Finding the Next Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs

At this time his new company, Apple, was already quite successful, probably doing a little less than one hundred million dollars in sales—but nothing close to what Atari or Chuck E. Cheese’s was earning. In 1980, Atari was bringing in around two billion dollars in revenue and Chuck E. Cheese’s some five hundred million. I still didn’t feel too bad that I had turned down a one-third ownership of Apple—although I was beginning to think it might turn out to be a mistake.

“It’s really neat to see so much creativity,” he said. “So many people doing their thing and evidently making a living at it.” He talked at length about the historic Parisian writers’ and artists’ salons. And then he added, “The computer is going to allow even more people to be creative.” Around this time, Steve had started to regard the computer as the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds. “If you look at the fastest animals, human beings aren’t among them,” he said, “unless you give them a bicycle, and then they can win the race.”

Steve’s point was that you could parachute anywhere into the city and realize you were nowhere but Paris. “There aren’t many cities where you can do that,” he pointed out. “The architecture here creates a unique signature for the entire city.” That Parisian simplicity was something he wanted Apple to emulate.

Then he sighed. “Everybody expects me to come up with all the ideas. That’s not how you build a strong company.” He went on to explain that he needed to generate more creativity within the company. We both recognized that innovation was the key to the future, and innovation was going to have to come from the brilliance of all the people at Apple—not just the person on top. What I realized then was that the original Steve Jobs believed he had to find his own next Steve Jobs.

Creativity & Change

Situations vary. Flexibility is always necessary. If you try to apply the same rules to every person or circumstance, you will find you’ve planted a field that is sterile and homogenous. In that environment creativity will wither and die. The constant application of inflexible rules stifles the imagination.

The truth is, there are no rules that apply to everyone uniformly—and that rule is the one exception to the rule that there are no rules.

…without creativity your company will not succeed. That concept may not sound surprising, but what is surprising is how few companies realize it, or actually do anything about it. Creativity is every company’s first driver. It’s where everything starts, where energy and forward motion originate. Without that first charge of creativity, nothing else can take place.

All of your competitors are trying to improve the product, the service, the concept; they’re creating new markets, refining processes to cut costs, and making their businesses more efficient. That’s what good businesses do. The ones that don’t inevitably wake up one day and find they have been outgunned, outclassed, and are out of business. As management guru Peter Drucker said, “The only source of sustained competitive advantage is the ability to learn faster than your competitors.”

Fast is important. The era when companies slowly evolved, when they studied their place in the business landscape over many years and changed slowly, is over. Today, companies have to radically revolutionize themselves every few years just to stay relevant. That’s because technology and the Internet have transformed the business landscape forever. And the pace of change accelerates every year.

Ideas happen faster, knowledge moves faster, competitors react faster. So it doesn’t matter what you do or your company does. The odds are overwhelming that you are going to have to change, and change again, and then again.

Culture & Environment

Atari didn’t find Steve Jobs. We made it easy for him to find us. A good company is a 24/7 advertisement for itself.

Our quirky environment allowed creative people to thrive, and these people acted as a living, breathing billboard for the company. They talked a great deal about Atari—about what it did, about its products, but mostly about how much fun it was to work there.

If you want ordinary employees, then you promote your company as an ordinary workplace. If you want creative employees, then you demonstrate creativity.

Those first dozen people in a company form the seed kernels around which the corporate culture will mold itself. A dozen individuals are sufficient for a dynamic to get going; beyond that number, everyone else will probably conform to the ethos they’ve established.

I once tried to change an entire company’s DNA. In the early 1990s, I bought a firm that made some interesting products but also had a terrible corporate culture. The place had been on a five-year decline and most of the innovative people had left. I should have fired 90 percent of the staff but I didn’t; I thought I could turn the company around. I was wrong. The employees could not seem to get out of their own way. For every proposed step forward, five people resisted the change. The corporate ecosystem was contaminated. This was one of my worst failures.

People like secrets. Creative people really like secrets. They’re fun, imaginative, and they add a sense of excitement to any corporate culture. Apple has always fostered this culture of secrets.

Managing creatives is like herding cats. You can try and try, but in the end you’ll fail. So instead of establishing dispiriting rules at your company, create an organization known for its flexible and original pongs. The creatives will come crawling out of their cozy lairs, looking for a place to settle down. You can’t ever really control them, but if you offer them a good work environment and stretchy guidelines, you can elicit excellent performances from them—making you, them, your company, and your stakeholders all very happy. The alternative is establishing an environment so rigid and standardized that the only people who like it are those who are already rigid and standardized.

Our engineers loved their new freedom to stay up and work as long as they liked. Once, just before a particularly intense trade show, we had more than twenty of them working late and sleeping at the company. The productivity was out of this world.

(It’s been said that many people in high tech cannot balance their personal and work lives. Here’s another way to look at it: Their jobs are so interesting that it’s difficult to figure out what is work and what is play. Creative projects produce this kind of excitement.)

…one of the workers in the assembly department wanted to bring his gun into work with him. To be fair, we did consider the idea instead of immediately saying no. But as the gun owner’s manager pointed out, it’s much harder to discipline an employee who has a gun on his hip than one who doesn’t. The no-firearms policy remained in effect. So even the rule about no rules can’t be taken as a rule.

…most companies’ ads effectively said, “Wanted: middle manager for boring job. Low pay. Don’t bother.” At Atari, we decided to go a different route, using the advertising tag line “Play games, make money.” It did very well for us, as did these lines: “Make games that make money; keep some of it,” “Confusing work with play every day,” and “Work harder at having fun than ever before.”

Fact: Funny people tend to be more creative than unfunny people.

Red 5 Studios poached talent from other companies by recording personalized messages on iPods and sending them to their top 100 prospects. In doing this the company was able to fill three major positions, spend much less than they otherwise would have for a traditional recruitment campaign…

Hiring for Passion

If there was a single characteristic that separated Steve Jobs from the mass of employees, it was his passionate enthusiasm. Steve had one speed: full blast. This was the primary reason we hired him. When you hire for intensity, you are bringing in people around whom you can build an entire department.

You can train employees in the ways of the company, but you can’t train them to be passionate. In the long run, people with enthusiasm are going to contribute the most to your enterprise.

What is said is far less important than the way it is said. A person’s passion can be about anything, from aardvarks to zydeco. It doesn’t even matter if it doesn’t match your mission. You can take that passion and meld it to your goal—but you can’t create passion if it’s not there.

I know of no creative who is not hyper-curious. Curious people always have a range of interests and a broad base of knowledge in many disparate fields and subjects. This trait has nothing to do with college. It has everything to do with innate intelligence.

What unites creative people is their passion for diverse knowledge. It is the driver. Serious hobbies are a sign of this passion.

Everyone has a short list of the cool people they’d love to work with again, as well as those they want nothing to do with, ever. Get those lists out of people.

HR departments have a tendency to hire the same people over and over, despite apparent differences in ethnicity or gender. These are people who, regardless of race, sexual orientation, or religion, attend the same schools, believe in the same ethos, and dress the same way.

You don’t want a homogenous company where everyone is interchangeable. You want a company that is spiky. Spiky balls have great singularities; in spiky companies, these singularities are the exceptional people.

Hiring a creative is about embracing risk, not mitigating it. So if you’re starting a company, perhaps your first task is to find creatives who can hire other creatives.

Steve Jobs understood that Atari was the kind of place that would allow him to flourish, no matter how arrogant he seemed. Perhaps everyone has creative potential, but only the arrogant are self-confident enough to press their creative ideas on others. Steve believed he was always right, and was willing to push harder and longer than other people who might have had equally good ideas but who caved under pressure.

Screening Creatives

Nearly all creative ideas can sound crazy when first presented. Most people don’t have creative imaginations, so most people don’t get what the creative is saying. And people tend to be fearful of things they don’t understand. That further exacerbates the problem. But if you can’t bring in a few people who seem crazy compared to the norm, then you probably aren’t going to have a creative organization.

It’s almost impossible to maintain your sense of self-worth if you propose interesting idea after interesting idea and your company refuses to adopt any—or even, perhaps, entertain any. Worse, the company may mock them.

One of Steve Jobs’ best traits was that he was an absolutely mesmerizing speaker—people swooned when they heard him. The first time I saw him on stage at a developers’ conference, which was later rebroadcast, he was wearing KEEN footwear. KEEN was sold out of that style for months afterward.

One of the best ways to find creative people is to ask a simple question: “What books do you like?” I’ve never met a creative person in my life that didn’t respond with enthusiasm to a question about reading habits.

Actually, which books people read is not as important as the simple fact that they read at all.

Expectations drive actions. If you have an organization where you don’t expect anyone to be creative, they won’t be. If you create one where creativity is a given, they will rise to that expectation.

Ask second and third questions about a topic after they’ve responded so fluently to your opening question. Poseurs are generally fluent in surface jargon. Get them to go into greater depth about a subject and you may well find them starting to lose that verbal acuity.

…ask judgment questions. Ask a lot of them. If you’re not an expert in the field yourself, get someone to prepare a dozen questions for you. Also, a lot of people know the how of a job but they don’t necessarily understand the why. “So you collected all analytics,” you ask. “Why did you do it? Why are they important? Why did you use these analytics to increase the outcome?”

If an interviewee is talking about a project she’s working on at another company, ask for details about it, making sure that you focus on what she actually did. People often use the royal “we” when talking about their experience, and although the project might have turned out very well, their particular involvement in it may have been minimal or even nonexistent.

What you want is a collection of amazing people. And if you have a collection of amazing people, they will accomplish amazing things.

Play & Community

One of the best ways to keep creatives happy is to make some happiness happen. One of the best—and most cost effective—ways to do that is to throw an inexpensive party. Yes, a party. If your company can institutionalize a regular episode of genuine, collegial fun, you can create an environment where interesting people want to work—and play.

Our attitude was that we never knew when creativity was going to strike—and at our parties it did all the time. At one particularly good bash held in our game room, people were playing one of our driving games. Everyone commented on how much more fun it would be if they could play against each other simultaneously, so one of the engineers quickly came up with an impromptu method of lashing eight of the games together. Suddenly the driving game went from a solitary experience to a social one. It seemed an obvious move, but no one had thought about doing this before. We immediately put the game into production and called it Indy 8. Indy 8 may well have earned more money than any of our other games.

One other advantage of the celebration: people’s tongues loosen. For example, despite Atari’s best efforts, we occasionally hired a few toxic managers, and our celebrations were generally the only place where anyone was willing to let us know about them. Several times, this is how I discovered a manager was stealing; none of his reports had the nerve to tell me until they had a beer in hand and several more in their stomach.

The beauty of parties is that they are instant hierarchy levelers—they provide an atmosphere in which anyone can communicate with anyone.

Hierarchy means having managers, and sub-managers, and sub-sub-managers. Basically, when you give people the title of manager, you are enabling them to say no. You want as few people saying no in the company as possible…

One of the best reasons to keep your company horizontal is that creative leaps do not always originate with your top players. Good ideas can come from assistants, janitors, part-time workers—people who are invisible in a strictly vertical company. When your company establishes that anyone can and should contribute, you will end up hearing some very good suggestions coming from unlikely places.

Humor is necessary in the workplace, and pranks help people learn to laugh at themselves. People who are pompous and pretentious are not risk takers; they are not as creative. A prankster culture loosens up employees.

Scale & Structure

Generally speaking, when a company reaches about 150 employees, sclerosis sets in. Once there are too many people for everyone to know each other’s names, what they do, and how they do it best, the calcification intensifies. Pennies start being watched, speed to market slows down, entrepreneurship disappears, and soon your organization is basically just another big company.

In the 1940s, aerospace company Lockheed created a special branch and called it Skunk Works. It was enormously successful, and the name stuck.

Oddly, it’s often hard for many people to understand that the future is also core to the business. Businesses tend to suffer from the tyranny of now. People think now trumps later. But if there is no later, now won’t do you much good. That’s why you don’t want creative projects to get sucked into that day-to-day morass. If all of your people—including the most creative ones—are fighting internal battles, nothing else happens.

Gaming a system is death to a meritocracy because the people who are gaming it destroy all semblance of fairness. And gamers are usually pretty blatant about their gaming, which tends to anger everyone else around them. In the long run, it’s best to prevent any one person from taking the credit for a new innovation or idea.

…if the original creator takes too much ownership of his idea, he may well try to exert too much control over it…

No company should ever empower the person who originated the idea with the ability to censor the person making improvements, even if the product is as amazing as the Amazing Widget 450. An excellent product or service is far more likely to be the amalgam of many small improvements and ideas rather than one sudden thunderbolt. The other problem with the credit game is that if someone is able to take all of it, you’ve created a culture of individual ownership. Why give the next great idea to your team when you can take it out on your own and get all the glory?

Team Bonding

Unlike a hotel or a conference center, where people can wander off and do whatever they want when their meetings end, at Pajaro we relied on each other for downtime activities. That’s how you build a team: through communication—even if you have to force it. A healthy company always engenders communication between employees. One of the best ways to promote communication is to force employees to spend time together, whether they want to or not. People who wouldn’t normally listen to others do so when they’re stuck together. People who wouldn’t normally even talk to each other do so when they’re stuck together. Interesting conversations take place when you have no one else to talk to.

Almost anyone can maintain a façade for an hour in a conference room, but few people can do that for three days in a different and isolated environment. The mask falls off and you discover who people really are. Employees actually talk to one another, communicate better overall, and work as a team more efficiently and creatively when they are comfortable with each other.

Creative Solitude

Steve had always enjoyed meditating. In fact, he went to India in the mid-1970s to do just that. Atari paid for the trip. He had told us he was going to resign before leaving, but because we had a company problem in Europe, we told him that if he went there and fixed it, we’d pay his way, and he could come back via India.

I knocked on the door and it took him a long time to answer—I’d woken him up, although it was well after noon. He proceeded to ask me into a home that looked as though he had just moved in—there was almost no furniture, and almost no food, just some tea and fruit. We then sat under a tree on a bench in the backyard, where he told me that this house represented what he’d always wanted in life: as little clutter as possible. I strongly believe that everyone who wants to be creative must find a place where his or her mind can be alone and untouched by the insanity of complexity. There is a place, a state of mind, somewhere between cognitive reasoning and dreaming, a place you can find just before you go to sleep or just after you wake up. It is from here that imaginative thoughts spring.

Risk & Reversal

I would ask everyone to make a list of all the ideas that had been presented at our meetings, and then have them rank those ideas from good to bad. I would then take the six items on the bottom of the list and say, “Let’s suppose we were restricted for the next few months to work just on these six terrible projects. How do we make them work?” This process reversed people’s normal mental dynamic. Instead of trying to figure out what’s wrong with something, which triggers people’s critical instincts, here they had to figure out what was right with something, which triggers people’s creative instincts. Every time we did this exercise, at least one of the bottom six ideas turned out to be not just good, but great, and eventually became a profit-making machine for us.

Fear of failure creates an organization that says no to every new idea. That organization will be saying no until the day it closes its doors with a final no: “No Longer in Business.”

Yet one of the best ways a company can create a healthy ecosystem that fertilizes creativity is to include risk. That doesn’t mean doing anything silly or poorly planned. Risks can be smart, or foolish, or anything in between.

Business Reality

Unix was great in many ways, and it had this wonderful multi-threaded architecture—you could run different applications at the same time, then unheard of in a personal computer. With Unix, if one app crashed, it didn’t crash the whole system. We talked about Unix for hours, going back and forth about its advantages and disadvantages. I didn’t see my role as telling Steve what to do as much as letting him hear himself argue both sides of the issue and then letting him know that I supported him totally and had absolute confidence that he would make the right decision. Ultimately Steve decided to use Unix, and although things didn’t work out perfectly, it did turn out to be the right choice at the right time. In 1996, Apple ended up buying NeXT for $429 million—and the company’s next operating system was based on Unix.

“If the other guy’s business looks easy, it means you don’t know enough about it.”

“Examples of failed products or projects are hard to find. Successes are easy.”

Managing Creatives

Many corporate cultures gear themselves around the concept that creatives can’t really be trusted and need constant supervision. This is what I call the kindergarten school of management.

This happens too often because someone who is good at his job at a base level is eventually promoted to a position where he is out of his depth—aka the Peter Principle: Employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence.

Management has one other critical task. Creatives are often poor communicators. For example, Steve Wozniak was possibly the worst speaker I ever met—he could barely get words out of his mouth, and he addressed his feet rather than me whenever we talked. In the early days, he was clearly a hyper-creative, but without Steve Jobs no one would have known.

The skills that make people highly creative do not necessarily make them articulate or even glib. So the other important task of a manager is to communicate for them—to recognize the good in their project and then become their in-house public-relations director. A great manager is a great cheerleader—of adults.

Creative innovation is just too radical, too scary, and unfortunately, too unbelievable to most people. Terrific in the abstract. Not terrific in real life. A lot of people, including the executives of many companies, have it in their minds that they embrace innovation, but when it comes to specifics, they become powerful naysayers. This is the opposite of a Steve Jobs. Steve was not particularly creative himself, but he was extraordinarily open to creativity, very willing to brave risks. He embraced innovation and brought it to the fore.

The truth is that creative ideas, products or services are not produced by lightning strikes. They evolve in these gradual, step-by-step processes of analysis and solution. To allow that progression to happen, you must have in place a chain of command (ideally as short a chain as possible) that does everything it can to promote a good idea and help it see fruition rather than stifle it.

Creative Process

…the digital entertainment company uWink (my eighteenth start-up)…

…letting people write all over the walls, in any medium, promotes creativity. Most creative types think in terms of broad strokes. They are often limited by the space available on a piece of paper or a computer monitor. Moreover, drawing while talking to someone helps communicate complex ideas.

Creatives often go down their own personal rabbit holes and fail to finish their projects on time. The solution: demo day.

In the tech world, and probably in many others, 90 percent of progress happens a week before a trade show (or in the case of other businesses, any deadline day). You can procrastinate and procrastinate, and then, finally, eventually, you act. But too often, you don’t act fast enough—and you miss your deadline. So at Atari we created soft deadlines called demo days.

Often, just to add some verisimilitude, we made up reasons for the imaginary deadlines, which were generally about two weeks away: a distributor from China was coming in, a venture capitalist wanted to see our work, a journalist was writing an article.

Jobs drove the concept to an even higher level. He would commission many designs for the same product, have them all demoed at the same time, choose which features he liked from the bunch, and then move the project forward to its actual completion date.

In software development, for example, every project is written twice. When I was a programmer I would get 90 percent through the programs, finally get my “aha!” moment, abandon everything I had already done, and start again with my new vision.

Limiting your creatives to one and only one project can be so frustrating to them that it hinders rather than helps their overall productivity. I’ve found that if you constrain your creatives to work on just one project, the resulting boredom they suffer is often relieved by surfing the web, reading a magazine, goofing off, and doing anything else they can think of to keep their active minds occupied, and they end up slacking off on that one goal you assigned them. Instead, assign your creatives several projects at the same time—something you wouldn’t do with the average person. When you give creatives multiple tasks, they tend to feel less limited and can often complete several of them in the same time frame in which they might have finished just one. These people have tremendous bandwidth. Take advantage of it. They want you to. Keep them productive by giving them what others would think of as an impossible workload.

Most people will tell you they only want to know as much as they need to know at any given time. Not creatives. When tasking a group of creative people, give them a heads up on their next projects. Their endlessly functioning, hyperactive minds will immediately start thinking about the future, even as they are still working on their current projects.

However, if I were to tell someone that her next project was going to focus on, say, fire hydrants, for the next six months she will notice every fire hydrant that she passes and she’ll start to understand nuances and differences among the hydrants that would not have been possible without that prompt. She may not even be doing this consciously, but then again, we often don’t know what our subconscious mind is doing. So even though the fire hydrant project won’t start for some time, when it does, she’ll already be ahead.

Keep your creatives’ minds busy. Make sure there’s always unconscious work going on in their brains.

Naysayers & Toxics

…one of the characteristics of the true creative is a certain amount of intellectual arrogance. Steve Jobs thought everyone he reported to was, basically, an idiot. (Of course, I was one of those people.) The point isn’t who’s smarter. It’s not a contest. The point is to help these people create like crazy for you. One of the best ways to achieve this: Don’t act like an idiot. Learn as much as you can about them. Learn what they do. And most of all, learn to speak their language.

When the manager becomes the student, she gains respect. It gives your creatives the ability to strut a bit, to talk about what they know, and to show how smart they are—especially to their superiors, who in their minds may be all powerful but not all that bright.

These naysayers are easy to spot because they’re the ones who prevent projects from taking off, who quash creativity, who sap imagination. They’ve gained power and prestige by being the company curmudgeon. They pretend that they’re doing this or that for the company’s good (someone has to play devil’s advocate, they say). But they’re really saying no all the time because it’s all they know how to do, and because they have no ideas of their own. In fact, they continue to thrive because they never stick their neck out and thus exist in the glow of their perfect record. When you give your approval to a new idea, like it or not, you have just taken on some responsibility for a possible failure. But if all you ever do is shoot down project after project, you are always going to be 100 percent correct. Nothing upon which you have your stamp fails because you haven’t stamped anything. This does not make you smart. This makes you obstructive. There was only one word we outlawed at Atari: no. I wouldn’t let people say it. Any idiot can say no. There’s no mental process there. If you don’t like something, the trick is to think of something better.

Often managers say no to an idea because the person trying to explain it simply isn’t very good at the process. Never let great ideas disappear because managers say no before the idea is fully explained.

When people write critiques, with their name attached, they are forced to take personal responsibility for their negative opinions. They are on record saying that they don’t think the project will work. If it then goes forward, and is successful, their prognostication skills are in doubt—whereas if they simply voiced their opinion, they could always claim they were misheard, or that they were just echoing someone else, or offer some other excuse.

…when people give quick voice to their objections, those objections aren’t generally thoughtful. The pressure is to speak, not to be accurate. A written statement forces people to explain exactly what they mean, with the proper analytics.

Helping to refine an idea is as important as having the idea itself.

Naysayers (see pong 40) reject before analyzing. They don’t want to say yes. They love to say no. Naysayers are recipe players—they know the formula for what has worked in the past, and they have thrived in that framework. They do not want to change it. Change is dangerous. The best way to stop change from happening is to say no as many times as possible.

Toxics are more dangerous—and often harder to recognize. They constantly reframe every possible new development at the company into one that is good for them—without any interest in whether or not it’s good for the company. If the company tanks, they can always get a new job, since they’re constantly working on their résumés and their contacts. They don’t care. They don’t work for the company. They work for themselves. Toxics are supremely subtle, preternaturally political, and potentially psychopathic. Rehabilitate them or exterminate them.

Market Strategy

Game companies tended to have an exclusive in each city. That meant the guy across the street from Atari’s distributor in, say, Chicago, would always be trying to get someone to go into business against us. When we realized that no one else was stepping up to do this, we thought, why not become our own competitor? So we created a company called Key Games, which was actually 100 percent owned by Atari but was set up to look as though it were our competitor. The salespeople from Key Games next went to the second-strongest distributor in each city and became its game supplier. We then took every other game from our engineering department, moved it over to Key Games, and soon Key Games was doing very well. Between Atari and Key Games, we ended up with an 80 percent market share.

The truth is that it’s quite appropriate to make a terrific product/service for the wealthy. In their early years, many successful products have been very expensive.

Say: I will build this only for rich people, who have money to burn. If you think that way, you free up one of the major self-constraints people place on creativity.

But even if the project does end up being pricey, keep in mind that the road to innovation often travels through the wealthiest neighborhoods. The rich were the only people able to afford the first telephones, the first airplanes, the first cars, the first computers, and so on. The wealthy are always looking for new products to make their lives easier, more enjoyable, or more productive, and creative minds are there to invent them.

In the 1860s, a Parisian blacksmith named Pierre Michaux began selling custom bicycles with pedals for what was then a pricey 250 francs. Most of his first customers were nobles, and the bicycle remained a high-priced toy for moneyed young men until the early part of the twentieth century, when department stores like Sears finally found ways to make and sell them inexpensively. (If you tore your clothes riding, you were lucky if you had a sewing machine to fix them; such machines were a lavish expense for most people in the nineteenth century, selling for $125 when the average annual income was $500. But by the mid-twentieth century, 85 percent of all American households owned one.) Similarly, the microwave oven, invented by Percy L. Spencer and first sold in 1947, was about six feet tall and weighed 750 pounds, looking more like a refrigerator than today’s compact unit. It cost the modern equivalent of about thirty thousand dollars and was sold only to commercial customers. Even the first consumer models, sold in the mid-1950s, were priced up to today’s equivalent of fifteen thousand dollars. Today, more than 90 percent of American households own a microwave oven. To give a more recent example, IBM’s Watson computer is a three-million-dollar supercomputer that is capable of understanding human language and, in 2011, even won an episode of the quiz show Jeopardy. The computer is currently being used on a trial basis in the health care industry to help medical professionals research and treat cancer. However, there is talk that within a few years the company might be able to create a pocket-sized, consumer version of the product—at a fraction of its current multimillion-dollar cost.

Process & Speed

The habits of highly effective people are seldom creative; highly habitual people don’t tend to have original ideas. They’re trying to have a well-planned life. When all you want is execution, consistency can be an excellent thing. But when you want wild, off-the-wall, uninhibited creativity, it is a spoiler.

The more you create organizational structure, the more likely it is your processes will become counterproductive. Otherwise, all the processes in the world would be useful and good. They’re not.

Managers are not evil. They just want to solve problems in a way that keeps the problems from repeating. Unfortunately, the procedures they install can be overly precise and engender some form of hidden cost. As noted, the usual payment for process is loss of personal creativity and speed. Often, the cost of enforcement is greater than the expected savings from the process.

So when new hires wanted to insert more process into our organization, I would always ask, “Why would this speed up our cycle?” This question usually discombobulated them. They were almost always able to answer as to how it might save money. They were seldom able to answer how it would make things go faster.

Today’s markets demand speed. Speed trumps all else. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in marketing, manufacturing, a service industry, or any other business. Given the remarkably fast pace of innovation and change, if you’re not focused on speed, you’re dead in the water. Creativity without speed is useless. Old rules and standard operating procedures don’t lead to innovation.

Inspiration & Energy

Although we both knew the other preferred going through museums alone for the freedom of being able to stop or go without any pressure, we decided to walk through the Whitney together. I quickly discovered that Steve, like me, had found a great deal of creative inspiration at modern art museums. We both liked the truly imaginative pieces but hated those we thought to be glorified junk. The one place where we differed is that Steve liked the very simple stuff. I wanted art to be more complicated. As always, Steve was drawn to elegant simplicity and said that he wanted his entire staff to come back to one particular room where the art was as simple and pure as art can be.

Success often creates a culture where people feel driven to create even more success, and more, and more, and then, as the company becomes increasingly known for hiring hard workers, even more. And more. When people work too hard, they become tired, they make mistakes, they lose their equanimity. They also lose their perspective, the ability to separate the big problems from the little problems. Everything looks overwhelming, creating tension and anxiety—the enemies of creativity.

You don’t want your creatives to lose judgment. Fatigue myopia is one of the worst things that can happen to an overworked company.

Everyone learned to appreciate the manufacturing process as well, because the executives were able to produce only about 70 percent of what the manufacturing line workers made in a shift. Some of the executives had thought the line workers had been loafing, but they soon learned that the workers had developed an economy of motion that the executives couldn’t figure out how to reproduce.

Oscar Dystel, one of the greatest book publishers in the history of the business, used to ask his editors at Bantam Books to accompany the sales department on its calls to help them expand their sense of the marketplace—and to give the salespeople a chance to tell the editors what they thought of their editorial choices.

Steve Jobs brought a futon to work, and I’d often find him sleeping under his bench. Many of my other creative employees also performed best when allowed to sleep as their bodies desired, rather than as the workday required.

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” —Computer scientist Alan Kay…

Act on Ideas

You might even find that the next Steve Jobses are already working for you—although if that’s the case, the odds are good that they’re wilting under your company’s hierarchy, their inspiration destroyed by your management team, by the lack of support for their ideas, by the fear that taking a risk will lead to being fired, and so on. As mentioned, it isn’t enough to find the next Steve Jobses and hire them; you have to create a situation in which they can flourish, and then your company can, too. Remember that Steve’s own board at Apple eventually fired him. The reason? They thought they could not control what they considered to be all his crazy projects. So even Steve Jobs lost out to the supposedly sophisticated managers of Apple—which promptly tanked until Steve was brought in again to lead the company back to success.

Act! Everyone who has ever taken a shower has had a good idea. The thing that matters is what you do with that idea once you get out of the shower. So if there’s only one thing you take from this book, it’s this: You must act! Do something! Too many people read books, listen to lectures, attend seminars, and then return to their lives without changing a thing. If that’s how you respond to this book, then I’ve failed.

You and your company are in a daily battle with the future—blink, and your competitor may suddenly take a giant step forward, leaving you wondering what happened. Blink, and your competitor may have taken over your market, and it’s too late for you to do anything about it. The future can leap out at you from any direction—do you think that Nokia or BlackBerry ever thought their business would be decimated by a California-based computer company named after a fruit that had never before entered the cell phone market?

Steve replied that since he’d left Apple (temporarily, as noted above), he had been fascinated with Pixar’s work in this area and was thinking of investing in the company. I told him that his nose for such things was excellent and that he should do what he always does: “Act!” I said. “And then solve any problems that come along.” He thanked me and we talked about other things. Only a few months later, I found out that he had gone out and made a significant investment in Pixar. Sometime later, I received an invitation to the San Francisco premiere of the movie Toy Story. At the party afterward, we talked about how terrific the animation technology was. “Great work, Jobs,” I said. He smiled. “I acted,” he said, and moved off into the crowd.