Leading Apple With Steve Jobs

By Jay Elliot · Former Senior Vice President, Apple

Leading Apple With Steve JobsManagement Lessons From a Controversial Genius

Written partly as a correction. Jay was present for events other books got wrong — and he says so.

Get it on Amazon What’s inside

Wiley, 2012 · with William L. Simon

Senior VPApple Computer
6 yearsBeside Steve Jobs
$150M → $3BApple sales, his tenure
FirsthandNot reconstructed

Stories in this book

Things that are in no other account.

What this book will teach you

Ten things you’ll take out of it.

  1. How Steve selected talent — and the interview technique that had almost nothing to do with a résumé.
  2. Why he made the team part of the hiring process, and what that did to the team.
  3. The business philosophy underneath the theatrics, stated plainly.
  4. How to protect innovation from the ordinary corporate machinery that grinds it down.
  5. What “no more crap products” meant in practice, with a shipping deadline.
  6. Product strategy: how Apple decided what to build and, harder, what to stop building.
  7. Where entrepreneurial confidence comes from when everyone in the room disagrees with you.
  8. How the Apple workplace was designed to make certain behaviours inevitable.
  9. Why selling became something other than selling once the product was right.
  10. What it takes to put a ding in the universe — and what it costs.

More about the book

It started in a restaurant.

Jay Elliot met Steve Jobs in a restaurant. A hippie-looking stranger struck up a conversation, and a few minutes later was asking him to become Apple’s vice president of human resources and join the original Macintosh development team at the same time.

That is how the next six years began.

This book exists partly because of another one. When Walter Isaacson’s biography appeared, Jay found it unfairly negative — and, more to the point, wrong about events he had witnessed firsthand. He wasn’t alone. Bill Campbell, a former Apple vice president, longtime board member and personal friend of Steve’s, referred to it as “that damn book.”

So Leading Apple With Steve Jobs is the management book written from the other side of the desk. How Steve hired. How he protected innovation from the parts of a company that quietly kill it. What product strategy looked like when someone was willing to stop building things.

The title is the argument. With. Not under, not for.

Praise

“An account of events from someone who was actually present for them — written in part to correct the record.”

From the author’s introduction

Who it’s for

Written for

  • Managers who have to get impossible things out of ordinary teams
  • Founders hiring their first ten people
  • Anyone building inside a company that quietly kills new ideas
  • Readers who found the famous biography one-sided

Not written for

  • People who want gossip
  • Readers looking for a hagiography
  • Anyone who thinks culture is a poster in the break room

Contents

Every chapter.

The book
  1. A Ding in the Universe
  2. Steve’s Business Philosophy
  3. People Who Know
  4. Steve’s Secrets for Selecting Talent
  5. Unusual Interviewing Techniques
  6. To Protect Innovation
  7. “No More Crap Products”
  8. More on Product Strategy
  9. Entrepreneurial Confidence
  10. The Apple Workplace
  11. When Selling Becomes More Than Selling

Free companion worksheet

The Product Review

Four questions from the book, with ruled lines under every one. Fifteen minutes and a pen, and you’ll know whether you have a marketing problem or a product problem.

Get the worksheet

Get the book

Leading Apple With Steve Jobs

Wiley, 2012 · with William L. Simon

Get it on Amazon

Both books →

About the author

Jay Elliot

Jay Elliot

Jay Elliot was Senior Vice President of Apple Computer, responsible for all corporate operations and part of the Macintosh organization from development to introduction. During his tenure, Apple’s sales grew from $150 million to more than $3 billion.

For six years he was beside Steve Jobs five to fifteen hours a day, nearly every day. His second book is titled Leading Apple With Steve Jobs — with. Not under, not for. Steve had the vision and the intolerance for anything half-finished; Jay was the one who could walk into a room of engineers who had just been told to do the impossible and get them to do it anyway.

Before Apple he was at Intel as director of California operations, reporting to Andy Grove and Gordon Moore, and before that at IBM, where he designed the BART ticket machines — which he writes became the prototype for the ATMs now standing in every bank in the country.

He is still building. More about Jay →