Leading Apple With Steve Jobs: Management Lessons From a Controversial Genius

Setting Standards: Simplicity

Another of Steve’s leadership mantras was simplicity. As one prime example, he demanded that the iPod not have any buttons on it, not even an on/off switch. This seemed weird and undoable to the engineers working on the project, but Steve wouldn’t bend. The engineers were pushed to their limits and finally stumbled on an idea that solved the problem: the scroll wheel. He used to talk about this as “one of my mantras,” insisting that “simple can be harder than complex.” Expanding on this idea to a journalist not long after he had returned from the NeXT detour, he said, “You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”1