Saying No

From Steve Jobs, interviewed by Peter Burrows for “The Seed of Apple’s Innovation” (BusinessWeek, October 12, 2004). The passage is Jobs’s answer to the question “How do you systematize innovation?” and opens with “The system is that there is no system.” He distinguished process (“makes you more efficient”) from innovation, then listed where innovation actually comes from at Apple: “people meeting up in the hallways,” calls “at 10:30 at night with a new idea,” “ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever,” and saying no to 1,000 things.

The saying-no line is the most-quoted part of that paragraph, and the part that sounds most like a management principle. In the source, it isn’t one. Jobs lists it alongside three things no manager could schedule (hallway run-ins, late-night calls, six people pulled together by one of them with an idea) as a fourth answer to where innovation comes from. He isn’t saying refusal is the system you run on top of those informal practices. He’s listing refusal alongside them as another thing innovation needs, in the same way it needs hallway encounters and late-night phone calls. All four items are his answer to a question he’s declining on its own terms: innovation doesn’t have a system.