JOBS: They've called.
INC.: But why is the appearance of a circuit board so important to you? Is this just a personal quirk of yours?
JOBS: No, it's not arbitrary. You're asking, where does aesthetic judgment come from? With many things—high-performance automobiles, for example—the aesthetic comes right from the function, and I suppose electronics is no different. But I've also found that the best companies pay attention to aesthetics. They take the extra time to lay out grids and proportion things appropriately, and it seems to pay off for them. I mean, beyond the functional benefits, the aesthetic communicates something about how they think of themselves, their sense of discipline in engineering, how they run their company, stuff like that.
INC.: But who cares? Most people are never going to look inside.
JOBS: Woz and I cared from the very beginning. And we felt the people who were going to own the Apple II would care, too. We were selling these things for $1,600, I think, which was a lot of money back in 1977, and these were people who generally didn't have $1,600. I know people who spent their life savings on one. Yeah, they cared what it looked like on the inside.
INC.: Was this just intuitive to you?
JOBS: Yes, it was. We thought, why don't we take the extra few days or weeks and do it right? We had a fundamental belief that doing it right the first time was going to be easier than having to go back and fix it. And I cannot say strongly enough that the repercussions of that attitude are staggering. I've seen them again and again throughout my business life. They're just staggering.
INC.: How do you mean?
JOBS: In my experience, people get far more excited about doing something as well as it can be done than about doing something adequately. If they are working in an environment where excellence is expected, then they will do excellent work without anything but self-motivation. I'm talking about an environment in which excellence is noticed and respected and is in the culture. If you have that, you don't have to tell people to do excellent work. They understand it from their surroundings. You may have to coach them at first, but then you just get out of their way, and they'll surprise you time and time again.
INC.: So?
JOBS: So how do you communicate to people that they are in an environment where excellence is expected? You don't say it. You don't put it in an employee handbook. That stuff is meaningless. All that counts is the product that results from the work of the group. That will say more than anything coming out of your mouth or your pen. So you have to pay close attention to those details, even if they seem minor, because they communicate a big attitude about what you do.
INC.: Can you be more specific?
JOBS: Sure. When we started the Macintosh factory, I made a few mistakes before I finally put Debbie Coleman in to run it, and she turned out to be a good choice. I remember that I'd go out to the factory, and I'd put on a white glove to check for dust. I'd find it everywhere—on machines, on the tops of the racks, on the floor. And I'd ask Debbie to get it cleaned. I told her I thought we should be able to eat off the floor of the factory. Well, this drove Debbie up the wall. She didn't understand why you should be able to eat off the floor of the factory. And I couldn't articulate it back then.
See, I'd been very influenced by what I'd seen in Japan. Part of what I greatly admired there—and part of what we were lacking in our factory—was a sense of teamwork and discipline. We lacked discipline about little details, but they were important. This was an automated factory. It wasn't going to be the big things that would stop us. It was going to be the little details, because one little detail could shut down the whole line. If we didn't have the discipline to keep that place spotless, then we weren't going to have the discipline to keep all these machines running.
INC.: What happened?
JOBS: We went along for a while, and the factory became clean, but Debbie and I continued to have conflicts over various things. Then one day I came into the factory, and I saw that she had rearranged some of the machines. Before, they had been randomly placed around the floor. Debbie had moved them for some functional reasons and also for some nonfunctional reasons. She'd put them in a straight line and cleaned the place up visually. And I hadn't mentioned anything to her. Well, that told me a light bulb had come on for her, and I didn't need to say a thing about it ever again—and I never did. From then on, she just took off like a rocket, because she understood the underlying principle. And the factory worked great.
INC.: It sounds as if she had to figure it out on her own.
JOBS: Yeah, but this stuff takes time. Let me give you an example from NeXT. We have probably the most automated factory in the world. Our circuit board comes out untouched by human hands. We have a series of sophisticated robots, some of which we built, some of which we bought. Now these robots come in different colors, and I wanted them all painted the same color. We went through a lot of trouble over that because the robot companies weren't used to painting things in any color but their own. People in our factory asked me, "Why is it so important to paint these machines the same color? We don't understand it." So we had to sit down with everybody and explain. Even after hearing the reasons, it took people six months or so before they began to understand.
INC.: What are the reasons?
JOBS: For one thing, we want the place to look nice because we bring customers through. They're going to make a decision on using NeXT products, and they ought to know that we have a very high-quality manufacturing operation. But the real reason is that we don't want people to think of the factory as separate islands of automation. We want people thinking of the whole. Suppose we have a bottleneck at one robot. In reality, you can probably rebalance the line and solve the problem—provided you think of it as a whole. It took people six months to understand this, but now it's in their bones. We spend a lot of time going over these concepts and why they are important—not just in the abstract, but right down to the everyday tangible point of view. That's what building a company culture is all about.
