STEVE JOBS - The relentless perfectionist

Bill Gates had told Steve Jobs, in person, that his (Steve's) way of integrating end-to-end products actually makes for beautiful products. Bill Gates later recounted, "I think only Steve Jobs could have done it. You had to have been an artist with a passion for detail and perfection to do that integration."

Inspiration: When a young Steve Jobs was helping his father build a fence around their house, his father told him to take as much care on the back of the fence as on the front. That was a lesson about the mark of a true craftsman. As Walter Isaacson, biographer of Steve Jobs, wrote: In overseeing the Apple II and the Macintosh, Jobs applied this lesson to the circuit board inside the machine. In both instances he sent the engineers back to make the chips line up neatly so the board would look nice.

This seemed particularly odd to the engineers of the Macintosh, because Jobs had decreed that the machine be tightly sealed. “Nobody is going to see the PC board,” one of them protested. Jobs reacted as his father had: “I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it’s inside the box. A great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody’s going to see it.”

No compromise: The team had worked really hard on the iPhone, but Jobs didn't like the design. He realized that the 'case' of the phone was becoming a distraction for the 'display' (it was display that was most important), and was proving harmful to the user experience. He said, "Guys, you’ve killed yourselves over this design for the last nine months, but we’re going to change it...We’re all going to have to work nights and weekends..." The team agreed. He said, "It was one of my proudest moments at Apple."

Attention to detail: Steve Jobs cared for the elegance and beauty in even the smallest of details. He famously phoned Vic Gundotra, a top Google executive, about fixing the 'yellow' in the second 'o' in the Google logo on iPhone. As Gundotra later recounted, "It was a lesson I'll never forget. CEOs should care about details. Even shades of yellow. On a Sunday."

Design philosophy: Jonathan Ive, Apple's chief designer, referring to the philosophy Jobs embedded at Apple, said, "To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it’s manufactured."