Jonathan Ive: The key to Apple’s success

Mac mini closeout deals“Jonathan Ive isn’t prone to making wild proclamations about design, his boss, Steve Jobs, or Apple, the company at which he’s led the design team since 1996. Indeed, he’s not really one for speaking in public much at all,” Helen Walters reports for BusinessWeek. “So it was with a sense of keen anticipation that a group of 700 or so Londoners descended on the Royal Geographical Society in posh South Kensington to hear Ive in conversation with Sir Christopher Frayling, rector of the Royal College of Art.”

“During the hour-long chat, Ive touched on many themes and topics. The main takeaway for executives looking to try and copy Apple’s success? Don’t. Instead, Ive said forcefully and repeatedly, companies need to define their own clear, high-minded raison d’être,” Walters reports. “That should drive the actions and decisions of every employee, from the C-suite down.”

Walters reports, “For Apple, he outlined, the end game isn’t commercial success. ‘Apple’s goal isn’t to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products,’ he explained. ‘We trust as a consequence of that, people will like them, and as another consequence we’ll make some money. But we’re really clear about what our goals are.’ This focus, he continued, has driven Apple to produce only a small number of high quality products. ‘We try not to bring out another product that’s just different,’ he said. ”Different’ and ‘new’ is relatively easy. Doing something that’s genuinely better is very hard.'”

Read more in the full article here.

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