I have been fascinated by the various doomsayers who were apoplectic about Apple’s Industrial Design team now reporting to COO Jeff Williams and not directly to Apple CEO Tim Cook. They seem to think that great Industrial Design alone can keep Apple humming and growing.
About every five years, I write a column that attempts to explain how Apple developed its way of thinking and strategies. That last time I did a column like this was for Fortune Magazine in April of 2017 where I shared how one particular thing has helped me understand Apple’s Strategies for success.https://finance.yahoo.com/news/learning-1-thing-helped-understand-004440873.html
If you have time, I encourage you to read that column as it lays out the key principles of Apple’s success that I have observed over my 38 years of covering Apple as a professional industry analyst. However, in that article, I did not have enough space to add another piece of the puzzle that makes Apple so successful and that is its world-class manufacturing and operations.
In a discussion with Steve Jobs before the iPhone came out, he told a group of us that one of the reasons Apple had been growing could be directly attributed to Tim Cook’s masterful revamping of their operations and manufacturing. He pointed out that designing the product was only half of the project’s success and unless you could manufacture it cost-effectively, efficiently and in large quantities, it would never have a chance to succeed.
We now know that when Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997, he found that Apple’s manufacturing and operations were very poor and gave the task of updating this part of their business to Tim Cook. At the time Jobs came back to Apple, the company was about $1 billion in the red and their business practices were off the rails.
Read more at forbes.com