Lessons for founders from Jony Ive's biography

Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products by Leander Kahney is full of great ideas for product builders and founders.

Here are a few of my favorite ideas from the book:

Make sure your company has a distinct personality. This helps attract undiscovered talent. Jony was an unknown designer when he first thought about working at Apple:

"The more I learned about this cheeky, almost rebellious company, the more it appealed to me, as it unapologetically pointed to an alternative in a complacent and creatively bankrupt industry. Apple stood for something and had a reason for being that wasn't just about making money."

Passion is infectious. Find work that you can't resist telling other people about:

I just wanted a sound bite, but he launched into a passionate, twenty-minute soliloquy about his latest work. I could barely get a word in edgewise. He couldn't help himself: Design is his passion.

Observe the products you already use. Think of ways they can be improved. These ideas can be the foundation of a new business:

They were constantly keeping up a conversation about the built environment and what made-objects were all around them and how they could be made better.

Embrace the grind. There are no shortcuts:

He was amazed to find the apartment filled with more than a hundred foam model prototypes of Jony's project, his design discipline on display. When most students might build half a dozen models, Jony had built a hundred. "I'd never seen anything like it: the sheer focus to get it perfect."

Study the greats:

He studied the work of Eileen Gray, one of the twentieth century's most influential furniture designers and architects. Modern masters fascinated Jony, among them Michele De Lucchi, who tried to make high-tech objects easy to understand by making them gentle, humane and a bit friendly. He was also fascinated by Dieter Rams, the legendary designer at Braun.

Ignore what a product already is. Start with what it should be and work backwards from that:

What something should be was always the starting point for his designs. He had the ability to remove, or ignore, how any product currently is, or how an engineer might say it must be.

The biggest decisions of your life won't be easy. You will have to take risks. Jony on deciding to leave his home country, give up his design business, and take a job at Apple:

As he remembered, "through some sort of reckless sense of faith," he got to Yes.

Your work is too important for second-rate effort:

Jony Ive was very serious about his work. He had a ferocious intensity about it. He was calm, but very deep. He was very serious.

Committees don't design great products:

"It becomes about consensus, and that's why you rarely see the spark of genius."

The best employees are mission driven. Jony was thinking about quitting Apple. Then Steve Jobs came back and set a completely different goal of making insanely great products:

But as he sat there thinking about returning to England, Jobs said something that gave him pause. Jobs told the group that Apple would be returning to its roots. "I remember very clearly Steve announcing that our goal is not just to make money but to make great products," Jony later recalled. "The decisions you make based on that philosophy are fundamentally different from the ones we had been making at Apple."

People will always pay for quality:

Jobs aimed at making innovative products again, but he didn't want to compete in the broader market for personal computers, which was dominated by companies making generic machines for Microsoft's Windows operating system. These companies competed on price, not features or ease of use. Jobs figured theirs was a race to the bottom.

Instead, he argued, there was no reason that well-designed, wellmade computers couldn't command the same market share and margins as a luxury automobile. A BMW might get you to where you are going in the same way as a Chevy that costs half the price, but there will always be those who will pay for the better ride in the sexier car. Rather than competing with commodity PC makers like Dell, Compaq and Gateway, why not make only first-class products with high margins so that Apple could continue to develop even better first-class products?

Never forget that you are building products for real people and real people place real value on intangible, hard to describe product attributes:

Later, Jony explained his thinking this way. The computer industry "is an industry that has become incredibly conservative from a design perspective," he said. "It is an industry where there is an obsession about product attributes that you can measure empirically. How fast is it? How big is the hard drive? How fast is the CD? That is a very comfortable space to compete in because you can say eight is better than six." But Jony offered a key insight: "It's also very inhuman and very cold. Because of the industry's obsession with absolutes, there has been a tendency to ignore product attributes that are difficult to measure or talk about. In that sense, the industry has missed out on the more emotive, less tangible product attributes. But to me, that is why I bought an Apple computer in the first place."

You can create something unique by combining several small ideas in a new way:

Innovation is rarely about a big idea; more usually it's about a series of small ideas brought together in a new and better way.

Making a great product is supposed to be hard. Making the iPhone was so difficult they almost gave up:

"We nearly shelved the phone because we thought there were fundamental problems that we can't solve.”

I highly recommend reading the book.

Biographies are full of useful ideas that you can use in your work. I think Tobi Lutke (founder of Shopify) said it best: "Books are the closest you will ever come to finding cheat codes for real life. You can access the entire learnings of someone else’s career in a few hours."

If you want an easy way to learn from a few hundred biographies of entrepreneurs listen to Founders