"In Search of Excellence" at Apple Computer in 1984

the youthful exuberance here seems a long way from the mannered halls of 3m but this is also a fortune 500 company renowned for product innovation these very young men and women are on the task force that created the Macintosh at Apple Computer and put the company back in the running with IBM in California's Silicon Valley time seems to be compressed and Apple is a perfect example in 1976 two computer whiz kids Steve Wozniak and Steven jobs designed the personal computer in Jobs garage and managed to bring it to market a year later as the Apple

2 in 1980 only three years later Apple went public as a one hundred and eighteen million dollar company the following year IBM entered the new market with its own personal computer the PC industry analysts predicted that Apple like many other smaller companies would be forced out of business but Steven jobs now all of 28 years old and chairman of the board was not prepared to step aside you know they have a third of a million people at IBM they've got like 350,000 people we've got six thousand people makes you wonder I think iBM is a

national treasure what they've been able to do and they're sort of like a jewel in many ways and I have a great deal of respect for them they've made Apple a lot better by competing with IBM we've become we're becoming better and better each month but there is a problem and the problem is is that they are so large and dominate certain markets so completely that I think Apple is the only thing standing between them and total industry dominance Apple's response to the IBM threat was the Macintosh this Jolly Roger actually flew above the project

building which was isolated from the rest of the company jobs wanted his new task force to behave like pirates outside corporate law he was determined that this team would be free to innovate unencumbered by apple's bureaucracy and he led the project himself Jobs was a perfect model of the new manager as coach cheerleader and nourisher of champions he's a maniac he's a maniacal genius his job is to stir up everything he's a muckraker in the classic sense of the word he will not leave anything alone he will not allow inadequacy or compromise to exist if

Steve Jobs was a catalyst for us he gave us space he sheltered us from the corporate noise there's nothing like a group effort toward a common goal to unite people that was the deal we wanted people that were insanely great at what they did but we're not necessarily those seasoned professionals but who had on at the tips of their fingers and in their passion the latest understanding of where technology was and what we could do with that technology and who wanted to bring that to lots of people so the neatest thing that happens is when

you get a core group of you know ten great people that it becomes self-policing as to who they let into that group so I consider the most important job of someone like myself is recruiting we agonize Dover hiring we had interviews I you could go back and look at some of the introduced agendas they would start at 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning and go through dinner a new interviewee would talk to everybody in the building at least once and maybe a couple times and then come back for another round of interviews and then we'd

all get together and talk about it before these to my mind was when we finally decided we liked them enough to show them the Macintosh prototype and then we sat them down in front of it and if they just kind of were bored or said this is a nice computer we didn't want it we wanted their eyes to light up and then to get really excited and then we knew they were one of us and everybody just wanted to work not because it was work that had to be done but it was because something that

we really believed in that was just gonna really make a difference and that's what kept the whole thing going we all wanted exactly the same thing and instead of spending our time arguing about what the computer should be we all knew what the computer should be and we just went and did it the greatest people are self-managing they don't need to be managed you if they know what if once they know what to do they'll go figure out how to do it and they don't need to be managed at all what they need is a

common vision and that's what leadership is what leadership is is having a vision being able to articulate that so the people around you can understand it and getting a consensus on a common vision you can click on a tool like a paintbrush and say just real quickly flip out a full image or someone can say draw an eye grab it with a lasso pull it over peel off coffee get another paintbrush the Mac team's vision was an inexpensive computer as powerful and sophisticated as IBM's PC with an added playfulness that would make it attractive to

young people like themselves and they wanted it easy to use with Macintosh there are no complicated commands to be memorized and typed into the machine all you do is move an arrow with a selection device called a mouse and point to what you want from a menu of options presented on the screen then the nice thing is you can copy a whole section peel off a copy flip it over move in one of the neatest things about Macintosh was we had a chance to change the way people thought of computers and I think prior to

the purr when the personal computer stuff started happening you know five or six years ago everyone thought of computers as big cold impersonal generally negative connotations associated with a computer no one would associate the word fun and computer together you know they look at the Machine and they say it gets me in the gut yeah I don't I don't know exactly how to articulate it but it's you know cute and fuzzy and warm and motherhood you know I wanted and it's it's so funny to hear your friends say this you know and your enemies say

this you know you've conveyed it's something very very intangible through this bunch of electronics really I mean very unemotional little pieces come together to form something that draws you that's very approachable you ask yourself why are you doing it I'm certainly not doing it for Steve Jobs I'm doing it for something that I think's a much greater good than that and that's the chance to change something really honestly truly for the better here is how we see personal computers here is how we want the world to be and here's how we're gonna we're gonna change

we have a vision of how we wanted to be we want to convert people we want to make converts Apple bet heavily that Macintosh would attract converts long before the computer was completed the company invested 20 million dollars in this assembly plant in Fremont California to keep its price down Macintosh was designed specifically to be assembled in high-volume on an automated line at the Fremont plant one Macintosh is assembled every 27 seconds the plant is currently producing 80,000 computers a month designing a state-of-the-art plant for the first time was an overwhelming task and finding the

right person to manage it proved to be just as difficult we went through that stage in Apple where we went out and we thought oh we're gonna be a big company let's hire professional management we went out and hired a bunch of professional management it didn't work at all most of them were bozos they they knew how to manage but they didn't know how to do anything and so well if you're a great person why do you want to work for somebody you can't learn anything from and you know what's interesting you know who the

best managers are there are the great individual contributors who never ever want to be a manager but decide they have to be a manager because every no one else is gonna be able to do as good a job as them after hiring two professional managers from outside the company and firing them both jobs gambled on Debbie Coleman a member of the Macintosh team 32 years old an English literature major with an MBA from Stanford Debbie was a financial manager with no experience in manufacturing I mean there's no way in the world anybody else would give

me this chance to run this kind of operation and I don't kid myself about that this is an incredible high risk both for myself personally and professionally and for Apple as a company to put a person like myself in this job I mean they're really betting on a lot of things we're betting that my skills at organizational effectiveness you know override all those you know lack of technology lack of experience lack of you know time and manufacturing so it's a big risk and I'm just an example in every single person on the Mac team almost

you're you know entry-level person you could say that about this is a place where people were afforded just incredibly unique opportunities to prove that they could do they could they could write the book again Apple released Macintosh on January 24th 1984 hoping to sell 50,000 computers in the first 100 days on the market 72 thousand sold and sales continued to climb what began as a pirate venture the bad kids in the company has reinstated Apple as IBM's principal competitor in personal computers and is now accounting for roughly half the company's 1.5 billion dollars in annual

sales the best way I came up with to affect change at Apple was by example and that was probably more than anything else the key reason that I spent two and a half years of my life on Macintosh was to try by example to say hey here's a better way to do things and it turns out it's worked I mean almost everything at Apple now has looked at the Macintosh experience and come in and said hey we can take a lot of these concepts and apply them make them better in some ways and model in

every other Factory we're doing now is modeled after the Macintosh Factory every other product team that's doing new product is being modeled after the Macintosh team the Macintosh example demonstrates how effectively a task force can innovate when it is bound together by a shared vision and given the freedom within the corporation to find its own way the project also attests to what can be achieved when people are recognized for their contributions inscribed inside the casing of every Macintosh unseen by the consumer are the signatures of the whole team this is Apple's way of affirming that

their latest innovation is a product of the individuals who created it not the corporation in search of excellence we'll be right back [Music]