“Jony Is Irreplaceable”

Excerpt from "Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products" by Leander Kahney

Chapter 13 - Apple's MVP

 

Jony clearly seeks to maintain Jobs’s values: To Jony, as it was to Jobs, making “great products” is much more important than the balance sheet. “Our goal isn’t to make money,” Jony told a surprised audience at the British Embassy’s Creative Summit in July 2012. “Our goal absolutely at Apple is not to make money. This may sound a little flippant, but it’s the truth. Our goal and what gets us excited is to try to make great products. We trust that if we are successful people will like them, and if we are operationally competent we will make revenue, but we are very clear about our goal.”²³

Jony explained that he learned this lesson from Jobs when Apple was poised to go under. “Apple was very close to bankruptcy and to irrelevance [but] you learn a lot about life through death, and I learnt a lot about vital corporations by experiencing a non-vital corporation,” he told the conference. “You would have thought that, when what stands between you and bankruptcy is some money, your focus would be on making some money, but that was not [Steve Jobs’s] preoccupation. His observation was that the products weren’t good enough and his resolve was, ‘We need to make better products.’ That stood in stark contrast to the previous attempts to turn the company around.”

Jony is also committed to maintaining Jobs’s renowned focus. Jobs always said that focus isn’t a question of saying yes to projects; it’s saying no. Under Jony’s guidance, Apple has remained highly disciplined in “saying no” to products that are “competent” as opposed to “great.”

“We have been, on a number of occasions, preparing for mass production and in a room and realized we are talking a little too loud about the virtues of something. That to me is always the danger, if I’m trying to talk a little too loud about something and realizing I’m trying to convince myself that something’s good,” he said.