The story of Jobs and Apple is one of triumph. After a decade in exile, Jobs came back and in a miraculous turnaround reversed Apple’s sagging fortunes to become one of the most valuable and innovative companies in the world.
Jobs was a mix of brilliance, intensity, and showmanship. His attention to storytelling and design were unparalleled in an industry that was slow to appeal to the sensibilities of consumers. This led to a string of hits during his second stint starting with the iMac, then the iPod, iTunes, and iPhone, changing the industry and pushing technology deeper into our lives.
What is less talked about are the things are did not go right. Some these cannot be blamed on Jobs though. Products like the Newton and Pippin were conceived during Jobs’ absence. The Lisa team was headed up by someone else. You could pin the failure of the Apple III on Jobs, but he could be forgiven for having one flop early in his career.
In the history of questionable product choices though, the one that stands out most for me was “the Cube”. The design was beautiful. From a commercial standpoint, it was a disaster. Tim Cook would go on to describe the Power Mac G4 Cube as:
“Flopping from the very first day.”
The aesthetic that made the Cube beautiful also made it incredibly frustrating. The lack of a power switch caused the Cube to turn on at random, while the air cooling turned the computer off at random. The fancy plastic used to encase the innards was flawed.
The real fault of the Cube though was that it did not fit anywhere in the Apple product story. It was three times more expensive as an iMac, but underpowered compared with the PowerMac. The Cube sat in the middle of a product strategy without a reason for being or an audience.
When Jobs returned to Apple, he was hellbent on simplifying the product lineup. Apple had invested in a wide arrange of products that were neither profitable nor world beating in order to expand their market. This caused a huge drain on finances and led to an array of mediocre products that destroyed trust in the brand.
Jobs saw the flaw in this logic and immediately started cancelling products. His goal was to return Apple to its roots as a manufacturer of high quality computers. Late 90’s Apple had become a four product company; a desktop and laptop for low-end and high-end users.
By 1998, Apple was back to profitability. While it would still take several more years to see the stock rise significantly, it was clear early on that simplicity was a winning strategy. Which makes the Cube such an interesting story because Jobs decided to take a flyer on a product that did not fit the clear vision he set forth on.
If you are anti-Steve Jobs or enjoy reveling in schadenfreude, you might think this is a wonderful case study in arrogance. Jobs barrels ahead with another seemingly brilliant idea and infatuated with his own genius, only to be throttled hard by the market. The humiliation is complete.
How to make better decisions? Become comfortable with failing fast.
Another lens on this story however is one of fast failure and a testament to Jobs as both visionary and leader. It was clear early on that the Cube was not going to succeed. Instead of digging into his support for a product that he believed in, he cut the cord. A product that debuted 20 years ago last week was shelved less than a year later.
Failure is a scary place for most of us. We desperately want to succeed, but the path to success is rarely straightforward and often filled with obstacles, roadblocks, and rejection. This leads to questions that I hear often from individual contributors to executives:
How will this affect our KPI’s?
Will a failure impact my career aspirations?
Does failure reflect poorly on the team?
How will morale suffer?
Do I have what it takes to succeed?
What Jobs showed was the willingness to “fail fast”. When the data clearly showed that the Cube was commercially unviable, Jobs made the call and moved on.
But how can you institutionalize the “fail fast” mentality in an organization? In startups, this is usually part of the operational DNA. Entrepreneurs are imbued with the gene for iterating quickly, thus giving rise to the term “startup speed”.
In enterprises though, startup speed often slams into the wall of organizational inertia. Take software releases for example. Even in teams that have adopted DevOps, it can take weeks, if not months, to release new features because the pipeline is full of manual approval steps. I once had a conversation with a digital marketing leader of a global bank who fumed that editing copy on the website sometimes took six months to complete.
Enterprises rightfully need to manage exposure to risk. The downside is that organizations build up antibodies that seek out and smother anything which even remotely appears risky. These antibodies get overzealous though and attack everything. Even inconsequential become governed by excessive processes, approvals, and oversight.
Many decisions and changes are completely reversible though. The impact is minimal. If you can measure the results of a decision over a period of time, you can analyze, assess, and reverse course if needed. Even a big decision such as migrating a production system or launching a new product can be rolled back.
Over a decade ago, I was involved in an upgrade of a custom built customer order management system for a US telco. We launched the new version Monday morning just to see it fail. Horrified, we initiated the rollback and got the stores and service reps back online. There was some financial loss, a few heads rolled, and the vendors had to do plenty of mea culpas. The world did not end though and eventually the new version launched a few months later.
Since coming on board to Amazon, what has impressed me has been the ability to get things done quickly and independently. It is a belief that Jeff Bezos has instilled in the company that he calls “one-way and two-way doors”.
“Many decisions are reversible, two-way doors. Those decisions can use a light-weight process. For those, so what if you’re wrong?”
Unless you are optimizing for a repeatable process, getting complete certainty for any decision will only cause delay. As Bezos says, “If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.” Perhaps getting 70% of the information you need is ok, maybe 50% could suffice. Then again, you might be in truly uncharted territory and starting is the only way to test if a decision yields useful data to confirm or refute said decision.
While we hope that a decision goes well, failure is not a wholly negative outcome. The value of failure is in whether the outcome derives useful output. As I discuss in a prior post, failure exists along an axis from valuable learning experiences to completely recklessness. As long as we approach our decision making from the perspective of measurable testing, we can be assured that we can iteratively learn and build towards success.
When you couple an experimental approach with faster cycles, you create a culture of high velocity, high quality decision making. What makes this work at the scale of Amazon or any enterprise building a learning culture is to drive these decisions to the front lines with employees that have the most knowledge on the ground.
Pushing decision making authority to the front line also avoids the bureaucratic labyrinth that slows down organizations. Startups are not immune either, especially as they quickly scale into unicorns and lose the nimbleness from the early days. The drive to centralize pulls authority away from the front line. If you empower the people though, you unlock high velocity decision making in your organization.
“The ones who are crazy enough to think they can
change the world are the ones who do”
Anonymous
What frameworks or value does your organization use to make faster decisions? How are you fostering a culture to support employees crazy enough to change the world?
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