Steve Jobs on Macintosh: Building a Better Way

In California's Silicon Valley, time seems to be compressed, and Apple is a perfect example. In 1976, two computer whiz kids, Steve Wozniak and Steven Jobs, designed the personal computer in Jobs' garage, and managed to bring it to market a year later as the Apple II. In 1980, only three years later, Apple went public as a $118 million company. The following year, IBM entered the new market with its own personal computer, the PC. Industry analysts predicted that Apple, like many other smaller companies, would be forced out of business. But Steven Jobs, now all of 28 years old and chairman of the board, was not prepared to step aside. You know, they have a third of a million people at IBM. They've got like 350,000 people.

We've got 6,000 people. Makes you wonder. I think IBM is a national treasure, what they've been able to do. And they're sort of like a jewel in many ways. And I have a great deal of respect for them. They've made Apple a lot better. By competing with IBM, we're becoming better and better each month. But there is a problem. And the problem is that they are so large and dominate certain markets so completely that I think Apple is the only thing standing between them and total industry dominance. Apple's response to the IBM threat was the Macintosh. This Jolly Roger actually flew above the project building, which was isolated from the rest of the company.

Jobs wanted his new task force to behave like pirates outside corporate law. He was determined that this team would be free to innovate unencumbered by Apple's bureaucracy. And he led the project himself. Jobs was a perfect model of the new manager as coach, cheerleader, and nourisher of champions. He's a maniac. He's a maniacal genius. His job is to stir up everything. He's a muckraker in the classic sense of the word. He will not leave anything alone. He will not allow inadequacy or compromise to exist. Steve Jobs was a catalyst for us. He gave us space. He sheltered us from the corporate noise. There's nothing like a group effort toward a common goal to unite people. That was the deal.

We wanted people that were insanely great at what they did, but were not necessarily those seasoned professionals, but who had at the tips of their fingers and in their passion the latest understanding of where technology was and what we could do with that technology and who wanted to bring that to lots of people. So the neatest thing that happens is when you get a core group of 10 great people, it becomes self-policing as to who they let into that group. So I consider the most important job of someone like myself is recruiting. We agonized over hiring. We had interviews. I could go back and look at some of the interviews again. They would start at 9 or 10 in the morning and go through dinner. A new interviewee would talk to everybody in the building at least once, maybe a couple times, and then come back for another round of interviews and then we'd all get together and talk about it.

And then they'd fill out an application. No, the most critical part of the interview, at least to my mind, was when we finally decided we liked them enough to show them the Macintosh prototype. And then we sat them down in front of it. And if they just kind of were bored or said, this is a nice computer, we didn't want them. We wanted their eyes to light up and them to get really excited and then we knew they were one of us. And everybody just wanted to work, not because it was work that had to be done, but it was because something that we really believed in that was just going to really make a difference. And that's what kept the whole thing going. We all wanted exactly the same thing. Instead of spending our time arguing about what the computer should be, we all knew what the computer should be and we just went and did it. The greatest people are self-managing. They don't need to be managed. Once they know what to do, they'll go figure out how to do it.

They don't need to be managed at all. What they need is a common vision. And that's what leadership is. What leadership is, is having a vision, being able to articulate that so the people around you can understand it, and getting a consensus on a common vision. You can click on a tool like a paintbrush and say, just real quickly, flip out a little image of someone and say, draw an eye. Grab it with a lasso. Pull it over. Peel off the copy. Get another paintbrush. The Mac team's vision was an inexpensive computer as powerful and sophisticated as IBM's PC, with an added playfulness that would make it attractive to young people like themselves.

And they wanted it easy to use. With Macintosh, there are no complicated commands to be memorized and typed into the machine. All you do is move an arrow with a selection device called a mouse and point to what you want from a menu of options presented on the screen. Then the next thing is you can copy a whole section. Peel off a copy. Flip it over. Move in. One of the neatest things about Macintosh was we had a chance to change the way people thought of computers. I think prior to when the personal computer stuff started happening, you know, five or six years ago, everyone thought of computers as big, cold, impersonal, generally negative connotations associated with a computer.

No one would associate the word fun and computer together. You know, they look at the machine and they say, it gets me in the gut. You know, I don't know exactly how to articulate it, but it's, you know, cute and fuzzy and warm and motherhood. You know, I want it. And it's so funny to hear your friends say this, you know, and your enemies say this. I know you've conveyed something very, very intangible through this bunch of electronics, really. I mean, very unemotional little pieces come together to form something that draws you, that's very approachable. You ask yourself, why are you doing it? I'm certainly not doing it for Steve Jobs. I'm doing it for something that I think is much greater good than that. And that's the chance to change something really, honestly, truly for the better. Here is how we see personal computers.

Here is how we want the world to be. And here is how we're going to change. We have a vision of how we want to be. We want to convert people. We want to make converts. Apple bet heavily that Macintosh would attract converts. Long before the computer was completed, the company invested $20 million in this assembly plant in Fremont, California. To keep its price down, Macintosh was designed specifically to be assembled in high volume on an automated line. At the Fremont plant, one Macintosh is assembled every 27 seconds. The plant is currently producing 80,000 computers a month. Designing a state-of-the-art plant for the first time was an overwhelming task, and finding the right person to manage it proved to be just as difficult. We went through that stage in Apple where we went out and we thought, oh, we're going to be a big company.

Let's hire professional management. We went out and hired a bunch of professional management. It didn't work at all. Most of them were bozos. They knew how to manage, but they didn't know how to do anything. If you're a great person, why do you want to work for somebody you can't learn anything from? You know what's interesting? You know who the best managers are? They're the great individual contributors who never, ever want to be a manager, but decide they have to be a manager because no one else is going to be able to do as good a job as them. After hiring two professional managers from outside the company and firing them both, Jobs gambled on Debbie Coleman, a member of the Macintosh team. 32 years old, an English literature major with an MBA from Stanford, Debbie was a financial manager with no experience in manufacturing.

I mean, there's no way in the world anybody else would give me this chance to run this kind of operation, and I don't kid myself about that. This is an incredible high risk both for myself personally and professionally and for Apple as a company to put a person like myself in this job. We're really betting on a lot of things. We're betting that my skills and organizational effectiveness, you know, override all those, you know, lack of technology, lack of experience, lack of, you know, time in manufacturing. So it's a big risk, and I'm just an example, and every single person on the Mac team, almost to your, you know, entry-level person, you could say that about. This is a place where people were afforded just incredibly unique opportunities to prove that they could do, they could write the book again.

Apple released Macintosh on January 24, 1984, hoping to sell 50,000 computers in the first 100 days on the market. 72,000 sold, and sales continue to climb. What began as a pirate venture, the bad kids in the company, has reinstated Apple as IBM's principal competitor in personal computers and is now accounting for roughly half the company's $1.5 billion in annual sales. The best way I came up with to affect change at Apple was by example, and that was probably more than anything else the key reason that I spent 2 1⁄2 years of my life on Macintosh was to try by example to say, hey, here's a better way to do things, and it turns out it's worked. I mean, almost everything at Apple now has looked at the Macintosh experience and come in and said, hey, we can take a lot of these concepts and apply them, make them better in some ways, and model.

Every other factory we're doing now is modeled after the Macintosh factory. Every other product team that's doing new product is being modeled after the Macintosh team. The Macintosh example demonstrates how effectively a task force can innovate when it is bound together by a shared vision and given the freedom within the corporation to find its own way. The project also attests to what can be achieved when people are recognized for their contributions. Inscribed inside the casing of every Macintosh, unseen by the consumer, are the signatures of the whole team. This is Apple's way of affirming that their latest innovation is a product of the individuals who created it, not the corporation.