Transcript
Introduction
"When Vince Lombardi joined the Green Bay Packers in 1959, the team had gone 11 straight seasons without a winning record. Upon arriving at training camp as their new head coach, Lombardi made an immediate and indelible first impression. After leading the players to a meeting room, Lombardi waited in front of a blackboard. As the players sat down, he picked up a piece of chalk and began to speak. 'Gentlemen,' he said, 'we have a great deal of ground to cover. We're going to do things a lot differently than they've been done here before. We're going to relentlessly chase perfection, knowing fully well, we will not catch it because perfection is not attainable. But we are going to relentlessly chase it because in the process, we will catch excellence.' He paused and stared, his eyes moving from player to player.
The room was silent. 'I'm not remotely interested in being just good,' he said with an intensity that startled them all. Lombardi soon followed up with a clear-cut description of the specific thing they would perfect, one play, one single running play. 'Gentlemen, this is the most important play we have. It's the play we must make go. It's the play that we will make go. It's the play that we will run again and again and again.' This is the power of focusing on and perfecting one thing. You will think there was so much to say about a single running play, but John Madden described attending a coaching clinic where Lombardi talked about the power sweep and only the power sweep for eight hours through practice after practice, drill after drill, game after game and season after season, the Packers honed and refined Lombardi's power sweep. Even though opposing teams knew the play was coming, they couldn't stop it. Lombardi built his victories on an openly declared challenge to beat the Packers, you must beat the power sweep. Over the following seven years, the Packers won five Championships, a step-by-step year-by-year progression through the ranks from worst, to best, to legends, all built on the foundations of one humble running play, initially described on the blackboard and then executed exclusively on the field over and over again.
In any" -- this sentence is so important, "in any complex effort, communicating a well-articulated vision for what you're trying to do is the starting point for figuring out how to do it. It may seem like a stretch to draw a comparison between winning football games and Green Bay and developing web browser software in Cupertino. But a significant part of attaining excellence in any field is closing the gap between the accidental and intentional to achieve not just a something or even an everything but a specific and well-chosen thing, to take words and turn them into a vision and then use the vision to spur the actions that create the results. Vince Lombardi was the Steve Jobs of football coaches."
That is an excerpt from a book that I've read three or four times now, and the one I'm going to talk about today, which is Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs and is written by Ken Kocienda. Okay, so before I jump back into the book, I want to tell you why I'm reading this book for the third or fourth time. So even though this is Episode 281, there's actually more than 281 episodes of Founders. There's at least eight unnumbered bonus episodes. And one of those unnumbered bonus episodes is an episode that I've previously done on the book that I'm holding in my hand. And so not numbering the bonus episodes was a giant mistake because I can't reference them as you hear over and over again, how I'm constantly referencing past episodes of Founders because I don't think about this as a separate episode.