he should be using customer_id or cust_id, might have to go into the database to double-check, might have to write additional code to handle special case tables with cust_id, all of which requires additional testing and adds to the amount of cruft code that needs to be maintained, whereas they could have just written generic code to consistently use customer_id in all cases.
It's like some sort of code butterfly effect.
Of course, if it was a manager who called me on Sunday who was incompetent or who had poor taste in visual or code design... well... then it would be a different story.
I have worked for people like that.
Is that what he literally said? "In religious services"? I find it really hard to believe. It is more fitting of a blog post that has been adopted to the format of "The Jobs Tales". Gender-neutral, religion-agnostic, PG-13.
The question is, why didn't people say things like that to Steve Jobs?
Or do only the ones that prostrated themselves to him ever speak up? (or get the attention when they do?)
I want some stories of people telling Jobs to piss off.
Well, the Apple board of directors told him to piss off in 1985.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/07/john-sculley-on-why...
Vic Gundotra at Google I/O 2010: "if Google did not act we faced a Draconian future, a future where one man, one company, one device, one carrier would be our only choice"
As a child, I was a religious fan of the Seattle Sonics. I knew virtually the entire roster by name, face, and number. And I watched them in the playoffs the year they made the finals against the Bulls. I hated Michael Jordan. Maybe that's a strong word, but I wanted nothing more than to see him and the Bulls beaten, especially by the Sonics. Despite some excellent play by Seattle, the Bulls won again, and again the next year against Utah.
When Jordan retired, I respected him. I wanted to see him beaten in the late prime of his championship winning career but he never let it happen. Not even my Sonics could beat him, but losing to Jordan's Bulls meant almost as much as beating a lesser team in the Finals. It's not a perfect analogy, but it's easy to see many of Apple's competitors and rivals taking a moment to acknowledge and respect the man.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.
Update, via @arnoldkim: Jan 2008, Jobs did MWSF Keynote and introduced Webclips with home screen icons. twitpic.com/6aye3l
Call someone who's work is starting to slip once on a Sunday to complain about some minutiae, and you are letting them know that you are watching - even if you aren't really watching all the time. I think this is a leadership technique, not the micro-management it appears to be.
This also is a way of Steve asserting control and dominance. Making someone scurry over a mis-tinted letter sets the tenor of the relationship.
I think it's important not to take the wrong lessons from all these anecdotes. Jobs knows how to get good work out of people by causing them to demand perfection of themselves and to fear producing imperfect products. No CEO has time to exact perfection end to end - their job is to set standards, expectation, and culture. Sometimes ridiculous demonstrations of micro-management are just what someone needs.
Here is the text from it.
Steve Jobs, is someone I admire hugely. Yes, he has numerous personality floors but his obsession to follow his heart in all things in his life is extremely admirable. Watching his Stanford Commencement speech too many times in a job I didn’t enjoy led me to quit as a Derivatives Trader and sent me on my current path, back to the startup world I left many years ago. He has literally changed my life.
Steve’s obsession has led him to become a product perfectionist. And is why Apple is now the second most valuable company in the world. Almost every product that comes from Apple is spectacularly awesome. And Vic’s post illustrates the depths of Steve’s obsession. I have heard similar stories about Jack Dorsey at Square, tweaking spacing on receipts because he felt they were not beautiful enough.
In Vic’s post the comments are full of ‘the devil is in the details’ quotes of admiration for Jobs’ obsession. But the question for us is, ‘Should we as startup entrepreneurs have the same obsession with the details of our products?’.
My answer is that, unfortunately, we can’t. And I really mean it when I say unfortunately. I am a perfectionist myself in a lot of ways. When I do something I pour my heart and soul into it. I want it to be the best I can make it. I become obsessed and it is constantly in my mind. I go to bed and wakeup thinking about it. My girlfriend recently pointed out that 70% of our conversation is about SayMama. All the SayMama animations, transitions and buttons movements, design, logo and user flows have all been laboriously thought through and refined. The amount of energy myself and the team have spent on details has been immense.
The problem is that we misplaced our passion. We are currently pivoting the business, or rather accelerating it to where we wanted it to be in a year or so from now. This means that we will be putting most of our energy into a new product. All the details we crafted in saymama.com don’t matter.
Obsession is not the problem, the problem is where we focus the obsession. For us startups, the obsession should be placed in finding product/market fit and gaining traction. And in finding our product champions who will help spread the word. A higher level of abstraction of obsession. Not the details but the broader product.
Obsession with the details of a logo are only gifted to those who have viable product that serves a users need. Those like Steve and Jack who already have a viable business. Personally I can’t wait for this day, but until then all my energy will go into defining where SayMama and our subsequent product fit into the world of real time video communications.
We are still guided by the same compass, ‘to take real world human interaction and replicate it online’. But the obsession is not on the product details. It is on creating something that solves users’ problems in a way that no one else does.