Steve Jobs and The Engineering Culture

A previous post tried to put a damper on the Jobs hagiography in its most quasi-religious version.  I had to laugh when I saw a blog posting that the Jesuit journal La Civita Cattolica had compared the late Apple CEO to St. Ignatius Loyola and Pope Piux XI.  As Johnny Carson often said, "I kid you not!"

True engineering cultures are often inimical to running product businesses with fickle, demanding customers.  I'm not talking about engineering services firms, but that's another story.  When I was growing up, I got to meet quite a few IBM engineers and executives through our family's network in Westchester County.  One of them gave me a gift of a leather note pad, inscribed in gold leaf with Watson's motto, "Think!"  There's no doubt that their engineers were the best and brightest of their breed. 

Fast forward to the time before Lew Gerstner was brought on as IBM CEO in 1993, when market pundits were calling for the company to be sold off in pieces.  Coming from Amex and RJR Nabisco, the engineers in IBM were dismissive about what a non-engineer could do to help their business.  One of them said, "His biggest decision at Nabisco was probably to decide the new colors on a box of Shredded Wheat."  A bit arrogant, don't you think? 

IBM could always afford to be arrogant because in much of their product business, they had a quasi-monopoly and they shoved price increases down their customers' throats.  As technology and new competitors buffeted them, the engineers got further entrenched in their own ideas and lost touch with what customers in changing markets wanted from IBM.  Among the many other dimensions of Gerstner's turnaround, he managed to change this engineering culture to a customer-centric culture, while also funding basic research which had really put the company on the map in the first place. 

COMPAQ too had an engineering culture, and their products were known for their extremely rugged construction.  "Unbreakable," we were told as Merrill Lynch paid their high prices to get average performance and lots of ruggedness.  I had the pleasure of having to carry the first portable computer in the economy cabin to a client location for some forecasting work.  It worked fine, but it was unbelievably heavy and unwieldy to carry.  There was no thought about design beyond basic functionality.  Here's a picture in case anyone else had to deal with this elephant:

HP has a legendary engineering culture going back to the earliest days of Silicon Valley.  Imagine when the two engineering companies were merged.  Then investors had a company that was truly out of touch with the fickle and demanding consumer markets.  Carly Fiorina and her successors failed to change the engineering culture at HP. 

Engineers believe that customers should buy products based on the spec sheets.  They also like to endlessly tinker with product designs and specs, in the guise of seeking perfection which also kills product launch timetables.  They also believe in their hearts that product design reflecting consumer ergonomics and user experience is something that they can do also, because "it's easy, not like engineering."

That's how you release a product like that pictured above.  Steve Jobs was able to talk with engineers and get to the kernel of their issues, and he had their respect because of this ability.  I don't believe that he tried to be a product designer, but he really looked at product design as a sort of consumer ombudsman.

So when a button came back and he used it the way a consumer would, he would say, "It's too big. Make it smaller!"  This wasn't imperious or micromanaging, but he was a proxy for the Apple customer, and a good one.  There's no doubt too that he had some visionary insights about how businesses could work, as in electronic music distribution.  I really believe that his eventual taming of Apple's engineering culture saved them from depending on products like LISA, shown below, to products that redefined consumer experiences like the iPod and iPad.

When Apple had too many new products on its strategic plan menu, Jobs was able to cut through the knot of empire building and engineering egos to say, "Give me that phone and that music player."  He used his own passion, ego, market intuition and business savvy to prepare the market place for these products in a way that catapulted Apple from a niche player in the education and graphic design PC markets into a true technology leader.  It's a great story.