Steve Jobs Quotes

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.
Steve Jobs 

For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?' And whenever the answer has been 'No' for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Steve Jobs

Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.
Steve Jobs 


Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.
Steve Jobs 

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
Steve Jobs 

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
Steve Jobs 


If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.
Steve Jobs 

Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful, that's what matters to me.
Steve Jobs 

You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
Steve Jobs 

That's been one of my mantras - focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.
Steve Jobs 

Computer Science Knowledge

Coursera offers what could be considered a basic grounding in computer science theory from some of the most prestigious universities :

• Computer Science 101 from Stanford University
• Introduction to Logic from Stanford University
• Learn to Program: The Fundamentals from the University of Toronto
• Algorithms, Part I from Princeton University
• Algorithms, Part II from Princeton University
• Introduction to Systematic Program Design, Part 1 from the University of British Columbia (no Part 2 yet but you can read the book online for free)
• Programming Languages from the University of Washington
• Pattern-Oriented Software Architectures for Concurrent and Networked Software from Vanderbilt University
• Algorithms: Design and Analysis, Part 1 from Stanford University
• Algorithms: Design and Analysis, Part 2 from Stanford University
• Operating System Engineering from MIT (Coursera has nothing)
• Introduction to Databases from Stanford University
• Introduction to Compilers from Stanford University

Choose to Start Anyway

                     It doesn't matter if you're trying to start a business, lose weight, write a book, or achieve any number of goals... who you are, what you have, and what you know right now is good enough to get going. We all start in the same place: no money, no resources, no contacts, no experience. The difference is that some people — the winners — choose to start anyway. Richard Branson

From Steve Jobs

"That's been one of my mantras -- focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains."
-- BusinessWeek interview, May 1998

"[Y]ou can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something -- your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."
-- Stanford University commencement address, 2005

"My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other's kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That's how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they're done by a team of people."
-- Interview with 60 Minutes, 2003

iPhone

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October 4, 2013

And Then Steve Said, ‘Let There Be an iPhone’

By FRED VOGELSTEIN

The 55 miles from Campbell to San Francisco make for one of the nicest commutes anywhere. The journey mostly zips along the Junipero Serra Freeway, a grand and remarkably empty highway that abuts the east side of the Santa Cruz Mountains. It is one of the best places in Silicon Valley to spot a start-up tycoon speed-testing his Ferrari and one of the worst places for cellphone reception. For Andy Grignon, it was therefore the perfect place for him to be alone with his thoughts early on Jan. 8, 2007.

This wasn’t Grignon’s typical route to work. He was a senior engineer at Apple in Cupertino, the town just west of Campbell. His morning drive typically covered seven miles and took exactly 15 minutes. But today was different. He was going to watch his boss, Steve Jobs, make history at the Macworld trade show in San Francisco. Apple fans had for years begged Jobs to put a cellphone inside their iPods so they could stop carrying two devices in their pockets. Jobs was about to fulfill that wish. Grignon and some colleagues would spend the night at a nearby hotel, and around 10 a.m. the following day they — along with the rest of the world — would watch Jobs unveil the first iPhone.

But as Grignon drove north, he didn’t feel excited. He felt terrified. Most onstage product demonstrations in Silicon Valley are canned. The thinking goes, why let bad Internet or cellphone connections ruin an otherwise good presentation? But Jobs insisted on live presentations. It was one of the things that made them so captivating. Part of his legend was that noticeable product-demo glitches almost never happened. But for those in the background, like Grignon, few parts of the job caused more stress.

Grignon was the senior manager in charge of all the radios in the iPhone. This is a big job. Cellphones do innumerable useful things for us today, but at their most basic, they are fancy two-way radios. Grignon was in charge of the equipment that allowed the phone to be a phone. If the device didn’t make calls, or didn’t connect with Bluetooth headsets or Wi-Fi setups, Grignon had to answer for it. As one of the iPhone’s earliest engineers, he’d dedicated two and a half years of his life — often seven days a week — to the project.

Grignon had been part of the iPhone rehearsal team at Apple and later at the presentation site in San Francisco’s Moscone Center. He had rarely seen Jobs make it all the way through his 90-minute show without a glitch. Jobs had been practicing for five days, yet even on the last day of rehearsals the iPhone was still randomly dropping calls, losing its Internet connection, freezing or simply shutting down.

“At first it was just really cool to be at rehearsals at all — kind of like a cred badge,” Grignon says. Only a chosen few were allowed to attend. “But it quickly got really uncomfortable. Very rarely did I see him become completely unglued — it happened, but mostly he just looked at you and very directly said in a very loud and stern voice, ‘You are [expletive] up my company,’ or, ‘If we fail, it will be because of you.’ He was just very intense. And you would always feel an inch tall.” Grignon, like everyone else at rehearsals, knew that if those glitches showed up during the real presentation, Jobs would not be blaming himself for the problems. “It felt like we’d gone through the demo a hundred times, and each time something went wrong,” Grignon says. “It wasn’t a good feeling.”

The preparations were top-secret. From Thursday through the end of the following week, Apple completely took over Moscone. Backstage, it built an eight-by-eight-foot electronics lab to house and test the iPhones. Next to that it built a greenroom with a sofa for Jobs. Then it posted more than a dozen security guards 24 hours a day in front of those rooms and at doors throughout the building. No one got in without having his or her ID electronically checked and compared with a master list that Jobs had personally approved. The auditorium where Jobs was rehearsing was off limits to all but a small group of executives. Jobs was so obsessed with leaks that he tried to have all the contractors Apple hired — from people manning booths and doing demos to those responsible for lighting and sound — sleep in the building the night before his presentation. Aides talked him out of it.

Grignon knew the iPhone unveiling was not an ordinary product announcement, but no one could have anticipated what a seminal moment it would become. In the span of seven years, the iPhone and its iPad progeny have become among the most important innovations in Silicon Valley’s history. They transformed the stodgy cellphone industry. They provided a platform for a new and hugely profitable software industry — mobile apps, which have generated more than $10 billion in revenue since they began selling in 2008. And they have upended the multibillion-dollar personal-computer industry. If you include iPad sales with those for desktops and laptops, Apple is now the largest P.C. maker in the world. Around 200 million iPhones and iPads were sold last year, or more than twice the number of cars sold worldwide.

The impact has been not only economic but also cultural. Apple’s innovations have set off an entire rethinking of how humans interact with machines. It’s not simply that we use our fingers now instead of a mouse. Smartphones, in particular, have become extensions of our brains. They have fundamentally changed the way people receive and process information. Ponder the individual impacts of the book, the newspaper, the telephone, the radio, the tape recorder, the camera, the video camera, the compass, the television, the VCR and the DVD, the personal computer, the cellphone, the video game and the iPod. The smartphone is all those things, and it fits in your pocket. Its technology is changing the way we learn in school, the way doctors treat patients, the way we travel and explore. Entertainment and media are accessed and experienced in entirely new ways.

And yet Apple today is under siege. From the moment in late 2007 that Google unveiled Android — and its own plan to dominate the world of mobile phones and other mobile devices — Google hasn’t just tried to compete with the iPhone; it has succeeded in competing with the iPhone. Android has exploded in popularity since it took hold in 2010. Its share of the global smartphone market is approaching 80 percent, while Apple’s has fallen below 20 percent. A similar trend is under way with iPads: in 2010 the iPad had about 90 percent of the tablet market; now more than 60 percent of the tablets sold run Android.

What worries Apple fans most of all is not knowing where the company is headed. When Jobs died in October 2011, the prevailing question wasn’t whether Tim Cook could succeed him, but whether anyone could. When Jobs ran Apple, the company was an innovation machine, churning out revolutionary products every three to five years. He told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, that he had another breakthrough coming — a revolution in TV. But under Cook, nothing has materialized, and the lack of confidence among investors is palpable. When Cook presented the latest smartphones in September, the iPhone 5c and the iPhone 5s, Apple’s stock fell 10 percent. A year ago the company’s stock price was at $702 a share, making Apple the world’s most valuable corporation. Today, it’s down more than 25 percent from that peak.

Comparing anyone with Steve Jobs is unfair. And during his two years as Apple’s chief executive, Cook has taken pains to point out that Jobs himself made it clear to him that he didn’t want Cook running Apple the way he thought Jobs would want to, but the way Cook thought it should be done. It hardly needed to be said. When you look back at how the iPhone came to be, it’s clear that it had everything to do with the unreasonable demands — and unusual power — of an inimitable man.

It’s hard to overstate the gamble Jobs took when he decided to unveil the iPhone back in January 2007. Not only was he introducing a new kind of phone — something Apple had never made before — he was doing so with a prototype that barely worked. Even though the iPhone wouldn’t go on sale for another six months, he wanted the world to want one right then. In truth, the list of things that still needed to be done was enormous. A production line had yet to be set up. Only about a hundred iPhones even existed, all of them of varying quality. Some had noticeable gaps between the screen and the plastic edge; others had scuff marks on the screen. And the software that ran the phone was full of bugs.

The iPhone could play a section of a song or a video, but it couldn’t play an entire clip reliably without crashing. It worked fine if you sent an e-mail and then surfed the Web. If you did those things in reverse, however, it might not. Hours of trial and error had helped the iPhone team develop what engineers called “the golden path,” a specific set of tasks, performed in a specific way and order, that made the phone look as if it worked.

But even when Jobs stayed on the golden path, all manner of last-minute workarounds were required to make the iPhone functional. On announcement day, the software that ran Grignon’s radios still had bugs. So, too, did the software that managed the iPhone’s memory. And no one knew whether the extra electronics Jobs demanded the demo phones include would make these problems worse.

Jobs wanted the demo phones he would use onstage to have their screens mirrored on the big screen behind him. To show a gadget on a big screen, most companies just point a video camera at it, but that was unacceptable to Jobs. The audience would see his finger on the iPhone screen, which would mar the look of his presentation. So he had Apple engineers spend weeks fitting extra circuit boards and video cables onto the backs of the iPhones he would have onstage. The video cables were then connected to the projector, so that when Jobs touched the iPhone’s calendar app icon, for example, his finger wouldn’t appear, but the image on the big screen would respond to his finger’s commands. The effect was magical. People in the audience felt as if they were holding an iPhone in their own hands. But making the setup work flawlessly, given the iPhone’s other major problems, seemed hard to justify at the time.

The software in the iPhone’s Wi-Fi radio was so unstable that Grignon and his team had to extend the phones’ antennas by connecting them to wires running offstage so the wireless signal wouldn’t have to travel as far. And audience members had to be prevented from getting on the frequency being used. “Even if the base station’s ID was hidden” — that is, not showing up when laptops scanned for Wi-Fi signals — “you had 5,000 nerds in the audience,” Grignon says. “They would have figured out how to hack into the signal.” The solution, he says, was to tweak the AirPort software so that it seemed to be operating in Japan instead of the United States. Japanese Wi-Fi uses some frequencies that are not permitted in the U.S.

There was less they could do to make sure the phone calls Jobs planned to make from the stage went through. Grignon and his team could only ensure a good signal, and then pray. They had AT&T, the iPhone’s wireless carrier, bring in a portable cell tower, so they knew reception would be strong. Then, with Jobs’s approval, they preprogrammed the phone’s display to always show five bars of signal strength regardless of its true strength. The chances of the radio’s crashing during the few minutes that Jobs would use it to make a call were small, but the chances of its crashing at some point during the 90-minute presentation were high. “If the radio crashed and restarted, as we suspected it might, we didn’t want people in the audience to see that,” Grignon says. “So we just hard-coded it to always show five bars.”

None of these kludges fixed the iPhone’s biggest problem: it often ran out of memory and had to be restarted if made to do more than a handful of tasks at a time. Jobs had a number of demo units onstage with him to manage this problem. If memory ran low on one, he would switch to another while the first was restarted. But given how many demos Jobs planned, Grignon worried that there were far too many potential points of failure. If disaster didn’t strike during one of the dozen demos, it was sure to happen during the grand finale, when Jobs planned to show all the iPhone’s top features operating at the same time on the same phone. He’d play some music, take a call, put it on hold and take another call, find and e-mail a photo to the second caller, look up something on the Internet for the first caller and then return to his music. “Me and my guys were all so nervous about this,” Grignon says. “We only had 128 megabytes of memory in those phones” — maybe the equivalent of two dozen large digital photographs — “and because they weren’t finished, all these apps were still big and bloated.”

Jobs rarely backed himself into corners like this. He was well known as a taskmaster, seeming to know just how hard he could push his staff so that it delivered the impossible. But he always had a backup, a Plan B, that he could go to if his timetable was off.

But the iPhone was the only cool new thing Apple was working on. The iPhone had been such an all-encompassing project at Apple that this time there was no backup plan. “It was Apple TV or the iPhone,” Grignon says. “And if he had gone to Macworld with just Apple TV” — a new product that connected iTunes to a television set — “the world would have said, ‘What the heck was that?’ ”

The idea that one of the biggest moments of his career might implode made Grignon’s stomach hurt. By 2007 he’d spent virtually his entire career at Apple or companies affiliated with it. While at the University of Iowa in 1993, he and his friend Jeremy Wyld reprogrammed the Newton MessagePad to wirelessly connect to the Internet. Even though the Newton would not succeed as a product, many still regard it as the first mainstream hand-held computer, and their hack was quite a feat back then; it helped them both get jobs at Apple. Wyld ended up on the Newton team, while Grignon worked in Apple’s famous R. & D. lab — the Advanced Technology Group — on videoconferencing technology.

By 2000 Grignon had found his way to Pixo, a company started by a former Apple software developer that was building operating systems for cellphones and other small devices. When Pixo’s software ended up in the first iPod in 2001, Grignon found himself back at Apple again.

By then, thanks to his work at Pixo, he’d become prominent for two other areas of expertise besides videoconferencing technology: computer radio transmitters (Wi-Fi and Bluetooth) and the workings of software inside small hand-held devices like cellphones. Grignon moves in an entirely different world from that inhabited by most software engineers in the valley. Most rarely have to think about whether their code takes up too much space on a hard drive or overloads a chip’s abilities. Hardware on desktop and laptop computers is powerful, modifiable and cheap; memory, hard drives and even processors can be upgraded inexpensively; and computers are either connected to electrical outlets or giant batteries. In Grignon’s area of embedded software, the hardware is fixed. Code that is too big won’t run. Meanwhile, a tiny battery — which might power a laptop for a couple of minutes — needs enough juice to last all day. When work on the iPhone began at the end of 2004, Grignon had a perfect set of skills to become one of the early engineers on the project.

Now, in 2007, he was emotionally exhausted. He’d gained 50 pounds. He’d put stress on his marriage. The iPhone team discovered early on that making a phone didn’t resemble building computers or iPods at all. “It was very dramatic,” Grignon says. “It had been drilled into everyone’s head that this was the next big thing to come out of Apple. So you put all these supersmart people with huge egos into very tight, confined quarters, with that kind of pressure, and crazy stuff starts to happen.”

Remarkably, Jobs had to be talked into having Apple build a phone at all. It had been a topic of conversation among his inner circle almost from the moment Apple introduced the iPod in 2001. The conceptual reasoning was obvious: consumers would rather not carry two or three devices for e-mail, phone calls and music if they could carry one. But every time Jobs and his executives examined the idea in detail, it seemed like a suicide mission. Phone chips and bandwidth were too slow for anyone to want to surf the Internet and download music or video over a cellphone connection. E-mail was a fine function to add to a phone, but Research in Motion’s BlackBerry was fast locking up that market.

Above all, Jobs didn’t want to partner with any of the wireless carriers. Back then the carriers expected to dominate any partnership with a phone maker, and because they controlled the network, they got their way. Jobs, a famed control freak, couldn’t imagine doing their bidding. Apple considered buying Motorola in 2003, but executives quickly concluded it would be too big an acquisition for the company then. (The two companies collaborated unsuccessfully a couple of years later.)

But by the fall of 2004, doing business with the carriers was starting to seem less onerous. Sprint was beginning to sell its wireless bandwidth wholesale. This meant that by buying and reselling bandwidth from Sprint, Apple could become its own wireless carrier — what’s known as a “mobile virtual network operator.” Apple could build a phone and barely have to deal with the carriers at all. Disney, on whose board Jobs sat, was already in discussions with Sprint about just such a deal to provide its own wireless service. Jobs was asking a lot of questions about whether Apple should pursue one as well. The deal Apple ultimately signed with Cingular (later acquired by AT&T) in 2006 took more than a year to hammer out, but it would prove easy compared to what Apple went through just to build the device.

Many executives and engineers, riding high from their success with the iPod, assumed a phone would be like building a small Macintosh. Instead, Apple designed and built not one but three different early versions of the iPhone in 2005 and 2006. One person who worked on the project thinks Apple then made six fully working prototypes of the device it ultimately sold — each with its own set of hardware, software and design tweaks. Some on the team ended up so burned out that they left the company shortly after the first phone hit store shelves. “It was like the first moon mission,” says Tony Fadell, a key executive on the project. (He started his own company, Nest, in 2010.) “I’m used to a certain level of unknowns in a project, but there were so many new things here that it was just staggering.”

Jobs wanted the iPhone to run a modified version of OS X, the software that comes with every Mac. But no one had ever put a gigantic program like OS X on a phone chip before. The software would have to be a tenth its usual size. Millions of lines of code would have to be stripped out or rewritten, and engineers would have to simulate chip speed and battery drain because actual chips weren’t available until 2006.

No one had ever put a multitouch screen in a mainstream consumer product before, either. Capacitive touch technology — a “touch” by either a finger or other conductive object completes a circuit — had been around since the 1960s. Capacitive multitouch, in which two or more fingers can be used and independently recognized, was vastly more complicated. Research into it began in the mid-1980s. It was well known, though, that to build the touch-screen Apple put on the iPhone and produce it in volume was a challenge few had the money or guts to take on. The next steps — to embed the technology invisibly in a piece of glass, to make it smart enough to display a virtual keyboard with autocorrect and to make it sophisticated enough to reliably manipulate photos or Web pages on that screen — made it hugely expensive even to produce a working prototype. Few production lines had experience manufacturing multitouch screens. The touch-screens in consumer electronics had typically been pressure-sensitive ones that users pushed with a finger or a stylus. (The PalmPilot and its successors like the Palm Treo were popular expressions of this technology.) Even if multitouch iPhone screens had been easy to make, it wasn’t at all clear to Apple’s executive team that the features they enabled, like on-screen keyboards and “tap to zoom,” were enhancements that consumers wanted.

As early as 2003, a handful of Apple engineers had figured out how to put multitouch technology in a tablet. “The story was that Steve wanted a device that he could use to read e-mail while on the toilet — that was the extent of the product spec,” says Joshua Strickon, one of the earliest engineers on that project. “But you couldn’t build a device with enough battery life to take out of the house, and you couldn’t get a chip with enough graphics capability to make it useful. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out just what to do.” Before joining Apple in 2003, Strickon had built a multitouch device for his master’s thesis at M.I.T. But given the lack of consensus at Apple about what to do with the prototypes he and his fellow engineers developed, he says, he left the company in 2004 thinking it wasn’t going to do anything with that technology.

Tim Bucher, one of Apple’s top executives at the time and the company’s biggest multitouch proponent, says part of the problem was that the prototypes they were building used software, OS X, that was designed to be used with a mouse, not a finger. “We were using 10- or 12-inch screens with Mac-mini-like guts . . . and then you would launch these demos that would do the different multitouch gestures. One demo was a keyboard application that would rise from the bottom — very much what ended up shipping in the iPhone two years later. But it wasn’t very pretty. It was very much wires, chewing gum and baling wire.”

Few even thought about making touch-screen technology the centerpiece of a new kind of phone until Jobs started really pushing the idea in mid-2005. “He said: ‘Tony, come over here. Here’s something we’re working on. What do you think? Do you think we could make a phone out of this?’ ” Fadell says, referring to a demo Jobs was playing with. “It was huge. It filled the room. There was a projector mounted on the ceiling, and it would project the Mac screen onto this surface that was maybe three or four feet square. Then you could touch the Mac screen and move things around and draw on it.” Fadell was aware of the touch-screen prototype, but not in great detail, because it was a Mac product, and he ran the iPod division. “So we all sat down and had a serious discussion about it — about what could be done.”

Fadell had strong doubts about shrinking such an enormous prototype so much and then manufacturing it. But he also knew better than to say no to Steve Jobs. He was one of Apple’s superstars, having joined the company in 2001 as a consultant to help build the first iPod, and he didn’t get there by being timid in the face of thorny technological problems. By 2005, with iPod sales exploding, he had become, at 36, arguably the single most important line executive at the company.

“I understood how it could be done,” Fadell says. “But it’s one thing to think that, and another to take a room full of special, one-off gear and make a million phone-size versions of that in a cost-effective, reliable manner.” The to-do list was exhausting just to think about. “You had to go to LCD vendors who knew how to embed technology like this in glass; you had to find time on their line; and then you had to come up with compensation and calibrating algorithms to keep the pixel electronics from generating all kinds of noise in the touch-screen” — which sat on top of the LCD. “It was a whole project just to make the touch-screen device. We tried two or three ways of actually making the touch-screen until we could make one in enough volume that would work.”

Shrinking OS X and building a multitouch screen, while innovative and difficult, were at least within the skills Apple had already mastered as a corporation. No one was better equipped to rethink OS X’s design. Apple knew LCD manufacturers because it put an LCD in every laptop and iPod. Mobile-phone physics was an entirely new field, however, and it took those working on the iPhone into 2006 to realize how little they knew. Apple built testing rooms and equipment to test the iPhone’s antenna. It created models of human heads, with viscous stuff inside to approximate the density of human brains, to help measure the radiation that users might be exposed to from using the phone. One senior executive believes that more than $150 million was spent creating the first iPhone.

From the start of the project, Jobs hoped that he would be able to develop a touch-screen iPhone running OS X similar to what he ended up unveiling. But in 2005 he had no idea how long that would take. So Apple’s first iPhone looked very much like the joke slide Jobs put up when introducing the real iPhone — an iPod with an old-fashioned rotary dial on it. The prototype really was an iPod with a phone radio that used the iPod click wheel as a dialer. “It was an easy way to get to market, but it was not cool like the devices we have today,” Grignon says.

The second iPhone prototype in early 2006 was much closer to what Jobs would ultimately introduce. It incorporated a touch-screen and OS X, but it was made entirely of brushed aluminum. Jobs and Jonathan Ive, Apple’s design chief, were exceedingly proud of it. But because neither of them was an expert in the physics of radio waves, they didn’t realize they created a beautiful brick. Radio waves don’t travel through metal well. “I and Rubén Caballero” — Apple’s antenna expert — “had to go up to the boardroom and explain to Steve and Ive that you cannot put radio waves through metal,” says Phil Kearney, an engineer who left Apple in 2008. “And it was not an easy explanation. Most of the designers are artists. The last science class they took was in eighth grade. But they have a lot of power at Apple. So they ask, ‘Why can’t we just make a little seam for the radio waves to escape through?’ And you have to explain to them why you just can’t.”

Jon Rubinstein, Apple’s top hardware executive at the time, says there were even long discussions about how big the phone would be. “I was actually pushing to do two sizes — to have a regular iPhone and an iPhone mini like we had with the iPod. I thought one could be a smartphone and one could be a dumber phone. But we never got any traction on the small one, and in order to do one of these projects, you really need to put all your wood behind one arrow.”

The iPhone project was so complex that it occasionally threatened to derail the entire corporation. Many top engineers in the company were being sucked into the project, forcing slowdowns in the timetables of other work. Had the iPhone been a dud or not gotten off the ground at all, Apple would have had no other big products ready to announce for a long time. And worse, according to a top executive on the project, the company’s leading engineers, frustrated by failure, would have left Apple.

Compounding all the technical challenges, Jobs’s obsession with secrecy meant that even as they were exhausted by 80-hour workweeks, the few hundred engineers and designers working on the iPhone couldn’t talk about it to anyone else. If Apple found out you’d told a friend in a bar, or even your spouse, you could be fired. In some cases, before a manager could ask you to join the project, you had to sign a nondisclosure agreement in his office. Then, after he told you what the project was, you had to sign another document confirming that you had indeed signed the NDA and would tell no one. “We put a sign on over the front door of the purple dorm” — the iPhone building — “that said ‘fight club,’ because the first rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club,” Scott Forstall, Apple’s senior vice president of iOS software until last October, testified in 2012 during the Apple v. Samsung trial. “Steve didn’t want to hire anyone from outside of Apple to work on the user interface, but he told me I could hire anyone in the company,” Forstall said. “So I’d bring them into my office, sit them down and tell them: ‘You are a superstar in your current role. I have another project that I want you to consider. I can’t tell you what it is. All I can say is that you will have to give up nights and weekends and that you will work harder than you have ever worked in your life.”

One of the early iPhone engineers says, “My favorite part was what all the vendors said the day after the unveiling.” Big companies like Marvell, which made the Wi-Fi radio chip, and CSR, which provided the Bluetooth radio chip, hadn’t been told they were going to be in a new phone. They thought they were going to be in a new iPod. “We actually had fake schematics and fake industrial designs,” the engineer says. Grignon says that Apple even went as far as to impersonate employees of another company when they traveled, especially to Cingular. “The whole thing was you didn’t want the receptionist or whoever happens to be walking by to see all the badges lying out” with Apple’s name on them.

One of the most obvious manifestations of Jobs’s obsession with secrecy were the locked-down areas on the company’s campus — places that those not working on the iPhone could no longer go. “Steve loved this stuff,” Grignon says. “He loved to set up division. But it was a big ‘[expletive] you’ to the people who couldn’t get in. Everyone knows who the rock stars are in a company, and when you start to see them all slowly get plucked out of your area and put in a big room behind glass doors that you don’t have access to, it feels bad.”

Even people within the project itself couldn’t talk to one another. Engineers designing the electronics weren’t allowed to see the software. When they needed software to test the electronics, they were given proxy code, not the real thing. If you were working on the software, you used a simulator to test hardware performance.

And no one outside Jobs’s inner circle was allowed into Jonathan Ive’s wing on the first floor of Building 2. The security surrounding Ive’s prototypes was so tight that some employees believed the badge reader called security if you tried to enter and weren’t authorized. “It was weird, because it wasn’t like you could avoid going by it. It was right off the lobby, behind a big metal door. Every now and then you’d see the door open and you’d try to look in and see, but you never tried to do more than that,” says an engineer whose first job out of college was working on the iPhone. Forstall said during his testimony that some labs required you to “badge in” four times.

The pressure to meet Jobs’s deadlines was so intense that normal discussions quickly devolved into shouting matches. Exhausted engineers quit their jobs — then came back to work a few days later once they had slept a little. Forstall’s chief of staff, Kim Vorrath, once slammed her office door so hard it got stuck and locked her in, and co-workers took more than an hour to get her out. “We were all standing there watching it,” Grignon says. “Part of it was funny. But it was also one of those moments where you step back and realize how [expletive] it all is.”

When Jobs started talking about the iPhone on Jan. 9, 2007, he said, “This is a day I have been looking forward to for two and a half years.” Then he regaled the audience with myriad tales about why consumers hated their cellphones. Then he solved all their problems — definitively.

As Grignon and others from Apple sat nervously in the audience, Jobs had the iPhone play some music and a movie clip to show off the phone’s beautiful screen. He made a phone call to show off the phone’s reinvented address book and voice mail. He sent a text and an e-mail, showing how easy it was to type on the phone’s touch-screen keyboard. He scrolled through a bunch of photos, showing how simple pinches and spreads of two fingers could make the pictures smaller or bigger. He navigated The New York Times’s and Amazon’s Web sites to show that the iPhone’s Internet browser was as good as the one on his computer. He found a Starbucks with Google Maps — and called the number from the stage — to show how it was impossible to get lost with an iPhone.

By the end, Grignon wasn’t just relieved; he was drunk. He’d brought a flask of Scotch to calm his nerves. “And so there we were in the fifth row or something — engineers, managers, all of us — doing shots of Scotch after every segment of the demo. There were about five or six of us, and after each piece of the demo, the person who was responsible for that portion did a shot. When the finale came — and it worked along with everything before it, we all just drained the flask. It was the best demo any of us had ever seen. And the rest of the day turned out to be just a [expletive] for the entire iPhone team. We just spent the entire rest of the day drinking in the city. It was just a mess, but it was great.”

Fred Vogelstein is a contributing editor for Wired. His book “Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution” will be published in November.
Editor: Dean Robinson

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 7, 2013
An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to changes in Apple’s stock price when Steve Jobs ran Apple. The stock price would sometimes rise and sometimes fall after Apple product announcements. It is not the case that Apple product announcements used to routinely send its stock soaring.

5 Unique Ways To Invest In Your Employees

Typical employee benefits no longer differentiate a company as much as they used to. Companies are realizing they must offer unique advantages that other businesses don’t to keep top talent. Investing in your employees is not a new strategy, but there are different ways of creating loyalty among your top performers.




Here are five uncommon ways to create loyal, top-performing employees within your company:

1.     Thought Leadership
I’ve learned that one of the biggest employee motivators is a sense of pride in their work. If your teammates feel they’re truly the best at what they do, that goes a long way. Encouraging and investing in your employees can be both a big motivator and a great boon to the company. In a recent article, a colleague and I talked about the benefits that thought leadership can bring a company’s marketing.
However, we left out the fact that one of the biggest benefits is to the employee. The more an employee leads her space, the more opportunity and credibility she brings to her company. Look at your VPs or directors, and put a plan in place to share their expertise with the public. Sure, you could worry about them leaving to start their own ventures or join another company, but if they’re the right people for your business, it should make them more loyal to your company.

2.     Personal Branding
This ties into thought leadership nicely because you can build your employees’ brands as they become thought leaders. Maximize the value of the content they release or the awards they receive. Make sure everybody updates their LinkedIn and other social media profiles. Educate them on Google’s Author Rank so they increase their Web presence. As you increase their brands, you will see your company’s credibility skyrocket. Investing in the branding of your employees is almost as important as the overall branding of your company. When your partners or customers deal with your company, they deal with the people who lead it. A good personal brand will mean fewer trust barriers to overcome. Your staff will have more credibility and, at the same time, create opportunity for the company.

3.     Unique Culture Benefits
Normal benefits like 401(k)s and insurance are important, but it’s also important to provide benefits that set you apart. In an earlier post, I wrote about a variety of different unique job benefits. Ken DeGilio, CEO of LaunchMob Media, has his team “volunteer for One Brick Orlando doing social media trainings — and they’re usually in a bar!” Invest in events and benefits your employees will brag about to their friends. You will instill a sense of pride in the company and probably obtain a few more applications from talent — without spending a dime on recruiting.

4.     Personal Time Investments
This is the hardest investment, but it’s also the most valuable. When my co-founder and I started Influence and Co., we invested a lot of time in each employee. We made it a point to take employees out to lunch, include them in business trips related to their areas, and spend time with them outside work. We were able to create a trusting environment while helping all our employees develop into the leaders they are today. As a result, we’ve had no employees leave and have been able to sustain growth because we have great employees who can lead day-to-day operations while we focus on the big picture. It was a big investment, but also well worth the time.

5.     Network Expansion
Many leaders are scared of the thought that their employees could develop massive networks. Job opportunities will eventually come their way, and they could easily be lost. However, if you invest in the above benefits, there should be a trust created that makes that less of a worry.
Make it a point to continuously introduce your employees to influential people you know. A spread effect will occur; they’ll develop the relationship and often turn it into an opportunity you might have missed. They’ll also gain the confidence that naturally comes with having a bigger network, and they will have more resources to learn from. Outside of the content I read, the best information comes from conversations I have with other leaders in my network. It’s worth it to invest in giving introductions or services that will help your employees become “connected.”

You want your company to stand out from the dozens you’re competing against — to do that, you have to help your employees stand out. Your team really is your most valuable asset, and your team will keep adding value once they feel your loyalty is as strong as theirs.

John Hall is the CEO of Influence & Co., a company that assists individuals and brands in growing their influence through thought leadership and content marketing programs. Influence & Co.

தேடிச்  சோறு நிதந் தின்று

பல சின்னஞ் சிறு கதைகள் பேசி 

மனம் வாடி துன்பம் மிக உழன்று

பிறர் வாட பல செயல்கள் செய்து

நரை கூடி கிழப் பருவம் எய்தி

கொடும் கூற்றுக்கிரையென பின் மாயும்

பல வேடிக்கை மனிதரைப் போலே

நான்வீழ்வேன் என்றே நினைத்தாயோ

                          

                        _  மஹா கவி சுப்ரமணிய பாரதி

9 Qualities Of Truly Confident People

1. They take a stand not because they think they are always right… but because they are not afraid to be wrong.
Cocky and conceited people tend to take a position and then proclaim, bluster, and totally disregard differing opinions or points of view. They know they’re right – and they want (actually they need) you to know it too.
Their behavior isn’t a sign of confidence, though; it’s the hallmark of an intellectual bully.
Truly confident people don’t mind being proven wrong. They feel finding out what is right is a lot more important than being right. And when they’re wrong, they’re secure enough to back down graciously.
Truly confident people often admit they’re wrong or don’t have all the answers; intellectual bullies never do.
2. They listen ten times more than they speak.
Bragging is a mask for insecurity. Truly confident people are quiet and unassuming. They already know what they think; they want to know what you think.
So they ask open-ended questions that give other people the freedom to be thoughtful and introspective: They ask what you do, how you do it, what you like about it, what you learned from it… and what they should do if they find themselves in a similar situation.
Truly confident people realize they know a lot, but they wish they knew more… and they know the only way to learn more is to listen more.
3. They duck the spotlight so it shines on others.
Perhaps it’s true they did the bulk of the work. Perhaps they really did overcome the major obstacles. Perhaps it’s true they turned a collection of disparate individuals into an incredibly high performance team.
Truly confident people don’t care – at least they don’t show it. (Inside they’re proud, as well they should be.) Truly confident people don’t need the glory; they know what they’ve achieved.
They don’t need the validation of others, because true validation comes from within.
So they stand back and celebrate their accomplishments through others. They stand back and let others shine – a confidence boost that helps those people become truly confident, too.
4. They freely ask for help.
Many people feel asking for help is a sign of weakness; implicit in the request is a lack of knowledge, skill, or experience.
Confident people are secure enough to admit a weakness. So they often ask others for help, not only because they are secure enough to admit they need help but also because they know that when they seek help they pay the person they ask a huge compliment.
Saying, “Can you help me?” shows tremendous respect for that individual’s expertise and judgment. Otherwise you wouldn't ask.
5. They think, “Why not me?”
Many people feel they have to wait: To be promoted, to be hired, to be selected, to be chosen... like the old Hollywood cliché, to somehow be discovered.
Truly confident people know that access is almost universal. They can connect with almost anyone through social media. (Everyone you know knows someone you should know.) They know they can attract their own funding, create their own products, build their own relationships and networks, choose their own path – they can choose to follow whatever course they wish.
And very quietly, without calling attention to themselves, they go out and do it.
6. They don't put down other people.
Generally speaking, the people who like to gossip, who like to speak badly of others, do so because they hope by comparison to make themselves look better.
The only comparison a truly confident person makes is to the person she was yesterday – and to the person she hopes to someday become.
7. They aren’t afraid to look silly…
Running around in your underwear is certainly taking it to extremes… but when you’re truly confident, you don’t mind occasionally being in a situation where you aren't at your best.
(And oddly enough, people tend to respect you more when you do – not less.)
8. … And they own their mistakes.
Insecurity tends to breed artificiality; confidence breeds sincerity and honesty.
That’s why truly confident people admit their mistakes. They dine out on their screw-ups. They don’t mind serving as a cautionary tale. They don’t mind being a source of laughter – for others and for themselves.
When you’re truly confident, you don’t mind occasionally “looking bad.” You realize that that when you’re genuine and unpretentious, people don’t laugh at you.
They laugh with you.
9. They only seek approval from the people who really matter.
You say you have 10k Twitter followers? Swell. 20k Facebook friends? Cool. A professional and social network of hundreds or even thousands? That’s great.
But that also pales in comparison to earning the trust and respect of the few people in your life that truly matter.

When we earn their trust and respect, no matter where we go or what we try, we do it with true confidence – because we know the people who truly matter the most are truly behind us.

FICO Score elements

The five main FICO score elements are payment history (35 percent), amount owed (30 percent), length of credit history (15 percent), type of credit used (10 percent), and new credit (10 percent). 

Constructive Disagreement

The following 8 tips will help you, as a leader and team member, create an even stronger environment where constructive disagreement, leading to better decisions, is a vibrant part of your culture. : courtesy : peterstark.com

1. Clarify the organization’s vision and goals. If you are going to disagree with someone, ensure that you are clear on the vision and goals for the project, prior to disagreeing with them on what they are saying or a solution they are proposing.
2. Listen for understanding. Everyone has different experiences and expectations. Let your counterpart speak first. Listen for both content, feeling and understanding for what the counterpart is communicating and from what is their point of reference.
3. Ask questions to ensure understanding. Before you state your beliefs, ask a question or two to ensure you do understand your counterpart’s point of view. Providing a recommendation to resolve the difference without true understanding is leadership malpractice. Last, when you feel your level of emotion rising, almost always, you will be better off asking a question versus telling someone why they are not right.
4. Change your goals from “being right” to finding a solution that will work. When disagreements occur, egos take over and both counterparts can develop a need to be right. The minute you think you are right, you are also indirectly saying that you are smarter than your counterpart or the team. If you are focused on the goal of resolving the disagreement versus “being right,” there may be multiple solutions that will work.
5. Let go of the past. When there is a disagreement, some people are prone to focus on what happened in the past relationship versus resolving the difference being discussed at the moment. Being willing to forgive or forget will help you to stay focused on the current disagreement.
6. Be motivated to learn. If two people think identically, there would be no need for the second person to be involved in making the decision. When two people think differently and/or have different experiences, there is an opportunity to learn from each other and make an even better decision.
7. Pick your battles wisely. There are some disagreements that are not worth the time to disagree or the fallout that may occur. In certain situations, it may be in your best interests to end the conversation with, “I am not sure I agree with your perspective but I feel that I now have a better understanding of why you feel the way you do. In this discussion, I think it is ok to agree to disagree. I know we will make it work. Thanks for talking to me.”
8. Thank the people who disagree with you. There is an opportunity to have an even stronger relationship and a more successful team with people who do not always think alike. If people have the guts to disagree with you, indirectly, they are helping you to become a better leader. Thank the people who are willing to speak up with an alternative opinion.

Don’t shy away from disagreement. When lead correctly, diversity of opinion can bring out valuable solutions to problems, which you otherwise may have not known existed.

How to Lower Blood Sugar Naturally

How to Lower Blood Sugar Naturally

By Laurie Sanchez, Lifescript Staff Writer

Published May 07, 2013

It’s the Holy Grail for people with diabetes – checking your blood sugar and seeing the numbers right in line. Can lifestyle changes help? Yes, says Jill Weisenberger, Lifescript’s nutrition expert, and other top diabetes doctors. Check out these 10 tips to learn how to lower your blood sugar naturally...

If you have diabetes, lowering blood sugar isn’t just a short-term goal: Doctors believe that it consistently helps prevent or delay diabetes complications, including kidney, eye and nerve diseases, such as diabetic peripheral neuropathy.

Most of these diseases require 10 or more years to develop, but “it's still worth aggressively managing blood sugar levels to slow the onset of complications,” says Edward Geehr, M.D., Lifescript Chief Medical Officer.

Here are 10 tips to keep your readings on target:

1. Spread out your meals.
“I always tell my patients to spread their food out over the day, keeping carbohydrates consistent,” says Jill Weisenberger, M.S., R.D., C.D.E., and Lifescript’s nutrition expert. “Don’t eat small meals so you can save up for a big dinner.”Avoid fasting or skipping meals, even on weekends or other days when your schedule is hectic. It’ll give your body enough time to regulate blood sugar levels and keep them even.

How many carbs per meal are ideal?

“It’s tailored to each individual,” says Weisenberger, who factors in medication, hormones and other key information for each patient.

A typical starting point is 45 grams per meal for women and 60 grams for men (15 grams per snack). From there, make adjustments according to your blood glucose readings. 

2. Eat more food with resistant starch.
Resistant starch — found in some potatoes and some beans — bypasses the small intestine, gets metabolized by the good bacteria and then behaves as dietary fiber in the large intestine, Weisenberger says.“Even after your next meal, your blood sugar will be lower,” she says. “It’s called the ‘second-meal effect.’”

You’ll find it in a potato that has been baked and then cooled, but not in a warm potato. So a half-cup of potato salad will bring on better blood sugar readings than the same amount of warm mashed potatoes.

Black and kidney beans also have natural resistant starch.

3. Bring on the beans.
Can something as simple and inexpensive as beans really help with diabetes control?

Yes, according to the American Diabetes Association (ADA). Beans digest slowly, resulting in only a small rise in blood glucose levels. Several studies have shown that eating 1-1/2 to 2-1/2 cups of cooked beans daily improves diabetes control.

Beans also are an excellent source of folate, which is linked to a lower risk of cardiovascular disease, a common diabetes complication. Eating 1-3 cups of cooked beans a day will lower total cholesterol 5%-19%.Sneak beans in soups and salads, or eat them as a side dish.

But introduce them gradually into your diet, the ADA says. Chew thoroughly, drink plenty of liquids to aid digestion and take enzyme products such as “Beano” to avoid gastrointestinal distress.

For convenience, go for canned beans, which require less preparation time and are as healthy as dried.

4. Cook up cactus.
The paddle-shaped nopal cactus (also known as “prickly pear”) slows carbohydrate absorption and lowers post-meal blood glucose readings in people with type 2 diabetes, according to some studies. In Mexico, nopal is used for treating the disease.

According to a 2007 article in the journal Diabetes Care, the cactus is very high in soluable fiber, and, when eaten with other foods, slows the rate at which sugar from the meal enters the bloodstream.

Nopal, popular in central Mexico, is boiled, grilled, fried or mashed and added to soups and stews.It’s available in supplements, but be careful: Some people experience gastrointestinal distress, and it hasn’t been studied extensively in the U.S. as an oral extract. Always talk to your doctor before trying this or any other supplement.

5. Get more sleep.
Poor or limited sleep affects body chemistry and getting more shut-eye helps with blood sugar control, Weisenberger says.

People who get fewer than 6 hours a night consistently are 4.5 times more likely to get abnormal blood sugar readings than those who slept longer, according to a study by the University at Buffalo, N.Y. Adults typically need 7-9 hours a night.

Lack of sleep is also linked with other health conditions, including heart disease, stroke and cancer.

More than a third of people with type 2 diabetes have obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), where a collapsed airway causes a person to repeatedly stop breathing during sleep, according to James Herdegen, M.D., director for Sleep and Ventilatory Disorders at the University of Illinois in Chicago.“Studies have demonstrated that type 2 diabetics who also suffer from OSA can dramatically reduce their glucose levels by getting treatment,” he says.

OSA can be treated with a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP), a mask worn during sleep that sends air through the airway to keep it from collapsing.

Check out more sleep disorders here.

6. Lose a little weight.
Carrying around those extra pounds causes insulin resistance, keeping the blood sugar lowering hormone from working.

Your weight-loss goals don’t have to be enormous either, Weisenberger says. Some of her patients have seen improvements in blood glucose readings with only a 5-pound loss.

7. Manage stress.
When you’re stressed out, your body creates a lot of stored energy – glucose and fat – so cells can use it when called into action.

In diabetics, this extra energy doesn't make it to the cells, so glucose piles up in the blood and results in high readings, according to the ADA.

How can you burn off tension?Yoga and meditation have helped lower blood sugar levels in her patients, Weisenberger says.

The ADA also recommends creating your own stress-relieving routines: talking with a supportive friend, taking a warm bath or shower, watching an enjoyable movie, listening to music or taking a walk.

8. Get moving.
Exercise normalizes blood glucose in people with type 2 diabetes (but not type 1).

“In type 2, exercise helps improve insulin resistance,” says James Beckerman, a Portland, Oregon cardiologist. “The end result is lower blood sugars.”

But exercise is important for both types because it helps prevent heart attack, stroke or diminished blood flow to the legs.

Because exercise can immediately reduce blood sugar levels in type 2 diabetics, work with your health care team to determine the right amount of activity and timing for insulin.

A combination of resistance and aerobic exercise may be the most beneficial, Dr. Beckerman says.9. Fidget more.
That’s right. It’s OK if you can’t sit still.

Mayo Clinic researchers studied how thin people burn calories and found that they have more “spurts” of daily activity, such as fidgeting, than heavier people. Just how much? Up to 350 more calories per day.

Add these short bursts of activity to your daily routine: 

• Park your car at the back of the lot and walk to the store’s door. 
• Return your grocery shopping cart to the supermarket door. 
• Walk to your neighbor’s house instead of calling her.
• Walk your outgoing mail to a farther mailbox.
• Do some sit-ups or push-ups during TV commercials.

10. Eat breakfast.
We’ve all heard that breakfast is the day’s most important meal, and this is especially true for those who have diabetes. After fasting 8-12 hours, your body needs food to balance blood sugar levels and injected insulin from the previous night.

Besides, eating breakfast can help overweight people with type 2 diabetes shed extra pounds.Of the 4,000 participants In the National Weight Control Registry who maintained at least a 30-pound weight loss for about 5.5 years, almost all said they ate breakfast daily.

So what’s the best breakfast? One with carbohydrate, protein and fiber, according to the ADA.

Good options are cereal or an English muffin, low-fat milk or yogurt and fruit. (Save high-fat foods, such as bacon, sausage and eggs, for special occasions.)

And think beyond the breakfast box: Leftover chicken breast with fruit is just fine too, the ADA says.

What if you're not usually hungry for breakfast? Then make your previous night’s meal smaller, so you’ll wake up hungry, the ADA says. It will spread your carbohydrates more evenly throughout the day, leading to better blood-sugar control.

For more information, visit our Diabetes Health Center.

Henry Ford's Experiment to Build a Better Worker

Henry Ford's Experiment to Build a Better Worker
By RICHARD SNOW,  WSJ 05/09/13

Early in 1914 Henry Ford, spurred by a combination of wanting to cut down the high turnover in his workforce and what seems to have been genuine altruism, announced that henceforth the base wage in his factory would be five dollars a day. This at a stroke doubled the prevailing salary for industrial work, and it caused a sensation.


Henry Ford posed in an early model at his plant in Detroit, in 1900.

.But Ford company workers discovered that achieving their five-dollar day came with some rigid stipulations. To qualify for his doubled salary, the worker had to be thrifty and continent. He had to keep his home neat and his children healthy, and, if he were below the age of twenty-two, to be married.

Book Excerpt

From the forthcoming book "I Invented the Modern Age: The Rise of Henry Ford" by Richard Snow.

.The job of ensuring such behavior went to John Lee. He was in charge of what today goes under the pallid name of "human resources," and was one of the very few of Ford's high executives who was universally liked.

Lee put out a booklet called Helpful Hints and Advice to Employees, which opened by declaring a "sole and simple" purpose that was far from simple. It was "to better the financial and moral standing of each employee and those of his household; to instill men with courage and a desire for health, happiness, and prosperity. To give father and mother sufficient for present and future; to provide for families in sickness, in health and in old age and to take away fear and worry. To make a well rounded life and not a mere struggle for existence to men and their families, and to implant in the heart of every individual the wholesome desire to Help the Other Fellow, whenever he comes across your path, to the extent of your ability."

This irreproachable aim was advanced by investigators for the newly formed Sociological Department who brought their questionnaires to the home of every Ford employee. The agents weren't mere busybodies. They'd been trained to offer useful advice on hygiene and on how to manage household finances. Behind them stood the Ford legal department, whose lawyers would help, free, with everything from buying a house to becoming an American citizen. Should an employee get sick or be injured, the company maintained a full-time staff of 10 doctors and 100 nurses.

The agents, initially recruited from among Ford's white-collar workers, soon grew to a force 200 strong. Its members had to assess some 13,000 people, and do it quickly. Naturally they met resistance, from newly arrived Russians, for instance, whose memories of the czar's secret police were all too fresh, and from the occasional descendant of an original settler whose family had been in Detroit for generations and who didn't care to have some company hireling tell him how to live like a decent American.

For the most part, though, the workers took the intrusion into their lives philosophically. A few nosy questions were a minor ordeal if they opened the door to the highest-paying job in the industry.

William Knudsen, Ford's immensely capable lieutenant, who by now was busy sowing branch assembly plants across the nation, opposed the plan. He told his biographer that "as he saw it, the men were entitled to the money and, having earned it, it was theirs to spend without answering the snooping questions of investigators."

Simon & Schuster

.Mr. Knudsen was greatly amused to learn about a boardinghouse close to the factory on Manchester Avenue where 11 young Ford workmen lived. None of them was married, but whenever an agent stopped by, the man he was visiting would borrow the generous-spirited landlady and present her as his wife. Fortunately, said Mr. Knudsen, the social workers never called on all 11 at the same time.

One stipulation of the new mandate was that a Ford worker needed permission from a Ford executive if he wanted to get his own automobile. Mr. Knudsen was in Mr. Lee's office when an employee came in and said, "Mr. Lee, I would like to buy a car."

"Got any money?"

"I have seven hundred dollars."

"Do you have a family?"

"Yes, a wife and four children."

"Is the furniture paid for?"

"Yes."

"Have you any insurance?"
"Yes."

"All right, you can buy a car."

"Thanks, Mr. Lee." On his way out the door the man turned and said, "Oh, by the way, Mr. Lee, my wife is going to have another baby. I'm going to buy a Buick."

The occasional worker was openly defiant. When asked if he had any savings, one man told the investigator that he had invested his earnings "in houses and lots." When the skeptical agent pressed him for details, the man explained he'd meant "whorehouses and lots of whiskey."

On the other hand, there was Joe, who had come from a peasant life in Russia with his wife and six children.

F.W. Andrews, one of the Ford investigators (they were later to be given the less provocative title of "advisors"), told his story. "Life was an uphill struggle for Joe since landing in America," Mr. Andrews wrote. But he was willing to work, and work hard, digging sewers and farming, making his way to Detroit where "for five long months he tramped in the 'Army of the Unemployed'—always handicapped by his meager knowledge of the English language, and unable to find anything to do." Joe's wife "worked with the washtub and the scrubbing brush when such work could be found."

Joe landed a job at Ford, and that is when Mr. Andrews entered his life, to find him living in "an old, tumbled down, one and a half story frame house." Joe and his family were in "one half of the attic consisting of three rooms, which were so low that a person of medium height could not stand erect—a filthy, foul-smelling home." It contained "two dirty beds…a ragged filthy rug, a rickety table, and two bottomless chairs (the children standing up at the table to eat)." The family owed money to their landlord, to the butcher, to the grocer. The eldest daughter had gone to a charity hospital the week before. Mr. Andrews said the remainder of the family "were half clad, pale, and hungry looking."

Mr. Andrews at once got the pay office to issue Joe's wages daily instead of every two weeks. He secured a $50 loan, and such was the Sociological Department's seriousness of purpose then that Mr. Andrews, not Joe, borrowed the money. Mr. Andrews paid the butcher and the landlord, rented a cottage, and filled it with cheap but sound new furniture, new clothes, and, he said, "a liberal supply of soap."

Then the messianic moment. Mr. Andrews "had their dirty, old, junk furniture loaded on a dray and under cover of night moved them to their new home. This load of rubbish was heaped on a pile in the backyard, and a torch was applied and it went up in smoke.

"There upon the ashes of what had been their earthly possessions, this Russian peasant and his wife, with tears streaming down their faces, expressed their gratitude to Henry Ford, the Ford Motor F -0.46%Company, and all those who had been instrumental in bringing about this marvelous change in their lives."

Were those tears only of gratitude as Joe watched this strange pyre of his family's old life?

Today the Sociological Department might seem the essence of suffocating paternalism, and many felt it so even at the time. Certainly no other big industrial operation had anything like it. But with its medical and legal services, and the English language school it ran for the company's thousands of immigrant workers, the department appears to have done more good than harm. In 1914 the average Ford worker had $207.10 in savings. For those who stuck with the company during the next five years, the average had risen to $2,171.14.

The reformer Ida Tarbell went to Highland Park planning to expose the oppressive Ford system. Instead she wrote, "I don't care what you call it—philanthropy, paternalism, autocracy—the results which are being obtained are worth all you can set against them, and the errors in the plan will provoke their own remedies."

Copyright © 2013 by Richard Snow. From the forthcoming book "I Invented the Modern Age: The Rise of Henry Ford" by Richard Snow to be published by Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc. Printed by permission.

A version of this article appeared May 10, 2013, on page B1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Henry Ford's Experiment To Build a Better Worker.

Great Quotes

Great quotes inspire us to change, to grow, and to become our best selves. I researched thousands of quotes from successful leaders for my last book, to capture one for each chapter, covering 11 simple concepts to become a better leader. My recent LinkedIn post explaining the 11 concepts became the 2nd most read article in LinkedIn history (at 1.3 million views!) So, I'm sharing my favorite quotes here- those which inspired me enough that I published them in the book, along with the runners up. Here are my 25 favorite likeable leadership quotes. I hope they inspire you as much as they have inspired me:

Listening

1) "When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen." - Ernest Hemingway

2) "The most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and be understood. The best way to understand people is to listen to them." - Ralph Nichols

Storytelling

3) "Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today." -Robert McKee

4) "If you tell me, it’s an essay. If you show me, it’s a story." —Barbara Greene

Authenticity

5) "I had no idea that being your authentic self could make me as rich as I've become. If I had, I'd have done it a lot earlier." -Oprah Winfrey

6) "Authenticity is the alignment of head, mouth, heart, and feet - thinking, saying, feeling, and doing the same thing - consistently. This builds trust, and followers love leaders they can trust." -Lance Secretan

Transparency

7) "As a small businessperson, you have no greater leverage than the truth." -John Whittier

8) "There is no persuasiveness more effectual than the transparency of a single heart, of a sincere life." -Joseph Berber Lightfoot 

Team Playing

9) "Individuals play the game, but teams beat the odds." -SEAL Team Saying

10) "Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much." - Helen Keller

Responsiveness

11) "Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it." -Charles Swindoll

12) '"Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning." - Bill Gates

Adaptability

13) "When you're finished changing, you're finished." -Ben Franklin

14) "It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." –Charles Darwin

Passion

15) "The only way to do great work is to love the work you do." -Steve Jobs

16) "I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious." -Albert Einstein

Surprise and Delight

17) "A true leader always keeps an element of surprise up his sleeve, which others cannot grasp but which keeps his public excited and breathless." -Charles de Gaulle

18) “Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.” - Boris Pasternak

Simplicity

19) "Less isn't more; just enough is more." -Milton Glaser

20) “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” -Leonardo daVinci

Gratefulness

21) "I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder." -Gilbert K Chesterton

22) "The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude." -Friedrich Nietzsche

Leadership

23) “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” — Peter F. Drucker

24) "If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader." —John Quincy Adams

25) "Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other." —John F. Kennedy