Steve Jobs on Company Culture: Communication at Scale
What Jobs talks about
Jobs argues that one of the biggest worries for growing companies is how to preserve culture and the fast communication that gives small teams an edge. He frames this as a central challenge for businesses scaling up.
He says NeXT’s technology can raise both the quantity and quality of communication in dramatic ways, helping organizations feel and function like smaller, tighter-knit teams. For him, that is not just a technical benefit but a social one.
Jobs also stresses that people need to use the technology themselves to understand its value. He presents it as something that can’t be fully grasped through explanation alone.
Jobs speaks throughout.
In his words
“How do we keep the culture of our company going as we grow?”
“How do we keep the communication that's one of our key competitive advantages while we're small as we grow?”
“This technology increases the level of communication to a degree that is stunning”
“Makes the organization work as if it was a much smaller tighter knit team”
“You have to sit down and actually use it”
Key points
- Growing companies struggle to keep their culture intact.
- Fast, effective communication is a key competitive advantage for smaller organizations.
- NeXT technology can dramatically increase communication inside companies.
- Better communication can make a large organization work like a smaller team.
- The effect is sociological, not just technical or business-related.
- Customers should use the technology directly to understand it.
Full transcript
You might find a little humorous, but I think it's very important. This last Mahal message is just alerting everybody to a pizza fest. Why did I put this on here? Because one of the largest concerns that we hear when we talk to small and medium sized companies or departments within even large companies is how do we keep the culture of our company going as we grow? How do we keep the communication that's one of our key competitive advantages while we're small as we grow? And what we've seen here at NeXT in our own company and what we've seen at many, many of our customers is that this technology increases the level of communication to a degree that is stunning and brings organizations together and makes the organization work as if it was a much smaller tighter knit team.
And that's not just a business phenomenon. It's not just a technical phenomenon, it's a sociological phenomenon. And the not only the quantity, but the quality of communication has increased dramatically because of this technology. And you have to use it to really understand what I mean, just as if I was trying to explain a spreadsheet or desktop publishing to you many years ago. You have to sit down and actually use it, and I encourage all of our customers to do exactly that.
Transcribed from the audio by speech recognition (Deepgram). Timestamps link to the video above. Errors are possible.