Steve jobs invented iphone

Steve Jobs Didn’t Invent the iPhone — But He Did Make it Happen

It is said that a farmer does not make his crops grow, he cultivates the soil to enable crops to grow

The Genius with a Thousand Helpers

In his seminal work Good to Great, Jim Collins discusses a leadership technique he calls “A genius with a thousand helpers.” As the name suggests this type of leader is excellent at their job, but dictates every move of the company.

Yes, this leader may be excellent, but by making all the decisions she denies the company leaders the opportunity to grow. In addition, when this leader moves on she leaves a huge void in experience and makes it near impossible for a successor to succeed.

When you think of a company like Apple, it is inextricably linked with the genius with a thousand helpers, Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs did not Invent the iPhone

Brian Merchant, author of The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhonedebunks the myth that Steve Jobs was the genius who dreamt up the iPhone. In his brilliant work, he uncovers every element of the most impactful invention of our generation.

The Front Stage Story — A Master Storyteller

Jobs was a master storyteller. He had the credibility, eccentricity and ability to deliver a streamlined, brilliant story. He had audiences in the palm of his hand. He had the press queuing up to talk to him.

He fronted the company and this added to the story that he was the genius within Apple.

He ensured the message behind every product focussed on benefits and not features. Take the iPod for example, not 1GB of memory, but 1,000 songs in your pocket. 1GB means very little to the layman, 1,000 songs in your pocket cannot be mistaken. He ensured this was the story told at every opportunity, he ensured the Headlines wrote themselves.

Brian Merchant tells us that he (in)famously told celebrated journalist Walt Mossberg that he had this idea of a gesture controlled phone and then asked his engineer to make it. As Merchant uncovers through a series of on and off the record interviews, this was not true.

The real story is just that, real. It is human. It is messy. It makes sense.

The Back Stage Story

“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.” — Buckminster Fuller

My kids are sometimes reluctant to try something new because they are afraid they won’t succeed. I remind them how we all learned to walk, we fell, we fell again and we kept falling until we walked.

Innovation is the same thing. It has to begin somewhere.

The iPhone started in a similar vein.

While Merchant recounts the story in detail and accredits the true innovators behind the iPhone, this article is more about the principle which made it happen. Importantly, we should recognise the real genius of Jobs also.

Through the book we learn that a group of like-minded individuals had some interest in doing much more than simply working on the Macs.

This team gained access to an abandoned 1990’s user testing lab. In this lab they hacked together a plethora of existing technologies and made an ugly straw man of multitouch device. It is important to recognise Wayne Westerman, an engineering Ph.D. who developed multitouch in a product called FingerWorks to overcome his difficulty in typing because of repetitive strain syndrome. This team happened upon this device and built on it. (Apple acquired Fingerworks and Westerman along with it).

Once they had something to show, they brought it to Scott Forstall and Jonny Ive, senior executives and people who had Jobs’ ear.

We are told Jobs was initially apathetic about the work until was developed further. However, once he realised it’s potential he did everything to bring it to life. Yes he “owned” it by controlling the front stage story. Even though he more than inferred that he came up with it, this all added to the story. The public, press and shareholders lapped it up.

Farmer Jobs

As I opened this week’s Thursday Thought: It is said that a farmer does not make his crops grow, he cultivates the soil to enable crops to grow. Once Jobs grasped the talent and the potential in this team of mavericks, he backed them 100%.

This is a key element to any leadership role. When you do realise the talent you set it free, you give them time to experiment, to fail (to walk, fall, fall, walk, run).

Jobs gave permission to Forstall and his deputies to pluck the brightest and the best to assemble a crack team to work on the iPhone.

The high level of secrecy all added to the legend. Being asked was to be invited behind the curtain, to be part of a secret club (although some Apple execs claim this was just Jobs’ paranoia.)

Lessons for Business and Leadership

The current buzzword in business today is transformation, accompanied by Big Data, Digital, Innovation and a few other similar such words.

The current trend is to go all out and create a digital/innovation lab. Often, in fact mostly, such initiatives fail.

Without a company-wide bought-into, agreed-upon North Star most innovation initiatives are orphaned from any bigger direction. Most experiments, even as we saw with Apple’s iPhone were orphan projects. Yes, this succeeded, but only because of Jobs’ vision.

I am not one for listicles, but here is a concise list of requirements:

This is a unifying meaning and purpose that acts as a beacon for any company. Any company activities should align to this. Once in place, all experiments can be measured off this. This would have made the work by the original iPhone maverick group easier to get condoned and blessed.

Once a North Star is established, leaders need to enable and encourage collaboration through the sharing of information, knowledge and best practices.

A Curious and Growth Mindset

This is a people thing. This takes real skill to hire such people, unfortunately, due to a poor education system, which celebrates collection of knowledge over collection of knowledge times experience such people are rare.

A Culture of Creativity

When you understand that Jobs fast tracked innovation when he saw it, you have to admire that. I don’t know if there was such a culture in Apple at the time, but the team that sparked the process should be emulated and encouraged and rewarded. (I feel this was the sacrifice they made for the bigger story, they sacrificed their acknowledgment and this is important for so many of us often more than monetary gain.)

Leading this way takes bravery. It is hard for companies to give bandwidth to senior executives to focus on the future of the company when they are so busy in the present. This takes bravery, the leader needs to manage the board and middle management and just make this happen. By having a company-wide North Star it makes the rest of the company understand an innovation team are in flow with the rest of the company and so they are enabled and not blocked.

A Helper with a Thousand Geniuses

Finally and often overlooked is that the genius usually does lie within your company. It is just not nurtured, it has nowhere to prosper. If anything the iPhone story tells us this. The company was awash with genius and once Jobs recognised it he cultivated the soil so it could flourish. Leaders should be chief helpers and nurture success rather than claim it.

So, I conclude, Jobs may not have shown genius in inventing the iPhone, but he sure showed genius in bringing it to life.

Thank you for Reading, please hit a like so others may see this.

(Katawave works with organisations to create meaningful and resonant North Stars. We make sense of an often uncertain future. Once in place, we provide strategic architecture and realisation, all the time in alignment with a company-wide North Star. More posts like this here.)

On this week’s Innovation Show I speak to Brian Merchant, we get to recognise the team behind The One Device: Bas Ording, Imran Chaudhri, Greg Christie, Brian Huppi, Josh Strickon, Scott Herz, Richard Williamson, Nitin Ganatra, Andy Grignon, Kim Vorrath, David Tupman, Michael Culbert, Wayne Westerman, Freddy Anzures, Marcel Von Os, Mike Matas, Steve LeMay, Jonny Ive, Tony Fadell, Scott Forstall and of course: Steve Jobs (I am sure I am missing many others).

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Steve Jobs unveiling the iPhone in 2007, which was less than half-inch thick, had Internet capability, an MP3 player and a two megapixel digital camera.

Tony Avelar/AFP/Getty Images

As Apple’s iPhones and other smartphones feature increasingly sophisticated cameras, processors and touch screens, the rise of the super-stocked device shows that even the inimitable Steve Jobs couldn’t predict the future.

The popular mythology around Jobs was that he was always thinking 10 years ahead of the rest of the computing and electronics world. Under Jobs’ leadership, Apple produced some of the most revolutionary and iconic pieces of consumer technology ever: the Apple IIc, the original Macintosh, the iMac G4, the iPod, the iPhone and iPad.

But the origin story of the first iPhone reveals that Jobs, while undeniably brilliant, was not a technological soothsayer who predicted our digital future. He was just trying to make a really cool phone.

Brian Merchant, author of The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, says that for all of the original iPhone’s game-changing innovations—the multitouch screen, the high-quality camera, the built-in accelerometers and gyroscopic sensors—Jobs conceived of the device as a cellphone, first and foremost.

And central to the concept of a cellphone back in 2005 and 2006 when the iPhone was being developed, was that it fit comfortably in your hand and in your pocket. “If the iPhone was uncomfortable to hold, that would have been a non-starter for Jobs,” says Merchant.

If you watch the 2007 Apple keynote when the iPhone debuted, the first thing Jobs says when he unveils the device is that “It fits beautifully in the palm of your hand.” Its size was perfectly suited for what Jobs believed was the original iPhone’s crowning achievement, making phone calls.

The original Apple iPhone in 2007.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

“We want to reinvent the phone,” said Jobs at the 2007 keynote. “What’s the killer app? The killer app is making calls. It’s amazing how hard it is to make calls on most phones.”

Merchant says that Jobs’ number one pet peeve, according to developers who worked on the original iPhone, was that his regular cellphone would drop calls. No doubt Jobs was jazzed about the iPhone’s groundbreaking touchscreen and Apple’s first-ever apps for music, photos, and SMS texting, but none of that could get in the way of making phone calls. The first iPhone shipped without the App Store, in fact, because Jobs didn’t trust third-party developers to prevent dropped calls.

“Which is insane to think now,” says Merchant. “Because the iPhone became famous for being kind of a crappy phone. The phone was the last thing anybody used it for.”

The iPhone took two-and-a-half years to develop and wasn’t even Jobs’ brainchild. In 2001, Apple released the iPod, a sleek, handheld digital music player that sold millions and catapulted Apple into the device market. Apple executives worried that the iPod would lose market share once cellphone manufacturers figured out how to put MP3 players on their phones. But not if Apple beat them to it.

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The first prototype of an Apple phone shows just how stuck Jobs and his team were in existing technologies. According to Tony Fadell, one of the original designers of the iPod and the first three iPhones, the first concept was literally an “iPod phone.”

“It was an iPod with a phone module inside it,” Fadell told Venturebeat. “It looked like an iPod, but it had a phone, and you would select numbers through the same interface and so on. But if you wanted to dial a number it was like using a rotary dial. It sucked.»

The iPod cell phone, made by Motorola, in 2005. The iTunes-enabled cell phone held up to 100 songs.

David Paul Morris/Getty Images

Jobs scrapped the design and started from scratch. At the time, there was a team of Apple engineers who had been playing with a device called the Fingerworks iGesture Pad invented by a man with hand injuries who couldn’t use a conventional mouse. Members of the team had worked on the Newton, Apple’s infamous flop of a PDA, but still believed touchscreens held promise.

“It was more of a ‘blue sky, future of computing’ kind of thing,” says Merchant. “The touchscreen research had gone through several iterations. It was briefly tied to a tablet, put aside, and had just kind of sat in the dark. Then Steve Jobs showed up and said, maybe this is the phone. Out of that mutation was how the iPhone was born inside Apple.”

With the touchscreen technology in place, Merchant says that many of the designers and engineers on the iPhone development team absolutely saw it as an opportunity to build an entirely new kind of mobile computer, exactly what the iPhone would become for its millions of loyal users.

“Steve Jobs didn’t,” says Merchant. “He thought it was cool, but the evidence suggests that Steve Jobs wanted to use Apple’s technology to build the best phone possible. And a phone fits in your hand.”

Subsequent generations of the iPhone stuck to the small design, incrementally increasing screen size, but nothing beyond 4 inches. Samsung was the first to release a truly huge phone in 2011. The Samsung Galaxy Note featured an almost comically huge (at the time) 5.3-inch screen and single-handedly popularized the term “phablet,” a cross between a phone and a tablet.

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