How Apple and Jobs influenced how I run my data shop
Thanks to some heavy recommendations from Macbreak Weekly, I ordered David Pogue’s Apple: The First 50 Years. I’m about a third of the way through and it’s a denser read than I was expecting.
I’ve seen some speculation online that it might be too technical, but I don’t know that a book can be simultaneously fluffy and deep.
It’s a good distillation of Apple itself and I appreciated the balance in the take. Not yet-another worshipful Jobs biography, which is exactly what I was hoping for.
That’s not to say that the Jobs philosophy doesn’t affect how I lead. Three things:
- Productizing things
For about the last five years I’ve gotten into the habit of treating initiatives (even minor internal ones) as cohesive products. Tiny internal projects get a mission, a vision, a logo, and a series of regular updates. Anything that escapes my office has to meet a certain quality standard, whether that’s a weekly update or a large-scale data initiative. If it has my name on it, it ships like a product. - A players
I’ve been haunted for years by his mantra that “A players hire A players and B players hire C players.” It bothered me for a while. Am I an A player? After a lot of thought I landed on this: A players drive people to be better. B players recruit sycophants. I’ve had colleagues who hired for position… looking for people who’d likely stick around long enough to avoid a vacancy in a year. That’s a respectable philosophy for managing a traditional office. I just want the strongest candidate on the board. It’s not about “am I good enough.” It’s about “do I make others better?” - Owning the pipeline
It might be fairer to credit Tim Cook for mastering this one. For Apple the pipeline is development, manufacturing, and sales. For me it’s often the actual data pipelines. When a coworker drops an “I’m waiting on-” I have a hard time not cringing, and I have to keep myself from rolling my eyes. I’ve lived in the world of ServiceNow tickets to outside orgs for technical issues. Hated it. It’s like suiting up for a run, getting to the door, and finding a rainstorm. Better to own your whole process. The knock-on effect is that you stop guessing about stuff and start knowing things.