Steve Jobs’ fierce meeting style shaped Apple’s culture for decades.
A new book by David Pogue, “Apple: The First 50 Years,” pulled back the curtain on the company’s culture, which was heavily influenced by its cofounder’s leadership style when he set out to turn Apple around in 1997. One of Jobs’ characteristics as CEO was his affinity for meetings.
He dedicated a day each week to meeting with different members of his executive team, with Mondays reserved for the most important ones. Those meetings were where Jobs and Apple’s leaders cultivated a culture of debate.
They would poke holes in each other’s strategies and refocus on a singular vision, former marketing exec Phil Schiller told Pogue.
It made collaborating easier, but the process could be tense.
“We’re all going to fight as loud as we want, as much as we want, about whatever it is we think,” Schiller said in the book. “Say it in this room. And then when we leave the room, we all own the decision together.”
Everyone was accountable for the decision they reached, he said. They all had the chance to voice their opinions during these meetings.
The method ties back to a metaphor Jobs used to tell about a rock tumbler that polishes ugly rocks into something beautiful. Pogue wrote that Jobs would say that people “bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together, they polish each other, and they polish the ideas.”
Pogue said the metaphor is still cited at Apple years after Jobs’ departure. Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
It’s how the company avoids situations where people think poorly of a project but stay silent out of fear, and it offers a chance to think through different viewpoints.
“Sometimes we switched positions and would argue the opposite way. That’s how we brainstormed stuff out,” former Apple hardware engineering exec Jon Rubinstein said in the book.
One thing you wouldn’t find in a meeting with Jobs is a PowerPoint slideshow. Pogue wrote that the cofounder considered them unnecessary.
“I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking,” Jobs once said, Pogue wrote in the book. “People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.
Jobs’ style was disruptive at the time, but it helped develop Apple into a dominant tech giant.
“It created a culture of collaboration, a culture of shared purpose, a singular focus on what we’re doing,” Schiller said.
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