R&D means to know as much as possible about REAL WORLD customer needs (Market-analysis).
R&D means to develop products that fulfill customers needs the best possible.
R&D means to do research to find the best existing technical means for the product and for the production-process.
R&D means to do deeper research to invent better technical means or even new products or new means for the production process. The latter is the „work“ of visionists. Visionists can be either persons in the company, even a single customer can have good ideas.
Market-Research, Marketing, engineers and designers should works together from the very beginning to prevent dead-end development.
Early controlling prevents that engineers and designers develop products that fulfill perhaps customers needs, but are too expensive for being accepted on the market or will not be too expensive for the enterprise and lead to economical losses.
All these and even more departments have to work in a balanced way to make a successfully product and holding an enterprise at life.
If any of these departments gets too much power over a certain time this tight cooperation will not work and puts the company in potential danger.
the industrial history is full of examples for catastrophic unbalanced cooperation and decisions.
apple had to face this several times.
Steve Jobs was a visionist, but for a certain time he did not respect economical needs. And his visions were to a certain part just not able to be realized because the technical status of that time did NOT allow this to realize. One example was the „newton“ project and product.
He did mostly perfect marketing, but for a certain time he did not and apple‘s products did not meet customers interest Nor fulfill the overdone primises of apple‘s marketing.
He got fired and was replaced by someone who did his job even worse.
when Steven Jobs came back he was NO more the old Steve Jobs, because he had learned his lesson.
He changed things radically, not only the mistakes of his successor, but his own mistakes as well.
At that moment the young Joni Ive did a perfect job. He was extremely productive and had a sense for marketing as well. Evidently he was even able to cooperate with the engineers in a successful way.
There exists a bad psychological phenomenon which is a danger for extremely successful people who get more and more power:
many of them are tempted to start believing they are like GOD and will never ever fail and that they will never ever do wrong decisions.
So they lose self-critical potential and - which is even more dangerous - they abuse their power to supress (expression of) critical thoughts even of absolutely loyal people. They become little dictators and instead of a symbiotic cooperation the departments start to play offense and (mostly) defense. People have fear to lose their job.
Joni Ive was very important for apple and did a good job.
But if you have a psychological look at his videos praising himself often enough and more and more presenting ridiculous changes as revolutions you understand that this is not only overdone marketing, but someone who loses more and more contact with reality because nobody around him has the balls to put his decisions in question in a loyal way. I am pretty sure Joni Ive had already eliminated all people that did not praise him and did not think he is Godfather himself. There was evidence that things went worse…
That was the time when Joni Ive HIMSELF killed his own work
because he made exactly the same mistake like Steve Jobs did before he got fired by his own company.
YES, history repeats himself often enough, especially on the basis of psychological weaknesses of people….
what can everybody who is a decision-maker learn from this?
NEVER lose self-critical potential and never abuse power to intimidate people trying to help you with critical statements. Just the opposite: Be THANKFUL to those who are critical in a constructive way and who are regarding critical thoughts as a very important mean to get things right.
Now, IMHO Joni Ive got fired because he did commit the same mistakes that Steve Jobs did when he got fired as well.
Maybe Joni Ive will learn his lesson as well - but I think he will not.
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You said what I should have. Everything as to be in some sort of balance. It's likely the last 10 years at Apple, they weren't.
