Steve Jobs: The Dynamics of An Excellent Team

IN this interview, Jobs explains the dynamics of a team that pushes to excel—to be above average—excellent. There are some team leaders who would argue that a great team is all smiles and agreement. But that only produces stasis or marginal improvement at best. It’s groupthink.

A productive team that pulls the best thinking from all members encourages the friction we need to grow into something transformative. What follows is a lightly edited portion of Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview, released in 2012, explaining what is required from a team to achieve excellence.

One of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left, John Sculley got a very serious disease, and that disease I’ve seen other people get it, too. It’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work and that if you just tell all these other people, “Here is this great idea,” then, of course, they can go off and make it happen.

And the problem with that is that there is just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it, and you also find there are tremendous tradeoffs that you have to make. There are just certain things you can’t make electrons do. There are certain things you can’t make plastic do, or glass do, or factories do, or robots do. And as you get into all these things, designing a product is keeping 5,000 things in your brain, these concepts, fitting them all together, and continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day, you discover something new—a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently. And it’s that process that is the magic. And so, we had a lot of great ideas when we started.

But what I’ve always felt is that a team of people doing something they really believe in is like … When I was a young kid, there was a widowed man that lived up the street. And he was in his 80s. He was a little scary-looking. And I got to know him a little bit. I think he might have paid me to mow his lawn or something. And one day, he said, “Come on into my garage. I want to show you something.”

And he pulled out this dusty, old rock tumbler. It was a motor and a coffee can and a little band between them. And he said, “Come on with me.” We went out to the back, and we just got some rocks. Some regular, old, ugly rocks. And we put them in the can with a little bit of liquid and a little bit of grit powder. And we closed the can up, and he turned this motor on, and he said, “Come back tomorrow.”

And this can was making a racket as the stones went around. And I came back the next day, and we opened the can, and we took out these amazingly beautiful polished rocks. The same common stones that had gone in, through rubbing against each other like this, creating a little bit of friction, creating a little bit of noise, had come out these beautiful polished rocks. And that’s always been, in my mind, my metaphor for a team working really hard on something they’re passionate about. It’s through the team, through that group of incredibly talented people, bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together, they polish each other, and they polish the ideas, and what comes out are these really beautiful stones.

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 09:17 AM
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