You Read the Steve Jobs Book. Now Find Out What You Missed.

Sir Jonathan Ive. He goes where the mapmakers haven't been. He's not about finding the trend and hopping on for the ride.
Sir Jonathan Ive. He goes where the mapmakers haven’t been. He’s not about finding a trend and hopping on for the ride. It’s more groundbreaking than that.

If you’re anything like people in our office you bought the Steve Jobs biography the day it was released.

Everyone we know read it.

Some carried it around like a badge of honor; one that announced them as a member of an elite team, like Seal Team 6.

Well, the story does ally you to a different sort individual and company.

That was then; now there’s something of a let down.

Not with Steve Jobs but with Walter Isaacson, his biographer.

Seemingly, he could have upped his game.

According to Jonathan Ive, head designer at Apple, Isaacson’s book has inaccuracies.

Ive is well placed to know.

He and Steve Jobs were best friends. Equally, Jonathan Ive knew him better than anyone in a professional sense.

They thought along the same lines for years.

In fact, they worked as a team since Jobs rejoined Apple as CEO after launching Pixar and NeXt.

Jonathan Ive says he thinks little of the Isaacson effort.

New YorkerRead about it in the New Yorker, the week of February 23rd. http://nyr.kr/1L1Thdt

It’s an article on Jonathan Ive, by Ian Parker. It’s called The Shape of Things to Come.

By the way … it’s Sir Jonathan Ive, to get a detail right.

Before reading put your iPhone on mute and settle in for a lengthy article.

Thanks to Ian Parker, who was virtually imbedded at Apple, you learn a lot.

Like the fact that insiders see Ive and the way he thinks as the heart and soul of Apple.

After all, he goes where the mapmakers haven’t been. He’s not about finding a trend and hopping on for the ride.

As you can appreciate, it’s more groundbreaking than that.

You get Ian Parker’s take on a design studio that’s open to few people — including Apple employees.

Here’s betting that in your company, designers don’t have anything near the influence they do at Apple.

Certainly design teams have never had a champion who established their right to call the shots as Jobs did.

Ian Parker goes into the kind of industrial design thinking that forces all others to play catch-up ball. They live life on the back foot.

It’s fascinating stuff.

Interestingly enough, Apple’s 19 designers are mostly unsung heroes. Anonymous.

They like it that way as it avoids disruption.

At Apple it’s all about the work and focusing on projects such as the new watch.

There’s purity for you.

Incidentally, you’ll read about cars and car design, as Jonathan Ive is an aficionado. A motorhead.

He had a hand in influencing the design of the new Bentley GT Concept Car, the EXP 10 Speed 6, presented this week at the Geneva Motor Show.

But there’s nothing about an Apple car.

If it is in the planning stage, not even Edward Snowden could detect it.

But that hasn’t stopped people admiring an audacious move, has it?

It seems almost fashionable these days for corporate types to talk about becoming more Apple-like.

After reading this article you might say a note of caution should be added to that.

Because Jonathan Ive’s approach is unique and ever-changing. Unlike others.

Copy him and you might get little for it.

Because just as you’re about to launch, he could monopolize public attention with something entirely new and exciting.

Share with us. Leave your comment below. Thanks for reading Whybetonto.com. Regards, Steve Ulin LinkedIn: http://linkd.in/1Bey3Jl

 

 

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