The Curse of Culture

In rescuing Apple, Jobs demonstrated how to escape the Moses Trap. He had learned to nurture both types of loonshots: P-type and S-type. He had separated his phases: the studio of Jony Ive, Apple’s chief product designer, who reported only to Jobs, became “as off-limits as Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project.” He had learned to love both artist

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Winblad: Well, if there was a perfect lens on this, it would be easier. Most companies do not fail because some competitor crushed them. There's a small amount of failures where the competition was underestimated. There's a small amount in the software category where the technical achievement needed to bring a high-value product could never be reac

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The less-famous history of an ultra-famous icon captures one person’s evolution toward this balance. During Steve Jobs’s first stint at Apple, he called his loonshot group working on the Mac “pirates” or “artists” (he saw himself, of course, as the ultimate pirate-artist). Jobs dismissed the group working on the Apple II franchise as “regular Navy.

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Providing real human value isn't a benchmark for business success. Instead, success is defined by speed, scale, and growth. This is deeply rooted in our culture of technology. It's easy to become swept along without realizing how far we have strayed from our original direction.