ARTS & FARCES internet

If you’ve worked in any techology-related field for any length of time—or probably in any other field, for that matter—you’ve spent a lot of time wondering how Steve Jobs manages to pull one great product after another out of his hat.

Leander Kahney sat down for 90 minutes with former Apple chief executive John Sculley, who should have a pretty good idea how Steve Jobs does it. Sculley, for the youngs, is the guy who Steve Jobs lured away from Pepsi by asking, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?” Sculley is also the guy who later won a battle for control of Apple against Jobs.

Sculley, remarkably, unveils Jobs’s “first principles:”

1. Beautiful design
2. Customer experience
3. No focus groups
4. Perfectionism
5. Vision
6. Mimimalism
7. Hire the best
8. Sweat the details
9. Keep it small
10. Reject bad work
11. Perfection
12. Systems thinker

Master those dozen principles and you’re well on your way to doing great work. Of course, it helps if you actually have the authority to employ those five principles; few of us do.

I find the customer experience principle the most easily applicable and find myself on every project saying to the project’s stakeholders: “You may sign my check, but I’m working for the users.”

The no focus groups principle is the most compelling. If you’re creating something completely new, how can you possibly ask someone else what that new thing should be, look like or work like? They, understandably, don’t have a clue. Kahney quotes Sculley as saying Jobs “... believed that showing someone a calculator, for example, would not give them any indication as to where the computer was going to go because it was just too big a leap.”

The perfectionism principle is probably the hardest sell. In brainstorming and prototyping, I’m a strong advocate of an iterative approach—failing early and often—of continually improved refinement. But when it comes to a final deliverable, I believe in doing everything as close to absolutely perfect as possible. Good enough never is. Lately I’m finding myself being told that my “standards are just too high.” That’s crap and a convenient cop-out.

Sculley tells Kahney what I think should be the first of the “first principles” when it comes to Steve Jobs’s success: “He was not a designer but a great systems thinker. That is something you don’t see with other companies. They tend to focus on their piece and outsource everything else.”