I stumbled upon this gem today (via this article). It’s a video of a 45-minute long raw Q&A session with Steve Jobs by developers at WWDC 1997, when he was still an advisor to Apple and Gil Amelio was CEO. In it, Steve gives pretty clear answers to some tough questions, and gives us a glimpse into what it was like to turnaround Apple from the brink of disaster into the powerhouse it is today.

Though slightly dated, this video is a great case study for what great leadership looks like, especially in times of crisis. Keep in mind that this was before there was any indication that Steve Jobs would be the next CEO of Apple, and the fate of the company was hanging by a thread. There’s irony, given Apple’s reputation for secrecy, in how candid Steve is to this audience of 3rd party developers. There’s no question that Steve totally gets it about the industry. He doesn’t mince words, or try to BS his way out of hard questions. Equally remarkable is how clear and consistent his vision for success was, and how you can now trace much of what Apple has since accomplished back to the points he made 14 years ago.

A few of my favorite takeaways and snippets:

1. On focus: “Focusing is about saying no.” The very first question out of the gate was a hardball one about why Steve and the new management cut so many seemingly promising projects like OpenDoc. Steve’s response was that due to bad engineering management, too many projects had been started and allowed to continue in multiple directions without coherence. The result of which was less than the sum of the parts. The solution was to cut things, even locally promising things, that did not contribute to the larger goal.

2. On Better vs. Different: “It’s important that Apple be perceived as Much Better, not Different.” The key is to focus on the 10-20% of stuff that you can make much better, and reuse the rest. It’s a failed strategy to try to reinvent the wheel in every case.

3. On the stock price: “[focus on executing and] the press and stock price will take care of themselves… if people are selling Apple stock short, go out and buy some, that’s what I’ve done.”

4. On “Cloud computing”: Although he never used the word “Cloud”, here’s a segment where Steve Jobs gives a pretty spot-on description of what Cloud computing should be. 14 years later, you’ll find this eerily similar to what iCloud is now trying to do.

5. On where great products come from: “Every good product is because a group of people cared deeply about making something wonderful that they and their friends wanted.”

6. On the customer experience: “You need to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.”

7. On the future of mobile communication: “What I want is a little thing with a keyboard that’s connected to the net… I don’t want a little scribble thing”.

After watching this, I only wish all companies were run by people with even half this level of candor and get-it-ness.

It’s every journalists dream to get into a flame war with a top CEO. Looks like one guy from Gawker got more than he bargained for when he tried to flame Steve Jobs, who fired back remarkably open and level-headed responses at 2 in the morning.

My favorite line is the last one from Steve (after a long series of flames from the Gawker guy):

“… You can disagree with us, but our motives are pure.

By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?”

I may not fully agree with Apple’s or Steve’s position on everything, but the fact that Steve Jobs is dishing out personal and lucid responses at 2 in the morning to a third rate journalist cements the fact that there’s good reason why Steve Jobs is the #1 CEO in the world.

Steve Jobs: **Respect** +10.

Gawker: Credibility -10.

Here’s a link to the full thread.

This brings to mind Teddy Roosevelt’s famous quote, which I can’t resist adding here:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

A great talk by DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson from 37 Signals) on how to create a successful company:

It’s a refined version of his usual talk. Some basic points:

1. All companies start as small companies.

2. An MBAs teaches you to manage large organizations, the very thing you do not want when starting a company.

3. Focus on profits, not just revenue.

4. When it’s your money, and you are focused on making more, you make much better decisions.

5. VC money is evil. Don’t do it.

Looks like a lot of this is from their new book, Rework.

Lattice by Todd Huffman

The Federal Government’s Office of Personnel Management publishes a Handbook for Measuring Employee Performance. It has some good points. My favorite part is the need to measure accomplishments not activities, best illustrated by the story about the 2 bee keepers:

Once upon a time, there were two beekeepers who each had a beehive. The beekeepers worked for a company called Bees, Inc. The company's customers loved its honey and wanted the business to produce more honey than it had the previous year. As a result, each beekeeper was told to produce more honey at the same quality. With different ideas about how to do this, the beekeepers designed different approaches to improve the performance of their hives:

The first beekeeper established a bee performance management approach that measured how many flowers each bee visited. At considerable cost to the beekeeper, an extensive measurement system was created to count the flowers each bee visited. The beekeeper pro-vided feedback to each bee at midseason on his individual performance, but the bees were never told about the hive's goal to produce more honey so that Bees, Inc., could increase honey sales. The beekeeper created special awards for the bees who visited the most flowers.

The second beekeeper also established a bee performance management approach, but this approach communicated to each bee the goal of the hive: to produce more honey. This beekeeper and his bees measured two aspects of their performance: the amount of nectar each bee brought back to the hive and the amount of honey the hive produced. The performance of each bee and the hive's overall performance were charted and posted on the hive's bulletin board for all bees to see. The beekeeper created a few awards for the bees that gathered the most nectar, but he also established a hive incentive program that rewarded each bee in the hive based on the hive's production of honey--the more honey produced the more recognition each bee would receive.

At the end of the season, the beekeepers evaluated their approaches. The first beekeeper found that his hive had indeed increased the number of flowers visited, but the amount of honey produced by the hive had dropped. The Queen Bee reported that because the bees were so busy trying to visit as many flowers as possible, they limited the amount of nectar they would carry so they could fly faster. Also, because the bees felt they were competing against each other for awards (because only the top performers were recognized), they would not share valuable information with each other (like the location of the flower-filled fields they'd spotted on the way back to the hive) that could have helped improve the performance of all the bees. (After all was said and done, one of the high-performing bees told the beekeeper that if he'd been told that the real goal was to make more honey rather than to visit more flowers, he would have done his work completely differently.) As the beekeeper handed out the awards to individual bees, unhappy buzzing was heard in the background.

The second beekeeper, however, had very different results. Because each bee in his hive was focused on the hive's goal of producing more honey, the bees had concentrated their efforts on gathering more nectar to produce more honey than ever before. The bees worked together to determine the highest nectar-yielding flowers and to create quicker processes for depositing the nectar they'd gathered. They also worked together to help increase the amount of nectar gathered by the poor performers. The Queen Bee of this hive reported that the poor performers either improved their performance or transferred to another hive. Because the hive had reached its goal, the beekeeper awarded each bee his portion of the hive incentive payment. The beekeeper was also surprised to hear a loud, happy buzz and a jubilant flapping of wings as he rewarded the individual high-performing bees with special recognition.

THE MORAL OF THIS STORY IS: MEASURING AND RECOGNIZING ACCOMPLISHMENTS RATHER THAN ACTIVITIESÑ AND GIVING FEEDBACK TO THE WORKER BEESÑ OFTEN IMPROVES THE RESULTS OF THE HIVE.