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  • You know Steve Jobs was one of those romantic innovators who comes up with great ideas,

  • 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.

You know Steve Jobs was one of those romantic innovators who comes up with great ideas,

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