Steve Jobs once likened a high-performing team to "common stones" spinning in a rock tumbler, noisy, abrasive and ultimately polished to brilliance.
What Happened: The anecdote, recorded in a 1995 interview for PBS's "Triumph of the Nerds" and rediscovered after his death, captures what the Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) co-founder saw as the alchemy of collaboration.
Jobs told interviewer Bob Cringely that, as a boy, a widower neighbor showed him a homemade tumbler, "a motor and a coffee can and a little band between them," filled with "regular old ugly rocks," water and grit. After a night of clattering, the stones emerged "amazingly beautiful," he recalled.
The tumbling, he said, mirrors "incredibly talented people bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise" until both ideas and individuals are refined. Jobs, then running NeXT and poised to return to Apple, argued that the best companies court constructive friction. “…Working together, they polish each other and they polish the ideas,” he remarked.
See also: Bill Gates Finally Meets Linux Creator Linus Torvalds At Microsoft Exec’s Dinner, Decades After Powering Rival Operating Systems
According to an NBC article from 2017, former colleagues say Jobs organized project rooms so engineers and designers could not avoid debate, a practice later echoed in Apple's iPhone and Pixar's story-brain sessions.
Why It Matters: Steve Jobs routinely engineered tension to sharpen ideas, whether by ringing Pixar colleagues "at any time, day or night, three in the morning" and expecting instant answers, a habit Pete Docter says he now refuses to copy.
His intolerance for half-measures surfaced again this month when tech watchers joked that Jobs would "have fired everyone" over a lackluster iOS interface, an exaggeration that nonetheless echoed stories of him dismissing teams that failed to hit the mark on the first iPhone's glass swap and other last-minute pivots.
Yet the same razor-edged perfectionism often came wrapped in jolts of generosity meant to keep morale high. Former quality chief Ron Givens recalls Jobs buying a tardy secretary a new Jaguar on the spot, a reward delivered only after a public grilling about her commitment.
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