What Jobs and Musk, the innovators of their time, have in common is ‘childlike awe’… Constant pursuit of change
When I learned that a singer’s new song released this month was called ‘Mantra,’ I reflexively recalled an interview from 26 years ago.
The interviewer asks a question. “I want to ask about symbolic value.” The interviewee answers. “My mantra is focus and simplicity. To make something simple you have to clean up your thoughts. Once you get to that stage, you can move mountains.” This is part of a Zen question-like interview published on May 25, 1998, in ‘Business Week’, a weekly economic magazine published by Bloomberg. The person who conducted the interview was Andy Reinhart, Business Week’s San Francisco correspondent. The interviewee is Steve Jobs, who was Apple‘s interim CEO in 1998.
Apple’s current market capitalization is $3.4597 trillion. The mantra of the person who developed the world’s largest company in market capitalization is ‘focus and simplicity.’ In Sanskrit, mantra means ‘words of truth.’ Looking up the Longman English Dictionary, I found that mantra has two meanings. Mantra means ‘a word or sound repeated during prayer or meditation,’ but it can also mean ‘a word or phrase that represents a person’s rules or principles.’
For Steve Jobs, both definitions of mantra apply. For Jobs, who personally lived the life of an avid ascetic, mantras were a tool of meditation. For him, who was kicked out of the company he started and wandered in the wilderness, the mantra was a great principle for rebuilding the company. In other words, ‘focus and simplicity’ became the cornerstones of the decisions he had to make after returning to Apple.
Apple Campus on the Infinite Loop in Cupertino, California, USA. It served as Apple’s first headquarters until the large circular Apple Park was completed in 2017. Unlike Apple Park, you can go inside if invited by an employee even if it is not for work purposes. Photo by Kim Wook-jin
“The ability to focus saved Apple”
At the product level, ‘focus’ was his iron rule. Jobs believes that deciding what not to do in the process of concentration is as important as defining what to do. At the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), where he returned to Apple in 1997 and was the first keynote speaker, Jobs declared: “Focusing is about saying no.”
Before Jobs returned, Apple was selling over 35 products. At the time, Apple produced multiple versions of each product to meet bureaucratic pressure and the whims of dealers. Each product had a complicated version number, such as 6300 or 8200. When Jobs asked the question, “What should I tell my friends to buy?”, if he couldn’t get a simple and clear answer, he boldly eliminated the product. Soon, 70% of all products disappeared.
Even in internal strategy meetings, Jobs drew quadrants on a whiteboard and argued that Apple should focus on one product in each field. There are four categories: desktop laptops for consumers and professionals. He defined Apple’s job as creating four outstanding products that fall into each quadrant. The board objected. Before Jobs returned, Apple’s board of directors was using a strategy of approving the development of more products to expand its product lineup.
Jobs did the complete opposite and pushed ahead with his own strategy. Apple’s engineers focused on just four areas, and the professional Power Mac and PowerBook and the consumer iMac and iBook survived. The printer server personal digital assistant (PDA) produced by Apple at the time has disappeared into the back of history. Users who came to Apple’s campus to protest the discontinuation of PDAs were given warm coffee and their sincerity was conveyed.
Ten years later, in an interview with Fortune editor-in-chief Betsy Morris, Jobs said, “I’m proud of what I haven’t done as much as Apple has.” Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson said, “The ability to focus saved Apple.”
Organizational simplification continued under Tim Cook.
In terms of organization, ‘simplification’ was Jobs’ approach. When he returned, Apple was operating as a multi-divisional organization with managers responsible for each division dedicated to specific products. Jobs believed that the multi-divisional organizational structure was the cause of Apple’s limitations. Each department head appeared to compete rather than cooperate. Responsible managers were only focusing on calculating the profit and loss (P&L) of individual products and were unable to create overall synergies. This means that key areas such as the intuitive interface that Apple currently boasts were distributed across multiple departments.
Jobs eliminated all product managers and reorganized Apple by function. His principle was ‘simplification’. All hardware engineers were integrated into a single group. The same goes for software engineers. The company had only one profit and loss structure under the Apple brand. Apple was transformed into ‘one functional organization’ through Jobs’ reorganization in 1998. Since then, Apple has grown more than 40 times.
This functional organization is maintained to this day under the ‘Tim Cook’ system. When Tim Cook took over after Jobs left, he recognized the value of the organizational structure Jobs had created and worked hard to preserve it. “Apple has a unique and unique culture of excellence,” Cook said. “I have no intention of changing this,” he said. After Jobs’ death, many people wondered whether a simple ‘one functional organization’ structure would work well under Tim Cook. So far it’s been very successful.
Finding the right talent is half the battle
The last mantra that Steve Jobs mentioned during his lifetime was ‘talent’. Jobs gave a short lecture at Stanford Graduate School of Business in May 2003. To MBA graduate students, Jobs talks about his experiences as the CEO of Apple and Pixar. He concludes his lecture by introducing one of his mantras. “My mantra at Apple and Pixar is, ‘Finding talent is the most important thing.’ Find the right person. Then half the battle is over.”
He talks about the importance of securing talent when creating a company and presents the concept of Management by Values (MBV). This means that it is necessary to quickly and quickly secure a large number of talented people who match the founder’s values. Ultimately, this means that everyone must be able to look at the same point and move quickly.
Jobs said in his Stanford lecture that Apple’s first value is creating the world’s best personal computer. The second, of course, is to make a profit. He adds that in Apple’s culture, first and second can never change. Profit will follow in the process of creating the best product. However, he asserts that an organization where profit is the top priority cannot create the best product. Jobs tried to organize the company with people who fit these values.
He also believed that the secret to Apple’s ability to create the best products lies in integration that encompasses design, hardware, software, and content. Accordingly, when Apple hires employees, it listens to the opinions of not only the department’s manager but also other departments and engineers. Jobs explained, “When hiring employees for the marketing department, I had them talk to people in the design department and engineers.”
What Jobs and Musk have in common is ‘awe’
The past 5th marked the 13th anniversary of the death of an innovator who dreamed of advancing humanity through products. After Steve Jobs left, Elon Musk took over as the leading innovator of his time. Suddenly, I became curious about Musk’s mantra. A biography of Elon Musk published last year reveals the mind of a young man about to enter a doctoral program in materials science at Stanford Graduate School in 1995. “I thought about what could truly impact humanity. And three things came to mind. Internet, sustainable energy, space travel.” Biographer Walter Isaacson expresses this as ‘Musk’s life vision to be repeated and repeated like a mantra.’
Jobs’ mantra and Musk’s mantra are different. However, Isaacson, who worked on both official biographies, described the innovators’ commonality as a ‘childlike sense of wonder.’ At some point in most people’s lives, they stop thinking about the world. These weren’t like that. The author’s mantra is ‘There is Hope’, which I encountered on the Golden Gate Bridge. Even though I am losing my sense of awe about the world, I want to believe that there is still hope.
Kim Wook-jin, Deputy Director of KOTRA Economic Cooperation Office, Author of ‘Silicon Valley Mind Walk’
