Walter Isaacson: "Steve Jobs' favorite product was the Apple Team"
In a new interview with Big Think, Walter Isaacson, author of The Innovators: How a group of Inventors. Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks, Created the Digital Revolution, explains what Steve Jobs told him product he was most proud of being a part of. The answer: the Apple Team.
The shared vision of great minds working together is what helped Apple become one of the leading forces in the world of technology, and Jobs was well aware of it. Here's Isaacson on the revelation:
I once asked Steve Jobs, you know, what product are you the proudest of. And I thought he might say the iPod or the iPhone or the iPad, whatever, the Mac. And he said, you know, making a product is hard but making a team that can continually make products is even harder.
The product I'm most proud of is Apple and the team I built at Apple. And that's when I moved to this new book, The Innovators, because I wanted to say it's not just about the visionary, it's about the visionary being able to execute on the vision by finding the right people to be collaborative and creative with. So with Steve Jobs even though we think of him as being a tough boss or we think of him as having sort of a prickly personality, there were people who were so loyal to Steve they would walk through walls for him. He developed around him the tightest, most loyal, most integrated team in Silicon Valley.
The remainder of the interview talks about exactly what Jobs thought was necessary for building an environment where collaboration was possible, including the importance of physically working together rather than digitally collaborating. You can view the complete interview below.
