The late Steve Jobs created a world class company called Apple – which is now the largest and most successful technology company – eclipsing Microsoft. The secret of the success of Apple is laid out in Steve Jobs biography – and can be stated in one word. Design.
Apple designs, develops and delivers great products and services – ones that people want to own and to use. That makes them cool. What is even more impressive is that Steve Jobs has done this in more than once and has reinvented more than one market: Apple Computers and the graphical personal computer; Pixar and animated films; and Apple again with digital music, electronic publishing; and mobile phones.
The common themes are digital technology and end-to-end seamless integrated design of chips, devices, software, services and shops. Full vertical integration rather like Henry Ford’s verically integrated iron-ore to finished cars production line. The Steve Jobs design paradigm is simplicity. It is much more difficult to design simplicity than to evolve complexity and his reputation was formidable. He was a uncompromising perfectionist who sacrificed feelings on the alter of design perfection. His view of the world was binary – it was either great or crap – meaning it was either moving towards perfection or away from it.
What Steve Jobs created was a design stream out of which must-have products and services flowed – and he did it by seeing all the steps as part of one system and aligned with one purpose. He did not allow physical or psychological silos to form and he did this by challenging anything and everything. Many could not work in this environment and left, many others thrived and delivered far beyond what they believed they could do.
Other companies were swamps. Toxic emotional waste swamps of silos, politics and turf wars. Apple computers itself when through a phase when Steve Jobs was “ejected” and without its spiritual leader the company slipped downhill. He was enticed back and Apple was reborn and went on to create the iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad and now iCloud. Revolutioning the world of digital commnication.
The image above is a satellite view of a delta – a complex network of interconnected streams created by a river making its way to the sea through a swamp. The structure of the delta is constantly changing and evolving so it is easy to get lost it in, to get caught in a dead-end, or stuck in the mud. Only travel by small boat is possible and that is often both ineffective and inefficient.
Many organistions are improvement science swamps. The stream of innovative ideas gets fragmented by the myriad of everchanging channels; caught in political dead-ends; and stuck in the mud of bureaucracy. Only small, skillfully steered ideas will trickle through – but this trickle is not enough to keep the swamp from silting up. Eventually the resistance to change reaches a critical level and the improvement stream is forced to change course – diverting the flow of change away from the swamp – and marooning the stick-in-the-muds to slowly sink and expire in the bureaucratic gloop that they spawned.
Steve Jobs’ legacy to us is a lesson. To create a system that continues to deliver and delight we need to start by learning how to design the steps, then to design the streams of steps to link seamlessly, and finally to design the system of streams to synergise as sophisticated simplicity.
Improvement cannot be left to chance in the blind hope that excellence will evolve spontaneously. Evolution is both ineffective and inefficient and is more likely to lead to dissipated and extravagant complexity than aligned and elegant simplicity.
Improvement is a science that sits at the cross-roads of humanity and technology.