PUT PRODUCTS BEFORE PROFITS
When Jobs and his small team designed the original Macintosh, in the early 1980s, his injunction was to
make it “insanely great.” He never spoke of profit maximization or cost trade-offs. “Don’t worry about
price, just specify the computer’s abilities,” he told the original team leader. At his first retreat with the
Macintosh team, he began by writing a maxim on his whiteboard: “Don’t compromise.” The machine
that resulted cost too much and led to Jobs’s ouster from Apple. But the Macintosh also “put a dent in
the universe,” as he said, by accelerating the home computer revolution. And in the long run he got the
balance right: Focus on making the product great and the profits will follow.
John Sculley, who ran Apple from 1983 to 1993, was a marketing and sales executive from Pepsi. He
focused more on profit maximization than on product design after Jobs left, and Apple gradually
declined. “I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies,” Jobs told me: They make
some great products, but then the sales and marketing people take over the company, because they are
the ones who can juice up profits. “When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t
matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off. It happened at Apple when Sculley came in, which was
my fault, and it happened when Ballmer took over at Microsoft.”
When Jobs returned, he shifted Apple’s focus back to making innovative products: the sprightly iMac,
the PowerBook, and then the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. As he explained, “My passion has been to
build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was
secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great
products. But the products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to
where the goal was to make money. It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything—the
people you hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings.”
DON’T BE A SLAVE TO FOCUS GROUPS
When Jobs took his original Macintosh team on its first retreat, one member asked whether they should
do some market research to see what customers wanted. “No,” Jobs replied, “because customers don’t
know what they want until we’ve shown them.” He invoked Henry Ford’s line “If I’d asked customers
what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’”
Caring deeply about what customers want is much different from continually asking them what they
want; it requires intuition and instinct about desires that have not yet formed. “Our task is to read
things that are not yet on the page,” Jobs explained. Instead of relying on market research, he honed his
version of empathy—an intimate intuition about the desires of his customers. He developed his
appreciation for intuition—feelings that are based on accumulated experiential wisdom—while he was
studying Buddhism in India as a college dropout. “The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their
intellect like we do; they use their intuition instead,” he recalled. “Intuition is a very powerful thing—
more powerful than intellect, in my opinion.”
Sometimes that meant that Jobs used a one-person focus group: himself. He made products that he and
his friends wanted. For example, there were many portable music players around in 2000, but Jobs felt
they were all lame, and as a music fanatic he wanted a simple device that would allow him to carry a
thousand songs in his pocket. “We made the iPod for ourselves,” he said, “and when you’re doing
something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you’re not going to cheese out.”