the A

Excerpt from the book Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson:

For most things in life, the range between best and average is 30% or so. The best airplane flight, the best meal, they may be 30% better than your average one. What I saw with Woz was somebody who was fifty times better than the average engineer. He could have meetings in his head. The Mac team was an attempt to build a whole team like that, A players. People said they wouldn't get along, they'd hate working with each other. But I realized that A players like to work with A players, they just didn't like working with C players. At Pixar, it was a whole company of A players. When I got back to Apple, that's what I decided to try to do. You need to have a collaborative hiring process. When we hire someone, even if they're going to be in marketing, I will have them talk to the design folks and the engineers. My role model was J. Robert Oppenheimer. I read about the type of people he sought for the atom bomb project. I wasn't nearly as good as he was, but that's what I aspired to do. 

Jobs goal was to be vigilant against 'The bozo explosion' that leads to a company's being larded with second rate talent. He was always looking for the A rate players. And no compromise on that in anyway. 

(Woz - the co-founder of Apple)

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Wonder how many of those at the top or those who are named 'leaders' worry about hiring only A players? or how many of them even invest their time in converting the B players to A. The point is to have only A players in the team. And hence if I am a C player, will I not be trying to get into the A category? 

I like the aspiration to have only A players in the team. 

Srik

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simple

Excerpt from the book Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you. Simplicity isn't just a visual style. It's not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it's manufactured. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential. 

Jonathan Ive, describing his design philosophy at the Apple's design studio. Ive is one of the closest soul mates of Steve Jobs who shared his values about the design and their quest for true rather than the surface simplicity.

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I used to always think there is a lot more to just being simple or calling it simple. And it rang a bell when I read this paragraph.

Simple cannot be simply simple. 

Srik 

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here's to the crazy ones

Excerpt from the book Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

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The Think Different ad of Apple. Truly so!

Srik

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Intuition

Excerpt from the book - Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Coming back to America was, for me, much more of a cultural shock than going to India. The people in the Indian countryside don't use their intellect like we do, they use their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That's had a big impact on my work.

Western rational thought is not an innate human characteristic; it is learned and is the great achievement of Western civilization. In the villages of India, they never learned it. They learned something else, which is in some ways just as valuable but in other ways is not. That's the power of intuition and experiential wisdom. 

-- Jobs after his visit to India in search of enlightenment when he was nineteen years old.

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Interesting paragraphs that made me wonder whether what he said is true even now?

Srik

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