Because it's Steve Jobs, this is a great anecdote. I'm sure we'll hear dozens of them in the next couple days and weeks, all examples of Jobs' attention to detail and design resulting in superior products and software.
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?
I think the difference is that he earns the right to make a fuss over stuff like that by setting the standard of excellence in his own work and consistently requiring it of everyone around him.
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.
That's a really good point. I'd also argue that you have to be right. His magic is high standards paired with amazing insight for what to build and how to motivate people. The most dangerous managers have strong convictions, micromanaging tendencies, but the wrong vision and focus. You can't bully other people into your perfectionism. You have to inspire them.
It happens that when you build respect by demonstrating excellence in your work yourself. You can get far more work done even without saying anything.
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.
> 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.
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.
Pull this sort of thing when you're an average executive or middle management, and you're an abrasive, demanding idiot. Pull it when you have a few billion in the bank, and you're a "visionary."
I don't think it's about having billions in the bank.
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.
I've had bosses who were just lost in details and micromanaging. It's usually annoying and rarely adds anything to whatever you want to do.
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.
I definitely agree. There's a difference in "nitpicking" for true product excellence, and "nitpicking" because of some deeper-rooted 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.
Your example doesn't compare to Vic's post in the same way you intend to. Vic clearly states that
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.
Steve is not Vic's boss but only that Vic had regular dealings with Steve. In this case too its clearly reflects in the post that Steve is not bossing Vic to do a job himself. He is assigning someone from his team to fix the issue who has to work with Vic.
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.
Having read a lot about Jobs, I take a more cynical view of this anecdote.
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.
Exactly, it's the kind of free pass that celebrities good at something typically get. "Yeah he's a bit {arrogant|rowdy|quirky|..} but (s)he's one of the best {football players|pop singers|CEOs|..} in the world so we can live with that". Case in point, Maradona.
I think there IS a difference, I just don't know exactly what... So I am just thinking loudly:
The diffrence may be that you have to work on a relatively risky product which when executed with extremely high attention to detail can have huge impact. A consumer hardware is seemingly such a thing. Probably a new programming language or a very elegant software lib either. The boring Java business application which I am maintaining at my workplace right now and contains hundreds of tables and hundreds of thousands lines of code, but only has impact on a relatively few customers is not such a thing.
My side project, which is a relatively small (but relatively risky in its approach) software lib might be such a thing.
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.
not if your boss saved a multi billion $ business from bankruptcy and converted it into the most valuable company in the US. It is the credibility that Jobs has built over many decades that speaks as all these blog posts now..
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.
I kind of agree. But that's still micromanaging.
Even though Steve's micromanaging seems to be excellent, it still will fire back at some point. That point might be now.
Causation != Correlation, except when it does. :) It's going to be interesting to see what Apple does without Jobs, though it's impossible to consider what they would have done without Jobs. :)
To quote the man himself (from Playboy interview):
> 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.
Have you seen their source code? Go download the CFLite code and then come back here and tell me that the insides of Apple products are as beautiful as the outsides of competitors' products.
This is another one of the ways in which Apple is very much like Nintendo. (Others include very strong leadership; doing things their own way, standards be damned; and cultivating the brand above all else.) The inside of the N64, in particular, was astonishing.
I am a trained watch repair technician. In school, we were trained to never touch the movement of a watch with our bare hands, even if it was filled with water and any sort of dirt, and to never leave a movement sitting out in the open air to collect dust, even if it was already filled with dirt.
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.
Beautiful, maybe; maintainable, not so sure. A colleague's iMac is likely to need a motherboard replacement and he was going through the procedure with me. The amount of work and the sheer cost of parts for something so routine on a PC astounded me.
In my experience, that's only true of the parts the customer is intended to take apart. The inside of a Mac Pro is beautiful. The inside of a Macbook... not so much.
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.
What would you rather a circuit board look like? They are satisfying 23 different constraints at once. They are small, fast, constrained by size, power and heat, and still they look good. What the fuck do you want?
Or f_e_id. (This turned out to be fund value at the end of the month - the fund value is the value in the account, if you really want to look it that way.)
Nope, it's just as important. "Good design is thorough through the details" and that permeates all the way from visual design to code to database. This is actually what makes Jobs different: he knows every little detail matters, anywhere, and that it's just not a gimmick. This is what it takes to have a robust, elegant, awesome and enjoyable product.
Exactly, this is a perfect application of Jobs' quote from the '80s about how a carpenter wouldn't put a piece of plywood on the back of a cabinet, even it was just going to face the wall.
The fact that he enforces quality and innovation in every part of his organisation (hardware, software, purchasing experience) is why the company is so successful.
The mistake everyone else makes is believing only the tip of the iceberg matters.
Why? To me, it's the same thing in the end, since I've seen a poorly named column cause impedance mismatches felt for years in countless ways and costing God knows how much to - ultimately - the consumer.
I think that's what in part makes him Steve Jobs. If anyone else asked you to do it you'd think they were insane. But if Steve Jobs asks you to do it, you not only get on it right away, you also feel like the fate of the entire world rests on your ability to change the color in the icon to the right shade of yellow.
For your database example he'd be absolutely right to do so. Removal of inconsistencies is a detail that too many programmers think isn't important, but something as simple as a column name can cause all kinds of consequences down the line.
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.
Wrong analogy. Appearance of icon impacts users' perception directly where name of a DB column does not. Also, I doubt Steve nitpicks every detail, just ones he comes across and ones he has a fetish about. As UI fetishes go, icons rate top billing.
The difference between your example and the Steve Jobs anecdote is that one is backend and the other is customer facing. Getting all of the details right for the customer is paramount for him but I doubt he would fret over the minute details on the backend.
Indeed; iTunes was a complete POS as a piece of commercial music managing software, and with a little focus _very_ easily fixed. He didn't seem to care about that too much.
I think it shows the passion for the product regardless of what level you get into. The net impact is what we see in iPhone,iPod,iPad etc. It could be argued either way, but the point is that the record speaks for itself. So when u see a product class apart from other competing product, some of these small gestures set things apart.
Yea, I read that thinking the same thing. It's also possible that, regardless of how this was perceived internally, it's being touted as a great anecdote because now is not the time for a 'Steve Jobs is a dick' post.
> I'm sorry I didn't answer your call earlier. I was in religious services...
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.
Some people might decide the details of their religion are nobody's business. Some would say they were at "church" or "temple" or "religious service". I have heard folks in the midwest say "they went to a religious service". I don't see how it is "Gender-neutral, religion-agnostic, PG-13".
Since the author is Indian, he is most likely Hindu. If he said he was attending Hindu temple worship service (or whatever they call it), some readers may have not know what he was talking about. I think it was simpler to phrase it that way.
I think most rational people would have said something like: "Steve, I agree that is an important detail but it does not warrant a phone call to me on Sunday morning. Send me an email. We'll speak tomorrow."
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.
Because at the level at which Gundotra and Jobs work(ed), you work weekends for important stuff. Branding quality is important stuff for a senior Google employee and providing an aesthetically appealing user experience is important stuff for the CEO of Apple.
Sudden love for Gundotra's favorite authoritarian? Sounds more like a sigh of relief.
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"
I don't know how relevant this is, but you can respect your opponents, and retirement is the best time to do so.
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.
Assuming the anecdote is accurate, my guess is this was Steve's subtle way of nudging Vic to be more attentive to details. I don't think Steve would call anyone at anytime making a fuss over such a small thing - he would never get any work done.
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.
I have just blogged about this article at FounderandFriends.com.
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.
I think people would generally appreciate you summarising your post and then perhaps quietly noting you'd blogged on the subject in the bottom line. (Just for future reference)
Wouldn't be surprising if joshu knew him...and it certainly wouldn't be the first time someone exaggerated an anecdote about an interaction with a famous person.
google plus has been known to terminate pseudonym accounts, so unless someone hacked into it, it seems to be genuine. a guy like vic is probably well connected, too, so it's quite plausible imho.
Not only have they been terminating accounts that don't use the owner's real name, they've started a "verified accounts" program, and the linked account has been verified.
The linked account also has 100k "followers" as well. I doubt a fake Vic account could amass that many considering there aren't that many on G+ yet. So the only other possibilities is that Vic is lying, or someone hacked into Vic's account, neither of which I think are true.
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?