has real passion, real vision and that prickly personality, that very pushy reality distorting

personality that can get something done. However, in writing about Steve Jobs I realized something

interesting. It wasn’t just his one vision. It was his ability to create a team around

him, his ability to work in partnership with Steve Wozniak. You go down the list with dozens

of people all the way to Tim Cook. And not only to work in partnership but to create

a collaborative team around him of great designers like Jony Ive and software people like Phil

Schiller and Johnny Rubinstein. And I once asked Steve Jobs, you know, what product are

you the proudest of. And I thought he might say the iPod or the iPhone or the iPad, whatever,

the Mac. And he said, you know, making a product is hard but making a team that can continually

make products is even harder.

The product I’m most proud of is Apple and the team I built at Apple. And that’s when

I moved to this new book, The Innovators, because I wanted to say it’s not just about

the visionary, it’s about the visionary being able to execute on the vision by finding

the right people to be collaborative and creative with. So with Steve Jobs even though we think

of him as being a tough boss or we think of him as having sort of a prickly personality,

there were people who were so loyal to Steve they would walk through walls for him. He

developed around him the tightest, most loyal, most integrated team in Silicon Valley.

You know, Steve Jobs was very intuitive in the way he made decisions. He wasn’t somebody

who deeply reflected or spent a whole lot of time hashing it through. But he would work

with everybody from the hardware designers like Jony Ive to the software people and just

sort of say no, that doesn’t feel right. Sometimes he used a little bit stronger language

than that. Or it’s genius, it’s perfect, it’s awesome, it’s incredible. But, you

know, don’t try this at home. People come up to me sometimes and say I’m like Steve

Jobs - when somebody does something that stinks I tell them it stinks. Yeah and have you invented

the iPod? Have you invented an iPhone? No, Steve Jobs didn’t just have a tough personality.

He also had a charismatic visionary personality and he brought people in.

And he really could inspire people because even though sometimes he couldn’t articulate

exactly what he wanted he could sure point the way to getting it there. He also believed

in physical space as necessary for collaboration. We think maybe we can collaborate in the digital

age by doing it virtually from afar but when he built the Pixar building and when he designed

what will be the new headquarters for Apple it was all about making sure people had serendipitous

encounters. That they came through the atrium.

That they walked through the perimeter where the light was in the new Apple headquarters.

Where they would just bump into people and say what are you working on. And then naturally

collaborate. But he felt that, you know, just by walking through Jony Ives design studio

and touching a few things and talking to people he could collaborate by being in a physical

space better than he could do it by Skype or email or, you know, Google hangouts. So

Steve’s team building skills really sort of came from the force of his personality

and being with him.