Joel Liu's Library tagged team-building → View Popular, Search in Google

Dec

2011

Focus on building 10x teams, not on hiring 10x developers « Avichal's Blog

avichal.wordpress.com/...s-not-on-hiring-10x-developers

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team team-building

The “Economics of Superstars” observes that in some industries, marginally more talented people/groups generate exponentially more value [0]

The Economics of Superstars phenomenon requires a distribution channel to move a large volume of goods. For superstar athletes, television enables endorsements and merchandise sales. For software developers, the Internet enables scalable distribution of digital goods.

Finding a way to be 10x better than median can now generate exponentially more value for people who make digital goods.
A bunch of 10x people != A 10x team

Most hiring processes assume that if you find a great developer and put them on a great team, the individual and team will do well. Good teams try to nail down “culture fit” but this is usually only based on whether the candidate gets along with the team.

Throwing together a bunch of great developers who get along does not make for a 10x team.

Aug

2011

Hacker News | How Apple Works

news.ycombinator.com/item

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team team-building

Someone has to be CEO and for the long term is Tim Cook really the best person for the job ? Steve Job is an irreplaceable part of Apple's lore, but that does not stop Jony Ive from making his own major mark. He already has a rich history of designing great products. To understand Aarons point better you have to watch Steve Jobs interview, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOgOP_aqqtg . There he says the only problem with Microsoft is that they have no taste. Steve recognize some questions it's importance, he says having good taste is important for Apple. According to Steve having good taste is key to Apple's culture and success, Steve Jobs said it. A company can have great financial success without good taste, Steve Jobs said that about Microsoft. But as Aaron mentioned in the article that is not how Apple works. Tim Cook is great at operations, perhaps he should have stayed COO. The interesting move would be to appoint Jonathan Ive's as CEO. Of course to many that would seem unconventional and perhaps even risky. But that would be authentic Apple, that would be thinking different.
But most importantly, Jony Ive is such a good designer that he's needed in that role without the distractions of the CEO role. Tim as CEO can still do the COO job plus whatever additional duties come from being CEO. That's what he's done for over a year now, off and on as Steve has taken leave.
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- It's amazing to me how so many people outside Apple think Jony Ive could be a credible candidate for CEO, when no one inside Apple would believe that for a second. The only product-focused executive who would even have had a chance is Scott Forstall.
  To the naive observer, Apple seems like a hardware company. But it is really a software company monetized through hardware sales, just as Google is a software company monetized through advertising. As Steve himself said, differentiation through software is the key to all of Apple's products. Ive doesn't have much experience, credibility or interest in this area.
  On the other hand, Scott Forstall is the most powerful and credible software executive at Apple. More specifically: the Human Interface team that does all the HI design for iOS and Mac OS X reports to Forstall, not Ive. Ive isn't even one of the executives present at executive HI reviews, whereas Forstall is the one driving the decisions when SJ is not there. The HI team may get less outside visibility than Industrial Design but they make a much bigger difference to the experience of Apple products.
  Furthermore, it's clear from watching company politics that Forstall has the ambition to go to the top (as does Phil Schiller), and Ive just doesn't have that kind of drive. Ive has the trust and affection of Steve for being an artist, and that's the main reason he is on the executive team. He hasn't had to fight for it like the other execs. Note for example that Eddy Cue (iTunes, iCloud) and Craig Federighi (Mac OS X) still aren't on the executive team, despite heading critical product lines and much bigger departments than ID.
- Operational depts have a natural tendency to answer "that's not possible" when challenged very hard, and to try and negotiate compromises. You don't need the top guy to be the tastemaster, but you need his arbitrages to be heavily biased in favor of designers, not operatives.
- Also, Tim Cook is gay (sorry but for me, that counts as an asset in the taste department). He's a creative guy (you have to be) and he's a uncompromising. You can't work as hard as he does and achieve what he has behind the scenes without a kind of ruthlessness that sets a very high bar.
  Tim's experience as COO is exactly what makes him the best man to fill Steve's shoes, if ruthless focus on design is what Apple needs. After all, Steve isn't a designer. Steve doesn't even, by all accounts, have a lot of natural taste. He's acquired the taste over many years. What Steve has always had, and what Tim seems to have, is an uncompromisingly high bar.

Jul

2011

Daring Fireball: On Succeeding Steve Jobs

daringfireball.net/...succeeding_steve_jobs

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team team-building

Everyone wants this to be an interesting story, but it’s not. There is no intrigue. If Jobs steps down in the foreseeable future his replacement will almost certainly be Tim Cook. Utter credibility on Wall Street, and much respect within Apple. He’s already run the company while Jobs has been on leave. The knock against him is that he’s an operations and finance guy, not a product design guy. Ideally Apple would find someone just like Steve Jobs, but there exists no such person. There will not be a next Steve Jobs. There will be a next CEO.
The obvious structure for a post-Jobs Apple has Cook as CEO, doing mostly what he’s already been doing as COO. What he already does at Apple is what most CEOs do at other companies. Final word on product design goes to the senior vice presidents: Scott Forstall (iOS), Jonathan Ive (hardware design), and Phil Schiller (marketing and, perhaps, Mac).¹

Aug

2011

How Apple Works (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)

www.aaronsw.com/...howappleworks

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team team-building

In the same way that Google is a company driven by engineering or Amazon is driven by operations, Apple is driven by taste. Here’s how Apple products are created: a team of designers decide exactly what a product should do and how it should look and feel, their work is ruthlessly edited by Steve until he approves, and then the entire rest of the company is given the task of moving mountains to make that dream real.
The only reason it works for Cook to be in charge while Steve is away is because Steve is still around, doing ruthless critiques of yet-to-be-invented products from his sickbed.
3 more annotation(s)...
- But within that group, there’s only one person who makes any sense as tastemaker-in-chief: Jony Ive.
- But even if Ive never designed a piece of software in his life, it’d be beside the point. I can’t imagine Jobs has either. What’s needed atop Apple is not creative brilliance — they have a design department full of that — but editorial taste. Like the director of a film, Apple’s CEO needs to go through the thousands of creative ideas developed within Apple and decide which ones should be approved for production and which ones need to sent back for more work.
- It’s impossible to imagine Apple functioning without this role. (Would Apple splinter and start developing all sorts of random unapproved products like Google under Eric Schmidt?) It’s impossible to imagine Tim Cook filling this role. (How can he be tastemaker for the whole company if he can’t even pull off a decent keynote?) And it’s impossible to imagine this role being anywhere but at the top of the org chart. (It’d be like crediting a film to the producer instead of the director.)

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Joel Liu's Library tagged team-building → View Popular, Search in Google

A bunch of 10x people != A 10x team

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