Is it the new hit products? The stock price? Tim Cook: Stock price is a result, not an achievement by itself. No, seriously. But it was clear it was changing things in an incredibly good way. Over the long haul, you just have to have faith that the strategy itself leads to [financial results] and not get distracted and focus on them.
It probably makes the results worse because you take your eye off what really matters. The question at the end of every year, or every month or every week or every day, is, Did we make progress on that front? FC: Given the relentless pace of change in the world, how do you prioritize what Apple is going to spend its time on, which things deserve attention and which things are distractions? TC: There is more noise in the world than change. One of my roles is to try to block the noise from the people who are really doing the work.
The priorities are about saying no to a bunch of great ideas. I doubt anybody that is anywhere near our revenue could say that. I worked at a company a while back, many years ago, where every hallway you go in, you would see their stock price being monitored. You will not find that here. And not because you can get it on your iPhone. FC: Do the investment markets make innovation harder? Or does Wall Street motivate change? TC: The truth is, it has little to no effect on us.
But we are an outlier. More generally, if you look at America, the day clock [measuring results by each fiscal quarter] is a negative. Why would you ever measure a business on 90 days when its investments are long term? TC: No, of course not. If I were king for a day, that whole thing would change.
But when I really get down to it, here, it affects a few of us because we have to do a quarterly call and so forth, but does it affect the company?
Take iPhone X, the portrait-lighting feature. This is something that you had to be a professional photographer with a certain setup to do in the past. Now, iPhone X is not a cheap product, but a lighting rig—these things were tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And an iPhone X does more than just take pictures. There are so many parts. With ARKit, we created something that essentially took the heavy lifting with [augmented reality] and put it in the operating system, which empowers thousands of developers eventually to be able to build AR into their apps.
Some will be very profound, life changing. There is no doubt about that in my mind. In each case, if you look at when we started, I would guess that we started much before other people did, but we took our time to get it right. Innovative Business Models. It builds innovative business models too. The iPod and iPhone would not have had nearly as much impact if they hadn't been matched with iTunes and the App Store respectively The most successful products at Apple were started with only a few people with no formal structure or hierarchy and little corporate oversight.
Apple has built an effective innovation system to harnesses creativity in its people, stimulate new ideas, streamline the design process , and launch successful, profitable new innovations. Apple's Design Process. Apple has repeatedly demonstrated with its innovation management what a success user friendliness and design can generate.
Genius ergonomics make Apple products effortless to use. There has to be a balance. For fans and customers, Apple might seem to churn out innovation after innovation, year after year.
In fact, their products have a long and considered development period. This steady-as-she-goes development process helps reduce the risk of products misfiring, and limits the possibility of any embarrassing missteps. What we have that I think is unique is patience. We have the patience to wait until something is great before we ship it. This patience and effort is precisely how Apple has built such a strong reputation amongst its users, and is why its customers place such a high degree of trust in Apple products.
I care deeply about what our users think. For Apple, these are a great way to inform future product development, and to iron out any technical issues. A lot of Apple products have been met with criticism or hangups, but have gone on to defy expectations and perform incredibly well. Customers were used to being able to type on actual keys, and naysayers even claimed the iPhone would be an embarrassment for Apple.
The key to churning out great products, year after year? Listening to customer feedback, while also tuning out unhelpful noise. If the company threw its weight behind every great idea proposed by its designers and engineers, it would risk spreading its resources far too thin.
Instead, Apple has the courage to say no to some great ideas every once in a while. While this may sound counter-intuitive, it reflects the reality of modern innovation. For growing businesses, having the courage to say no to some promising ideas can make all the difference to your survival over time.
After all, for every exciting innovation like the AirPod, Apple has had its share of products that failed to truly take off, like the Apple Watch and the iPhone XS. This poses a unique problem for a tech company: has Apple created so many great and long-lasting products that the market for new gadgets has started to shrink?
With iPhone sales looking a little shaky, more people seem to be holding on to their older versions. Some market commentators are even starting to sound alarm bells for Apple , and are predicting that the company may have reached the end of its innovation capacity.
It also helps to have a strong innovation strategy in place, and to look to the greats for pointers. Former Strategy Consultant turned Entrepreneur.
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