I have been fascinated by the various doomsayers who were apoplectic about Apple’s Industrial Design team now reporting to COO Jeff Williams and not directly to Apple CEO Tim Cook. They seem to think that great Industrial Design alone can keep Apple humming and growing.
About every five years, I write a column that attempts to explain how Apple developed its way of thinking and strategies. That last time I did a column like this was for Fortune Magazine in April of 2017 where I shared how one particular thing has helped me understand Apple's Strategies for success. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/learning-1-thing-helped-understand-004440873.html
If you have time, I encourage you to read that column as it lays out the key principles of Apple’s success that I have observed over my 38 years of covering Apple as a professional industry analyst. However, in that article, I did not have enough space to add another piece of the puzzle that makes Apple so successful and that is its world-class manufacturing and operations.
In a discussion with Steve Jobs before the iPhone came out, he told a group of us that one of the reasons Apple had been growing could be directly attributed to Tim Cook’s masterful revamping of their operations and manufacturing. He pointed out that designing the product was only half of the project’s success and unless you could manufacture it cost-effectively, efficiently and in large quantities, it would never have a chance to succeed.
We now know that when Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997, he found that Apple's manufacturing and operations were very poor and gave the task of updating this part of their business to Tim Cook. At the time Jobs came back to Apple, the company was about $1 billion in the red and their business practices were off the rails.
From 1997 to about 2010, Cook was the genius behind developing Apple’s preeminent manufacturing lines and its overall operations that kept Apple humming and products delivered on time.
Although Cook is now CEO, he is still a master of operations and Jeff Williams reports directly to him. Williams has been trained by Cook and their manufacturing and operations under him is still a world-class program.
When I read that Jony Ive was leaving Apple and the Industrial Design team would now report to COO Jeff Williams, I saw this as a natural way to manage this transition. As Jobs suggested, the design is only half the equation for success and works if you can couple it to phenomenal manufacturing.
In Jean Louie Gassee's popular online blog, Monday Note, he echoes this idea that Industrial Design and Operations go hand-in-hand and he puts this idea into perspective in last weeks post:
"A more serious concern among the commentators is Apple’s new org chart. With Ive’s departure, Apple Design no longer reports to the CEO, but to the COO of Operations. As voiced by John Gruber in his eminently readable Daring Fireball blog:
“…when Jobs was at the helm, all design decisions were going through someone with great taste. Not perfect taste, but great taste. But the other part of what made Jobs such a great leader is that he could recognize bad decisions, sooner rather than later, and get them fixed.”Gruber is hardly a doomsayer; he offers that Ive’s departure “may be good news” for Apple. Others, who are less sanguine about the re-org, foresee the Dark Ages:
“The design team is made up of the most creative people, but now there is an operations barrier that wasn’t there before,” one former Apple executive said. “People are scared to be innovative.”
This is silly and belies a misunderstanding. There’s a difference between the traditional, personal, “artistic” design (and taste) that presides over the composition of, say, a 15th century Botticelli painting, and the Industrial Design (ID) that are practiced today by any successful hardware company. Industrial Design goes beyond the fit between form and function that we think of as good design, ID makes sure the product — cars, typewriters, iPhones — can be manufactured in large quantities, meeting cost and reliability targets.
Ive is a living representative of the relatively new lineage of industrial designers, of artists and engineers who understand that to design a product means taking care of the Look and Feel and the operational factors that are required to deliver their wares in extremely large quantities, on time, while meeting cost and reliability targets.”
https://mondaynote.com/apple-misunderstanding-design-and-jony-ives-role-ed90faa146a4
As Gasee points out, great industrial design goes hand in hand with world-class manufacturing. In this case, putting the industrial design team under COO Jeff Williams not only makes sense but will be critical for Apple to continue to develop great products and make them with the kind of quality and in the large quantities that their customers demand. That is why putting this team under Williams, and not Cook is important for Apple’s future. Jony Ives was unique in that he understood great design and how to create products that could be made in Apple’s unique world-class manufacturing system. Designers under him were taught his way of thinking but may not have the skills or experience to create designs that also match the criteria needed to manufacture them elegantly and in huge quantities. Apple pairing these designers under Jeff Williams and operations shows Apple covets the two disciplines being coupled together and redesigned the org chart to reflect this strategic thinking.
