Apple has always loaded the odds in its favor. Every big, audacious project that it has pursued -- the Macintosh, Lisa, Newton, iPod, and the iPhone – have had one thing in common: all have had a great team behind them. A recent article in Wired, by David Pierce suggests that the Apple Watch has had one as well.
Each of these projects was a great adventure into the unknown; and each represented an explicit aspiration to disrupt an established industry. Some of these efforts worked, and others didn’t, but they were all built around great teams! This has been part of Apple’s signature throughout. When going into the unknown with a big move, don’t settle for anything less than acquiring the best skills you need – not relying on just the skills you have. It’s good advice for any organization.
Wearables are seen as perhaps the next great step forward in the future of personal computing and connectivity. Despite their being widely proclaimed as the new frontier, it remains to be seen if and how that prediction will be fulfilled. Last year, the actual shipments of wearables were less than 60% of what was predicted. Clearly, this is a big leap into the unknown, even for Apple… .Jonathan Ive, Apple’s celebrated number two, has admitted that: “It’s not very often that we start something that’s an entirely new platform.” Yet, what’s so breathtaking about the new Watch is how Apple’s team went about tackling this project, and what others can learn from it.
Among the key lessons are:
Dream Big
Ironically, the dream that launched the watch was born out of dissatisfaction with Apple’s most successful product, the iPhone. According to David Pierce, there was a feeling at Apple that “Your phone is ruining your life,” which became a challenge to “engineer a reverse state of being.” The quest would take Apple far afield of much of what had made it successful to date, including moving into luxury offerings and providing fashion variety to a mass-produced consumer electronics product.
Give Big Projects the Attention they Deserve
Kevin Lynch, VP Technology at Apple, and newly hired from Adobe where he was CTO, ran the Watch project, but, clearly, everyone at the top of Apple, from Tim Cook down, was involved in one way or another with the Watch initiative. While this was very definitely a “special” project, it was never very far from the attention of the people at the top. Jonathan Ive, who had recently been given responsibility for both design and leadership and direction for Human Interface software teams across the company, met with the Watch design team weekly.
Hire for Skills
When jumping S-curves, Andy Boynton and I have written in our book Virtuoso Teams that firms need to abandon the traditional advice to “hire for attitude and train for skills, and, instead, hire for skills and figure out how to deal with the attitudes.” Attitudes are not enough to carry you into the future; you need skills, and you probably need skills that you don’t already have! With Apple, that was certainly true when they hired Tony Fadel in the making of the iPod, and they did it again with the Watch.
The talent hired in by Apple for the Watch reveals not only an unwillingness to compromise about product design and development, but also an unwillingness to compromise over talent as well. What differentiates the Watch from previous Apple products is that it is their first unabashedly luxury offering, as well as being a mass-produced product whose wearers expect variety. In response, Apple hired such luxury- and watch-experienced talent as: Marc Newson, British luxury watch designer and designer of Safilo’s reading glasses; Kevin Lynch, formerly CTO at Adobe, and also formerly an outspoken Apple critic; Paul Deneve, former CEO and president of the iconic Yves Saint Laurent luxury brand; Angela Ahrendts, former CEO of Burberry; and Patrick Pruniaux, from watch-maker Tag Heuer, a part of the L.V.M.H. luxury conglomerate. Alan Dye, chief of Apple’s human interface group and a key player in the Watch project, had been hired in 2006, having previously worked as design director for Kate Spade.
Learn from Others
Learning from others is a good way to begin any innovation project, and learning from the best is an even better approach. Not surprisingly, when New Yorker writer Ian Parker visited Apple’s design laboratories, he spotted “a wall of books that included “100 Superlative Rolex Watches. ”” Similarly, when health-monitoring was still thought to be a part of the initial Watch offering, Apple had hired-in a posse of health-monitoring talent that was breath-taking in its scope and experience, and which included Jay Blahnik, and Nike design director Ben Shaffer, both of whom had worked on the design and development of Nike’s FuelBand.
The final form of the Apple Watch resembles one of Marc Newson’s earlier watches, and the 1904 Cartier Santos, which is both a credit to the team's knowledge and a willingness to learn from anywhere.
Change the conversations
Innovation feeds off of ideas, and ideas move in conversations. Who participates, and when, can make the difference between excellence and adequate; between success and failure. Jeff Williams, Senior VP, Operations, and in charge of Apple’s special projects, has pointed out that at Apple “manufacturing and design” are “inextricably linked,” both for speed and to ensure that dreams can in fact be realized. This differs from many consumer electronics producers where Design has typically been just ““a vertical stripe in the chain of events” in a product’s delivery”. According to Robert Brunner, former head of Industrial Design at Apple before Jonathan Ive, and now a partner at the San Francisco-based design consultancy Ammunition LLC, at Apple: “Design [has become] a long horizontal stripe where [it] is part of every conversation.”
Prototyping is also a part of making conversations faster and feedback more precise. With the Watch, Apple built its first prototype six weeks into the project, and apparently it was no more than “an iPhone rigged with a Velcro strap. … with a simulator that displayed a life-size image of an Apple Watch on the screen. And a custom dongle, an actual watch crown that plugged into the bottom of the phone through the cord jack.” Given that the Watch was seen to be a replacement for the tyranny of the iPhone, there is both irony and genius associated with using an iPhone as the first prototype.
Hard Work
The final ingredient to any project at Apple is hard work. Ive estimated that work on the Watch took three years: “It took a long time and it was very hard.” Typically, Apple’s design projects teams work 12 hour workdays, and while every project has a lead designer, “almost everyone contributes to every project, and shares the credit….with team meetings ...held in the kitchen two or three times a week.” This is clearly not so much about glamor as it is about a chance to participate in something memorable. Bono has written in Time magazine that “What the competitors don’t seem to understand is you cannot get people this smart to work this hard just for money.”
Six relatively straight-forward lessons that speak much more to the quality of Apple's leadership than anything else. We look at Apple and marvel at what they have accomplished, but at the core of their success is that they care more, and compromise less (or not at all).
