New Yorker profile highlights Ive's leadership


Ian Parker has a lengthy profile of Ive in the current issue. Subtitled "How an industrial designer became Apple's greatest product," there are many interesting tidbits of how Ive operates at Apple. Here are a couple quotes I pulled on how Ive runs his design team.

The first on the table configuration in Apple's design lab:

Apple's intentions can be revealed in one room. Each table serves a single product, or product part, or product concept; some of these objects are scheduled for manufacture; others might come to market in three or five years, or never. "A table can get crowded with a lot of different ideas, maybe problem-solving for one particular feature," Hönig, the former Lamborghini designer, later told me. Then, one day, all the clutter is gone. He laughed: "It's just the winner, basically. What we collectively decided is the best." The designers spend much of their time handling models and materials, sometimes alongside visiting Apple engineers.

Second on his team's loyalty:

"They play together, they work together, and they protect each other," Robert Brunner, the former Apple design chief, later said of the team. At one of our meetings, Ive reminded me of a short article that Bono wrote about him in Time. It said, "To watch him with his workmates in the holy of holies, Apple's design lab, or on a night out is to observe a very rare esprit de corps. They love their boss, and he loves them. What the competitors don't seem to understand is you cannot get people this smart to work this hard just for money." Ive, Bono's friend, described these comments as "shockingly perceptive"--which is an unusual response to praise, even shared praise.