Operations Vs. Vision, or Why Tim Cook Can't Replace Steve Jobs

I've had a terrific career in high tech looking back at the last 20 years. I learned tube theory in high school but got to play with the new TTL logic chips. I wrote software for one of the first digital telephone switches, played with an Apple Lisa beside the VPs' office, and designed the file system for one of the first voicemail systems from the disk sectors, up. I worked on a network management system where we had to unpack tcp, udp and ip packets, which are the corpuscles of the internet. And I got to be part of a startup that accelerated the move from film to digital workflows in the printing industry.

Over that time, I've received a lot of positive feedback for a role I like to take on, that of a product visionary. It seems to be a simple but unusual set of skills. You have to be able to listen well, have a feel for industry and human trends, you have to be up on the latest trends in technology, and be able to accumulate enough data points to extrapolate a bit into the future with decent accuracy. But that's not enough. If seeing the future were all you needed, Cassandra would have been a happy person. Seeing the future is just the beginning, and the only times that the vision work I've been part of has come to fruition is when I had the courage, energy, and a great management team, to persevere against the myriad compromises that arise to prevent the vision from being achieved.

Sadly it is the compromises that keep many great products from shipping, becoming only "good", or even "mediocre," in the process. What's important to know is that none of these compromises, in and of themselves, seem bad. But accumulated together, one after another, without someone seeing where it is going to lead, and you end up with products like Microsoft Vista, the Blackberry Storm, and non-RPN calculators. There is no one person to blame, just a series of little things that turn into Cortlandt Homes. This is also refered to as the Death by a Thousand Cuts.

Here's the thing. None of the changes suggested along the path of dumbing a visionary product down to a me-too, unsatisfying object, are arguable on a solely rational basis. Each one seems "reasonable" - it will save 5 cents per machine, the competitors have one, and the famous - "we don't have time." You have to be driven to overcome all these setbacks, you have to persevere against the small rationalism in favor of the big picture, and you have to have the authority to say "no." You have to inspire and drive the vision into the people building it so they defend it themselves. You have to create a visionary army.

This is why Steve Jobs could create a company capable of creating, developing, and delivering great products. As CEO, he built the company around the core dna of product beauty, integrity and ease-of-use. He is crazy, and that is how we get insanely great products.

That this should be self-evident is in the examples of yesterday and today. When Steve was kicked out of Apple, the Mac lineup turned into a myriad of beige, functional boxes with hundreds of incremental new features and looked pretty well the same for years. Spindler and Amelio were decent operations guys, but they did not understand the core Apple values of design passion, and of pricing at the premium brand level. You can see the opposite this week when Jon Rubinstein, who was well-schooled in the Apple way, unveiled the most beautifully designed Palm product since the Palm V.

Yet, companies love to have an operational leader. The COO at a company I worked for explained it to me; if you put an operational person in charge, you can be sure that the budgets will get done, the numbers will get tracked, and all the action items will be completed. If you put a vision person in charge, you might get something amazing but you won't know when it will ship. An operation person, he argued, will go find vision if that's what they need to succeed. Sadly, that has never been my experience. Everyone falls back to their comfort zone, and when the going gets tough, the ops people cut back, trim budgets, get conservative, efficiently tracking the shrinking revenue and laying people off, right into bankruptcy. They never believe they need vision. They don't get it. They don't respect it. "We have plenty of vision," one manager told me, "we have more things we want to do then we have people, so vision is not our problem". That product went on to several versions, each with hundreds of new features, without a comprehensive theme, difficult to use, and looking almost exactly the same after years of development.

You have to have the madman at the helm. The person who wants to drive the crew to the edge of the world to do what has never been done before. The same thing that inspires the visionary makes the operations person quake in their boots and run back into the cabin to count things. Operations people join the navy. The visionaries want to be pirates.

So it's fine for Tim to cover daily operations while Steve recuperates, hopefully returning in time for a standing ovation and newly-unveiled innovation at WWDC 2009, but the next CEO of Apple has to be someone who knows how to get the best from Apple, and that means pushing innovation and passion to the forefront, and having the team behind him, sure - sometimes shaking their heads, but nonetheless on board, and making it happen. From what I've seen, that person might be already there.