Then you get a chance to test your understanding. Some things will test out right; others will test out wrong. Hopefully, you're paying attention. By the third time, you should start to get a pretty good feeling in your gut that you understand the process. And you can use that understanding to become a lot more productive. That's how this feels. A lot of us have been working together for a long time.
INC.: So you can avoid mistakes?
JOBS: Oh, we'll make a whole bunch of mistakes. That's what life is about. But at least they'll be new and creative ones.
INC.: You once said that, in the early days of Apple, Woz was the great engineer, but you were the one who turned the ideas into products. Do you still think of your role in terms of the product?
JOBS: I think the same philosophy that drives the product has to drive everything else if you want to have a great company. Manufacturing, for example, is an extension of the engineering process for us. We view it more and more as a software-engineering job with interesting I/O [input-output] devices on the ends. It demands just as much thought and strategy as the product. If you don't pay attention to your manufacturing, it will limit the kind of product you can build and engineer. Some companies view manufacturing as a necessary evil, and some view it as something more neutral. But we view it instead as a tremendous opportunity to gain a competitive advantage.
INC.: Have you always viewed it that way?
JOBS: Ever since I visited Japan in the early '80s. And let me add that the same is true of sales and marketing. You need a sales and marketing organization that is oriented toward educating customers rather than just taking orders, providing a real service rather than moving boxes. This is extremely important. For most of your customers, after all, the sales folks are your company. So you've really got to pay attention to that. The point is that our philosophy is not a product philosophy. It's a philosophy of how we go about things, and it affects everything—finance, information systems. Can I digress for a moment?
INC.: Go ahead.
JOBS: Let's take the decision to automate a factory. You might have a lot of reasons for doing it, quality and other things. But there's a nice by-product of automation if you're growing very fast: you probably don't have to hire people as rapidly as you would if you weren't automated. When you hire people too quickly and don't give them appropriate training, quality drops off. So you have a much better chance of hanging on to your quality if you automate. The same is true in other parts of the company—accounts payable, for example. With a really good information system, you can automate a lot of those functions. Then you don't have to hire people, which saves your company an enormous amount of energy.
So, to build a great company, you need more than a great product. You have to pay attention to all the different areas and be as aggressive with them as with your product. Otherwise, you'll spend half your time fixing things that break. And that's typical of high-growth companies. Half the management time is spent making repairs—stock-option plans, marketing strategies, information systems, whatever.
INC.: Let's stop there. Suppose somebody is starting a company and doesn't have your resources to fall back on. Is any of this relevant?
JOBS: Well, obviously, you can't build a multimillion-dollar automated factory if you don't have the money. But a lot of this stuff just requires energy.
Take an employee stock-participation plan. You need help from a lawyer or a consultant. Most people take very little time selecting lawyers and consultants. It doesn't cost money to interview 10 lawyers, but you have to invest your time. And most people don't do it because they don't think it's important. But it is important. It will save you countless hours in the future.
And the same goes for auditors, accountants, engineering consultants, and so on. Because you need people who can anticipate the problems you will encounter and who can offer solutions.
INC.: It sounds as though you experienced these problems at Apple.
JOBS: Of course. I can show you the arrows.
INC.: This is just a personal observation. You seem much more interested in business than we had expected.
JOBS: Business is what I do.
INC.: But you have an image as someone more focused on the technical side of things.
JOBS: Well, there's the technical part of the equation and the business part, meaning the distribution, manufacturing, and so on. And then there's the human part. You just have to put the whole equation together.
INC.: May we ask you a mushy question? We're in a business in which we rarely get to see people using our product, except maybe on an airplane once in a while. But you get to see the products you've created being used all the time. Do you sometimes marvel at the effect you've had on people's lives?
JOBS: Well, yes, there are some moments. I was in an elementary school just this morning, and they still had a bunch of Apple IIs, and I was kind of looking over their shoulders. Then I get letters from people about the Mac, saying, "I never thought I could use a computer before I tried this one."
INC.: To some extent, you don't know how people are going to use a computer when it first comes out, do you?
JOBS: No, you don't. Sometimes it takes years to exploit a computer's baseline capabilities. It took five years before people exploited the advanced features of the Apple II. With the Macintosh, it took three or four years. So it's important to build in as much raw capability as possible when you put out the machine.
INC.: Did you have any idea that you were creating whole new industries with the development of the Apple II and the Mac?
JOBS: With the Mac, it was fairly clear; less so with the Apple II. But I must also say that the experience of watching it happen is quite different from the experience of imagining it happen. I think everybody who had anything to do with creating the Mac has very, very good feelings about it.
