The Curse of Culture

ts fundamental belief is that those with the most expertise and experience in a domain should have decision rights for that domain. This is based on two views: First, Apple competes in markets where the rates of technological change and disruption are high, so it must rely on the judgment and intuition of people with deep knowledge of the technolog... See more

Ultimately, I see the embrace of curation as a mark of maturation of the technology industry. Today’s technology companies have massive amounts of influence over what people the world over see and consume, and while there is a long ways to go when it comes to transparency about what is seen and why, at least everyone is now being honest about posse... See more

What Jobs is referring to is the fundamental difference between "builders" and craftsmen, or why even though engineering builds, it is design which establishes . Essentially, products—no matter if they're technological in nature or not—do not exist in a vacuum. On the contrary, every single product worth its salt is designed to exist within a socie... See more

So what is culture? Does culture matter? If so, how much time should you spend on it? Let’s start with the second question first. The primary thing that any technology startup must do is build a product that’s at least ten times better at doing something than the current prevailing way of doing that thing. Two or three times better will not be good

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When you describe the culture and values and character of a company, not even through like the internal workings but in the way that the product experience feels when you use it, it’s almost indistinguishable from the founder’s personality. And very rarely does a company, even when it goes through multiple CEOs significantly deviate from that that ... See more

Having a culture and people that will evolve in this way is critical because the world changes quickly and in ways that can’t possibly be anticipated. I’m sure you can think of a number of companies that failed to identify and address their problems on time and ended up in a terminal decline (see: BlackBerry and Palm) and a rare few that have consi

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