38: Trust the troops

Thoughts on leadership, experimentation and learning

Steve Jobs was notorious for his focus. He was happy to kill 100 good ideas to be resolute about 10 great ones. He did just that with a major restructuring of Apple in 1997. Apple was full of great executors, but they were executing 'wonderfully' on all the wrong things. To narrow focus, Jobs axed thousands of nascent ideas and centred the company aroun…