The Craftsmanship in Between

From Steve Jobs in Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview (1995), footage Robert Cringely shot for the PBS series Triumph of the Nerds. Jobs was running NeXT, a decade after he left Apple. He had recruited John Sculley from PepsiCo in 1983; by 1985 the two had fallen out over the company’s direction, and when Jobs moved to push Sculley out, the board sided with Sculley. Jobs left; Sculley stayed and ran Apple. The diagnosis here is Jobs’s account of what went wrong next.

The disease is not having ideas. It is believing the idea is the hard part, so that handing it to other people is enough to get a product out the other side. Jobs’s claim is that the ratio runs backwards: the idea is the cheap part, and the work that turns it into something real is most of the work. He makes that work concrete in the rest of the answer. The idea “changes and grows” as it meets what engineering, materials, and manufacturing will actually permit, and “designing a product is keeping 5,000 things in your brain” at once while you fit them together.

For a manager the trap is the delegation that skips the craft: send the vision down as a memo, tell the organization to go make it happen, and treat the thousand small decisions that decide whether the product is any good as someone else’s downstream chore. Jobs’s point is that those decisions are the product.