APRIL 2018
ISSUE 32
FEATURING
The World’s 20 Most Innovative Companies of 2018 AND
Why Apple is the World’s Most Innovative Company
These Mesmerizing Images Of Athletes Reinvent Sports Photography
INSIDE THE PIXAR BRAINTRUST
From left: Catmull, Steve Jobs, and John Lasseter ran Pixar together for over two decades. Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks during the Apple World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco
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CONTENTS APRIL 2018
4 INSIDE THE PIXAR BRAINTRUST In this exclusive excerpt from Creativity, Inc., Ed Catmull unveils one of his key management tools--the Pixar braintrust, which has helped the animation powerhouse score 14 box office hits in a row. (Reprinted from 2014) by Ed Catmull
10 I HAVE A SECRET, ADD-LESS
INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT, AND IT’S PURE BLISS I don’t know how I hit the jackpot, but I’d pay to keep it that way. by Mark Wilson
12 THE WORLD’S 20 MOST
INNOVATIVE COMPANIES
The 2018 edition of the World’s Most Innovative Companies spans more than 350 enterprises across 36 categories, from the world’s most valuable firm and its continuing transformation of consumer electronics to a small outfit selling natural gum to preserve rainforests. We hope you’re as inspired learning from these businesses as we were in selecting them.
14 WHY APPLE IS THE WORLD’S
MOST INNOVATIVE COMPANY
In this exclusive interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook, he explains the culture and approach that led to iPhone X, Air Pods, Apple Watch 3, and HomePod. by Robert Safian
18 THESE MESMERIZING IMAGES OF ATHLETES REINVENT SPORTS PHOTOGRAPHY
You need a keen artistic eye, 60 hours of work, and endless patience to create these stunning composites. by Jesus Diaz
APRIL 2018 FASTCOMPANY.COM 3
INSIDE THE PIXAR BRAIN 4 FASTCOMPANY.COM APRIL 2018
A
hallmark of a healthy creative culture is that its people feel free to share ideas, opinions, and criticisms. Our decision making is better when we draw on the collective knowledge and unvarnished opinions of the group. Candor is the key to collaborating effectively. Lack of candor leads to dysfunctional environments. So how can a manager ensure that his or her working group, department, or company embraces candor? By putting mechanisms in place that explicitly say it is valuable. One of Pixar’s key mechanisms is the Braintrust, which we rely on to push us toward excellence and to root out mediocrity. It is our primary delivery system for straight talk. The Braintrust meets every few months or so to assess each movie we’re making. Its premise is simple: Put smart, passionate people in a room together, charge them with identifying and solving problems, and encourage them to be candid. The Braintrust is not foolproof, but when we get it right, the results are phenomenal. While I attend and participate in almost all Braintrust meetings, I see my primary role as making sure that the compact upon which the meetings are based is protected and upheld. This part of our job is never done because you can’t totally eliminate the blocks to candor. The fear of saying something stupid and looking bad, of offending someone or being intimidated, of retaliating or being retaliated against-they all have a way of reasserting themselves. And when they do, you must address them squarely. The Braintrust developed organically out of the rare working relationship among the five men who led and edited the production of Toy Story--John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, Lee Unkrich, and Joe Ranft. From Pixar’s earliest days, this quintet gave us a solid model of a highly functional working group. They were funny, focused, smart, and relentlessly candid when arguing with each other. Most crucially, they never allowed themselves to be thwarted by the kinds of structural or personal issues that can render meaningful communication in a group impossible. After the release of Toy Story 2 [when the Braintrust helped turn around a film in danger of foundering], the Braintrust evolved from a tight, well-defined group working on a single film into a larger, more fluid group. Over the years, its ranks have grown to include a variety of people--directors, writers, and heads of story-whose only requirement is that they display a knack for storytelling. The one thing that has never changed is the demand for candor. Candor could not be more crucial to our creative process. Why? Because early on, all of our movies suck. That’s a blunt assessment, I know, but I choose that phrasing because saying it in a softer way fails to convey how bad the first versions really are. I’m not trying to be modest or self-effacing. Pixar films are not good at first, and our job is to make them so-to go, as I say, “from suck to not-suck.”
Think about how easy it would be for a movie about talking toys to feel derivative, sappy, or overtly merchandise driven. Think about how off-putting a movie about rats preparing food could be, or how risky it must’ve seemed to start WALL-E with 39 dialogue-free minutes. We dare to attempt these stories, but we don’t get them right on the first pass. This is as it should be. Creativity has to start somewhere, and we are true believers in the power of bracing, candid feedback and the iterative process--reworking, reworking, and reworking again, until a flawed story finds its through line or a hollow character finds its soul.
“ ”
NTRUST
BY ED CATMULL
A basic truth: people who take on complicated creative projects become lost.
To understand why the Braintrust is so central to Pixar, you have to start with a basic truth: People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process. It is the nature of things--in order to create, you must internalize and almost become the project for a while, and that near-fusing with the project is an essential part of its emergence. But it is also confusing. Where once a movie’s writer/director had perspective, he or she loses it. Where once he or she could see a forest, now there are only trees. How do you get a director to address a problem he or she cannot see? The answer depends, of course, on the situation. The director may be right about the potential impact of his central idea, but maybe he simply hasn’t set it up well enough for the Braintrust. Maybe he doesn’t realize that much of what he thinks is visible on-screen is only visible in his own head. Or maybe the ideas presented in the reels he shows the Braintrust won’t ever work, and the only path forward is to blow something up or start over. No matter what, the process of coming to clarity takes patience and candor. At Pixar, we try to create an environment where people want to hear each other’s notes (even when those notes are challenging) and where everyone has a vested interest in one another’s success. We give our filmmakers both freedom and responsibility. For example, we believe that the most promising stories are not assigned to filmmakers but emerge from within. With few exceptions, our directors make movies they have conceived of and are burning to make. Then, because we know that this passion will at some point blind them to their movie’s inevitable problems, we offer them the counsel of the Braintrust. You may be thinking, How is the Braintrust different from any other feedback mechanism? APRIL 2018 FASTCOMPANY.COM 5
WThere are two key differences, as I see it. The first is that the Braintrust is made up of people with a deep understanding of storytelling, who usually have been through the process themselves. While the directors welcome critiques from many sources, they particularly prize feedback from fellow storytellers. The second difference is that the Braintrust has no authority. The director does not have to follow any of the specific suggestions. After a Braintrust meeting, it is up to him or her to figure out how to address the feedback. Giving the Braintrust no power to mandate solutions affects the dynamics of the group in ways I believe are essential. While problems in a film are fairly easy to identify, the sources of those problems are often extraordinarily difficult to assess. A mystifying plot twist or a less-than-credible change of heart in our main character is often caused by subtle, underlying issues elsewhere in the story. Think of it as a patient complaining of knee pain that stems from his fallen arches. If you operated on the knee, it wouldn’t just fail to alleviate the pain, it could easily compound it. To alleviate the pain, you have to identify and deal with the root of the problem. The Braintrust’s notes, then, are intended to bring the true causes of problems to the surface--not to demand a specific remedy. We don’t want the Braintrust to solve a director’s problem because we believe that, in all likelihood, our solution won’t be as good as the one the director and his or her creative team comes up with. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t get tough sometimes. Naturally, every director would prefer to be told that his film is a masterpiece. But because of the way the Braintrust is structured, the pain of being told that flaws are apparent or revisions are needed is minimized. The film--not the filmmaker--is under the microscope. This principle eludes most people, but it is critical: You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when challenged. Andrew Stanton, who has been on the giving or the receiving end of almost every Braintrust meeting we’ve had, likes to say that if Pixar were a hospital and the movies its patients, then the Braintrust is made up of trusted doctors. It’s important to remember that the movie’s director and producer are “doctors” too. It’s as if they’ve gathered a panel of consulting experts to help find an accurate diagnosis for an extremely confounding case. But ultimately, it’s the filmmakers, and no one else, who will make the final decisions about the wisest course of treatment. To get a clearer sense of how candor is delivered at Pixar, I want to take you inside a Braintrust meeting. This one followed an early screening of a Pete Docter film, then known as The Untitled Pixar Movie That Takes You Inside the Mind. [It’s now called Inside Out.] As Braintrusts go, this was a crowded one,
with about 20 people at the table and 15 more in chairs against the walls. Everyone grabbed plates of food on the way in and, after a little small talk, got down to business. Earlier, before the screening, Pete had described what they’d come up with so far. “What’s inside the mind?” he asked his colleagues. “Your emotions--and we’ve worked really hard to make these characters look the way those emotions feel. We have our main character, an emotion called Joy, who is effervescent. She literally glows when she’s excited. Then we have Fear. He thinks of himself as confident and suave, but he’s a little raw nerve and tends to freak out. The other characters are Anger, Sadness--her shape is inspired by teardrops--and Disgust, who basically turns up her nose at everything. And all these guys work at what we call Headquarters.”
“”
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I understand that you want to keep this simple and relatable, but I think we need something that your audience can get a little more invested in.
That got a laugh, as did many scenes in the 10-minute preview that followed. Everyone agreed that the movie had the potential to be, like Pete’s previous film Up, among our most original and affecting. But there seemed to be a consensus that one key scene--an argument between two characters about why certain memories fade while others burn bright forever--was too minor to sufficiently connect audiences to the film’s profound ideas. Midway down the table, Brad Bird shifted in his chair. Brad joined Pixar in 2000, after having written and directed The Iron Giant at Warner Bros. His first movie for us was The Incredibles, which opened in 2004. Brad is a born rebel who fights against creative conformity in any guise. So it was no surprise that he was among the first to articulate his worries. “I understand that you want to keep this simple and relatable,” he told Pete, “but I think we need something that your audience can get a little more invested in.” Andrew Stanton spoke next. Andrew is fond of saying that people need to be wrong as fast as they can. In a battle, if you’re faced with two hills and you’re unsure which one to attack, he says, the right course of action is to hurry up and choose. If you find out it’s the wrong hill, turn around and attack the other one. Now he seemed to be suggesting that Pete and his team had stormed the wrong hill. “I think you need to spend more time settling on the rules of your imagined world,” he said.
APRIL 2018 FASTCOMPANY.COM 7
TOY STORY
Released: 1995 Box-office total: $390 million
A BUG’S LIFE
Released: 1998 Box-office total: $362 million
TOY STORY 2
Released: 1999 Box-office total: $513 million
MONSTERS, INC.
Released: 2001 Box-office total: $576 million
FINDING NEMO
Released: 2003 Box-office total: $937 million
THE INCREDIBLES
Released: 2004 Box-office total: $632 million
CARS
Released: 2006 Box-office total: $462 million
RATATOUILLE
Released: 2007 Box-office total: $620 million
WALL-E
Released: 2008 Box-office total: $533 million
UP
Released: 2009 Box-office total: $735 million
TOY STORY 3
Released: 2010 Box-office total: $1.06 billion
CARS 2
Released: 2011 Box-office total: $561 million
BRAVE
Released: 2012 Box-office total: $539 million
MONSTERS UNIVERSITY Released: 2013 Box-office total: $745 million
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Every Pixar movie has its own rules that viewers have to accept, understand, and enjoy understanding. The voices of the toys in the Toy Story films, for example, are never audible to humans. The rats in Ratatouille walk on four paws, like normal vermin, except for Remy, our star, whose upright posture sets him apart. In Pete’s film, one of the rules--at least at this point--was that memories (depicted as glowing glass globes) were stored in the brain by traveling through a maze of chutes into a kind of archive. When retrieved or remembered, they’d roll back down another tangle of chutes, like bowling balls being returned to bowlers at the alley.
“” “Pete, I want to give you a huge round of applause: this is a frickin’ big idea,” said bird.
That construct was elegant and effective, but Andrew suggested that another rule needed to be clarified: how memories and emotions change over time, as the brain gets older. This was the moment in the film, Andrew said, to establish some key themes. Listening to this, I remembered how in Toy Story 2, the addition of Wheezy helped establish the idea that damaged toys could be discarded, left to sit, unloved, on the shelf. Andrew felt there was a
similar opportunity here. “Pete, this movie is about the inevitability of change,” he said. “And of growing up.” This set Brad off. “A lot of us in this room have not grown up--and I mean that in the best way,” he said. “The conundrum is how to become mature and become reliable while at the same time preserving your childlike wonder. People have come up to me many times, as I’m sure has happened to many people in this room, and said, ‘Gee, I wish I could be creative like you. That would be something, to be able to draw.’ But I believe that everyone begins with the ability to draw. Kids are instinctively there. But a lot of them unlearn it. Or people tell them they can’t or it’s impractical. So yes, kids have to grow up, but maybe there’s a way to suggest that they could be better off if they held on to some of their childish ideas. “Pete, I want to give you a huge round of applause: This is a frickin’ big idea to try to make a movie about,” Brad continued, his voice full of affection. “I’ve said to you on previous films, ‘You’re trying to do a triple backflip into a gale force wind, and you’re mad at yourself for not sticking the landing. Like, it’s amazing you’re alive.’ This film is the same. So, huge round of applause.” Everyone clapped. Then Brad added, “And you’re in for a world of hurt.” An important corollary to the assertion that the Braintrust must be candid is that filmmakers must be ready to hear the truth; candor is only valuable if the person on the receiving end is open to it and willing, if necessary, to let go of things that don’t work. Jonas Rivera, the producer of Pete’s film, tries to make that painful process easier by “headlining” the main
points of a Braintrust session--distilling the many observations down to a digestible takeaway. Once this meeting wrapped up, this is what he did for Pete, ticking off the areas that seemed the most problematic, reminding him of the scenes that resonated most. “So what do we blow up?” Jonas asked. “And what do you love? Is what you loved about the film different now than it was when we started?” “The way the movie opens,” Pete responded, “I love.” Jonas raised his hand in a salute. “Okay, that’s the movie, then,” he said. “How we set up the story has to handshake with that.” “I agree,” Pete said. They were on their way.
“” “What do we blow up?” Rivera asked after the braintrust meeting. “What do you love?” The most productive Braintrust sessions explore myriad trains of thought, in a way that is additive, not competitive. Take WALL-E, which was known, early on, as Trash Planet. For a long time, that movie ended with our googly-eyed trash-compactor robot saving his beloved droid, EVE, from destruction in a Dumpster. But something about that end-
ing never quite felt right. We had countless discussions about it. The confusing thing was that the romantic plotline seemed right. Of course WALL-E would save EVE--he’d fallen in love with her the moment he saw her. In a sense, that was precisely the flaw. And it was Brad who pointed that out to Andrew in a Braintrust meeting. “You’ve denied your audience the moment they’ve been waiting for,” he said, “the moment where EVE throws away all her programming and goes all out to save WALL-E. Give it to them. The audience wants it.” As soon as Brad said that, it was like: Bing! Andrew went off and wrote an entirely new ending. Michael Arndt remembers it was Andrew, meanwhile, who gave a Braintrust note on Toy Story 3 that fundamentally altered the end of that movie’s second act. At that point in the film, Lotso, the pink teddy bear and mean-spirited leader of the day-care-center toys, is overthrown after the toys’ mutiny. But the mutiny wasn’t believable, because the impetus behind it didn’t ring true. “In that draft,” Michael told me, “I had Woody giving this big, heroic speech about what a mean guy Lotso was, and it changed everyone’s mind about Lotso. But in the Braintrust, Andrew said, ‘I don’t buy it. These toys aren’t stupid. They know Lotso isn’t a good guy. They’ve only aligned themselves with him because he’s the most powerful.’ “ This sparked a pitched discussion, until Michael hit on an analogy: If you think of Lotso as Stalin and the other toys as his cowering subjects, then Big Baby, the bald-headed doll with one droopy eye who acts as Lotso’s enforcer, was Stalin’s army. A fix began to emerge. “If you flip
the army, you get rid of Stalin,” Michael said. “So the question was, What can Woody do that will turn Big Baby’s sympathies against Lotso? That was the problem I faced.” The solution--revealing that Lotso’s duplicity had led Big Baby to be abandoned by his little girl owner--was all Michael’s, but he never would have found it without the Braintrust. You don’t have to work at Pixar to create a Braintrust. Every creative person can draft into service those around them who exhibit the right mixture of intelligence, insight, and grace. “You can and should make your own solution group,” says Andrew, who has made a point of doing this on a smaller scale, separate from the official Braintrust, on each of his films. “Here are the qualifications: The people you choose must (a) make you think smarter and (b) put lots of solutions on the table in a short amount of time. I don’t care who it is, the janitor or the intern or one of your most-trusted lieutenants: If they can help you do that, they should be at the table.” Believe me, you don’t want to be at a company where there is more candor in the hallways than in the rooms where fundamental ideas or policy are being hashed out. The best inoculation against this fate? Seek out people who are willing to level with you, and when you find them, hold them close. Excerpt reprinted from Creativity, Inc., by Ed Catmull with Amy Wallace. Copyright © 2014 by Edwin Catmull. Published by Random House, a division of Random House LLC.
APRIL 2018 FASTCOMPANY.COM 9
I HAVE A SECRET
AD-FREE INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT, And It’s Bliss BY MARK WILSON
I
want to tell you about a secret place. A magical place. A place called Instagram in 2010. People posted photos–of their pets, their food, their adventures–and you just flipped through them as an escape from everything terrible in your life. Crucially, there were no ads or attempts at monetization. It was just pure visual bliss. Only about two years ago did I learn that Instagram wasn’t still like this for most people. That’s because on my Instagram I don’t see ads. Even after upgrading my iPhone. Even after switching to Android. Even after Instagram got rid of the reverse chronological feed and added its self-destructing stories. I have all the new features, just none of the baggage that comes with them. When I realized that my experience was not common–and, in fact, that other people needed to squint through the ads to see posts–I figured it was because I wasn’t using Instagram hard enough. Maybe I was just an aging millennial not worth the effort of bra ads (I’ve heard from my female colleagues that there are a lot of bra ads). After all, I was still using Instagram in friends and family mode, and so I only followed a
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dozen people. As sweet as my ad-free Instagram was, the idea that I wasn’t even worth being targeted made me feel a bit lame–it coincided with the birth of my first child and a sudden penchant for dad jeans. So I challenged the algorithm by following celebrities, meme accounts, and even brands. Still, no ads. I think maybe I saw an ad or two, circa 2015? But nothing I could do as a user created ads on my feed. Eventually, I just forgot that my Instagram was different. After all, Instagram A/B tests everything on its service, just like Facebook. The most probable explanation is that I’ve hit the jackpot. I’m one of a lucky few who don’t see ads as some sort of control group, for now at least. Why question a blessing? (Instagram declined to comment on said blessing, anyway.)
In turn, I’ve begun to wonder, what would I pay for this experience? And would I pay to go ad-free on my other services, too? In many ways, and to many people, Instagram is sort of a perfect permutation of Facebook itself. And if it’s ads ruining Facebook, might we buy our way out? It’s been proposed by a lot of people. In fact, Sheryl Sandberg recently went on record with NBC saying, “We don’t have an opt-out [for ad targeting] at the highest level. That would be a paid product,” though she never detailed if Facebook would offer such a product, or what a subscription would cost. And Zuckerberg has stated pretty clearly just this month that he believes a free Facebook, driven by ads, is the only tool that can bring the service to everyone. Some analysis, however, helps us speculate. While Facebook doesn’t break out revenue specific to Instagram, the company does detail its revenue on Facebook itself. Facebook currently makes $26 per user, per quarter, in the U.S. and Canada as of Q4 2017. That rate is $7 higher than the same time last year, and about double what Facebook was making off users in 2016. Assumably, the per-user revenue for Instagram and WhatsApp is much lower than that, though, so I have little to no clue what I’d have to spend to go revenue-neutral on an Instagram feed. Would you or I pay $104/year, or $8.60/ month, for Facebook? Keep in mind, its revenue has been growing at an incredible rate –so to appease Wall Street, those prices might go up, too. Does that sound like a lot or a little? My mind oscillates back and forth. Given that
Spotify costs $10/month, and Netflix currently costs $11/month, I guess I’d fork over about $9 for Facebook, but I would certainly be grumpy about it. And I’d drop a few bucks to keep my ad-free Instagram feed if it came down to it, too. Though surely, that’s not so realistic for 2 billion other users that have adopted Facebook around the globe–which is really the problem with a hypothetical discussion like this, or wishfully thinking that Facebook would let us buy our way out of its data-tracking initiatives. Privacy should not be a privilege.
“ ” “” Would you or I pay $104/ year, or $8.60/month, for Facebook?
Amidst the Trump era on Twitter, and the Russian reckoning at Facebook, though, I realized something: Instagram has become my digital refuge. Other platforms were no longer a means to unwind on the couch, because they carried a perpetual burden of their own politics. Instagram remained the perfect bubble to tune it all out, a piece of the old internet, before we were ad-targeted and hot-taked to death.
I can confirm that social media without the ads really is an entirely different experience.
In the meantime, it may be of little solace, but I can confirm that social media without the ads really is an entirely different experience. Not simply because there is less visual noise vying for your attention (and your dollars), but because now, as we all come to terms with the consequences of deep user profiling, those targeted ads are the perfect, omnipresent reminder of everything we’ve given up to connect with our family and friends online: our privacy, and our democracy. APRIL 2018 FASTCOMPANY.COM 11
The World’s 20 Most Innovative Companies of 2018
APRIL 2018
12 FASTCOMPANY.COM APRIL 2018
01. Apple | For delivering the future today
02. Netflix | For mastering the
smallest screen 03. Square | For extending the benefits of banking 04. Tencent | For honoring content as king 05. Amazon | For becoming a larger-than-life presence 06. Patagonia | For growing its business every time it amplifies its social mission 07. CVS Health | For cleaning up the aisles 08. The Washington Post | For bringing Amazonian ambition to news 09. Spotify | For pointing fans toward new artists 10. NBA | For leading the leagues in technology 11. Marvel Studios | For forging the future of media 12. Instagram | For making people drool 13. Stitch Fix | For sizing up its customers 14. Space X | For putting the cosmos within reach 15. Walmart | For embracing its inner underdog 16. Bytedance | For nosing out the news 17. Reliance Jio | For putting India on the fast track 18. Nintendo | for changing the game— at home on the go, and beyond 19. Social Capital | For putting values into its ventures 20. Alive Cor | For knowing its user’s hearts APRIL 2018 FASTCOMPANY.COM 13
Why Apple Is The World’s Most Innovative Company BY ROBERT SAFIAN
T
he only things more impressive than Apple’s financial numbers are the products that generated them. For a company routinely slagged for not having had a hit since 2010’s iPad, Apple, which as of mid-January was valued at more than $900 billion, had a heckuva 2017: Its wireless AirPods became ubiquitous from Brooklyn to Boise, and can now be paired with the best-selling Apple Watch Series 3, which has GPS and cellular connectivity, for a meaningful, new consumer experience. Developers embraced ARKit, Apple’s augmented-reality framework, like nothing since 2008’s App Store (which paid out $26.5 billion last year). After a year of whining about what the new iPhone might offer, most skeptics were blown away by the iPhone X, with its facial recognition, camera quality, bezel-to-bezel screen, and new user interface. Now, HomePod, first announced last June, offers a fresh take on the intelligent speaker. These category-redefining products don’t just defy the adage that scale hampers agility and creativity–they obliterate it. During a January 10, 2018, conversation at the newly opened Apple Park (itself an impressive product launch), Apple CEO Tim Cook sat down with Fast Company to discuss the overarching philosophy behind Apple’s ever-evolving universe and what unites its ambitions and endeavors.
Fast Company: What makes a good year
for Apple? Is it the new hit products? The stock price? Tim Cook: Stock price is a result, not an achievement by itself. For me, it’s about products and people. Did we make the best product, and did we enrich people’s lives? If you’re doing both of those things–and obviously those things are incredibly connected because one leads to the other—then you have a good year.
FC: Do you look back at some years and say,
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Oh, that was a good year, that year wasn’t as good? TC: I’ve only had good years. No, seriously. Even when we were idling from a revenue
point of view–it was like $6 billion every year– those were some incredibly good years because you could begin to feel the pipeline getting better, and you could see it internally. Externally, people couldn’t see that. With the iPod, before it came out, we didn’t really know that it would become as big. But it was clear it was changing things in an incredibly good way. Of course, with the iPhone it was clear that that was a huge change, a category definer, but who would’ve thought [it would have impact] to the degree that it [did].
FC: We forget that the iPhone wasn’t imme-
diately embraced by everyone. TC: [People said] it could never work because it didn’t have a physical keyboard. With each of our products there’s that kind of story. Over the long haul, you just have to have faith that the strategy itself leads to [financial results] and not get distracted and focus on them. Because focusing on them doesn’t really do anything. It probably makes the results worse because you take your eye off what really matters.
FC: So what does matter? TC: It’s always products and people. The
question at the end of every year, or every month or every week or every day, is, “Did we make progress on that front?”
FC: Given the relentless pace of change in
the world, how do you prioritize what Apple is going to spend its time on, which things deserve attention and which things are distractions? TC: There is more noise in the world than change. One of my roles is to try to block the noise from the people who are really doing the work. That’s tougher and tougher in this environment. The priorities are about saying no to a bunch of great ideas. We can do more things than we used to do because we’re a bit bigger. But in the scheme of things versus our revenue, we’re doing very few things. I mean, you could put every product we’re making on this table, to put it in perspective. I doubt anybody that is
anywhere near our revenue could say that. You have to make sure that you’re focused on the thing that matters. And we do that fairly well. I worked at a company a while back, many years ago, where every hallway you go in, you would see their stock price being monitored. You will not find that here. And not because you can get it on your iPhone.
FC: Do the investment markets make inno-
vation harder? Or does Wall Street motivate change? TC: The truth is, it has little to no effect on us. But we are an outlier. More generally, if you look at America, the 90-day clock [measuring results by each fiscal quarter] is a negative. Why would you ever measure a business on 90 days when its investments are long term?
FC: And the payoff doesn’t necessarily hap-
pen on that kind of cadence. TC: No, of course not. If I were king for a day, that whole thing would change. But when I really get down to it, here, it affects a few of us because we have to do a quarterly call and so forth, but does it affect the company? No.
FC: So what compels you to wow consumers
year after year with new products? TC: What drives us is making products that give people the ability to do things they couldn’t do before. Take iPhone X, the portrait-lighting feature. This is something that you had to be a professional photographer with a certain setup to do in the past. Now, iPhone X is not a cheap product, but a lighting rig– these things were tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars. And an iPhone X does more than just take pictures. There are so many parts. With ARKit, we created something that essentially took the heavy lifting with [augmented reality] and put
it in the operating system, which empowers thousands of developers eventually to be able to build AR into their apps. Some will be very profound, life changing. There is no doubt about that in my mind.
FC: Sometimes Apple takes the lead, intro-
ducing unique features–Face ID, for instance. Other times you’re okay to follow, as long as you deliver what you feel is better, like HomePod, which is not the first home speaker. How do you decide when it’s okay to follow? TC: I wouldn’t say “follow.” I wouldn’t use that word because that implies we waited for somebody to see what they were doing. That’s actually not what’s happening. What’s happening if you look under the sheets, which we probably don’t let people do, is that we start projects years before they come out. You could take every one of our products–iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch–they weren’t the first, but they were the first modern one, right? In each case, if you look at when we started, I would guess that we started much before other people did, but we took our time to get it right. Because we don’t believe in using our customers as a laboratory. What we have that I think is unique is patience. We have patience to wait until something is great before we ship it.
FC: So this differentiation I’m trying to cre-
ate between Face ID on one end and HomePod on the other, you don’t see it that way. TC: I think about things from a core technology point of view. If you look at the core technology in each of our products, we had to start working on it years before the product shipped. With iPhone X, for example, if you look at the Bionic chip, we started working on that many years before it came out. Because we [design] our own silicon, it puts a level of discipline in our planning process. Now it also gives us an
incredible advantage from a product point of view, because we can do things that others can’t.
FC: In the magazine business, the issue
doesn’t ship when we’re done with it, it ships when we have to print it. Sometimes that enforced discipline is valuable in pushing people. On the one hand, you’re patient, but on the other, you have to set deadlines, to create a forcing function somehow. TC: You have to have a forcing function. For us, on the product side, we have to come up with our silicon requirements three, four-plus years in advance. So we’ve got things that we’re working on now that are way out in the 2020s. You also want to have the flexibility to go right up until the last minute so that you are continuing to explore and use the product and discover more things that you want to do. There has to be a balance. If we try to allow that kind of flexibility in the silicon piece, we’d never ship a product. [A product] is like a train–the train leaves the station, and if you have a great idea after that, it’s going on the next train. You’re not going to call this one back to the station. We have events, other things, that give us goals, shipping by a certain time. But ultimately the question is, Is the product great? Is it ready? And if it’s not, we delay.
FC: How do you factor in outsider opin-
ions? Some people complain, “Oh, Apple isn’t coming out with anything new,” and others will say, “Oh, there is so much new that we’ve reached Peak Apple.” TC: You’re grinning. We don’t have a tin ear. We definitely listen. But because we know what’s happening inside the company, we just have to find another channel to listen to and tune out the noise. APRIL 2018 FASTCOMPANY.COM 15
FC: What about critiques that you get from
consumers? TC: Customers are jewels. Every day I read a fair number of customer comments, and they vary widely. Some are writing positive things about a store experience, an employee who did an incredible job for them. Some are saying, “Hey, I want a feature that’s not in the product right now.” Some are saying this feature should work this way, some are saying they had a life-changing experience with our product. I can no longer read all of them, but I read a bunch of them, because it’s sort of like checking our blood pressure.
FC: Is there some pattern you’re looking for? TC: I tend to weight the ones that are most thoughtful. That doesn’t mean polite—I don’t mind people saying I’m ugly or whatever. It’s just, what level of thought is it? I care deeply about what users think.
FC: There’s a lot of talk right now at big tech companies about the unintended consequences of technological advances. How do you keep your ear open to those potential things without slowing down the machinery of change? TC: I’m very sensitive to that. Our products are all about the people who use them. What comes with that is trying to anticipate not only the great things that people can use your 16 FASTCOMPANY.COM APRIL 2018
products for but those things that might not be so good, and try to get out in front of those. We implemented something in iOS 11 where it detects if you’re in a car and will shut off your messages and notifications. That isn’t us playing Big Brother. That’s us giving you a tool to help you do the right thing. You can override it; you may be a passenger instead of the driver, and that’s okay. But we would like to try as many of those as possible so that we help people do the right thing. Back in the day, giving people the ability to buy music digitally. That was about doing the right thing in a simple and straightforward manner because at that time everybody was ripping music off. Essentially, music was becoming free. We really try to think through these things.
FC: Music has always been part of the
Apple brand. Apple Music has had a lot of user growth, but streaming is not a major moneymaker. Do you think about streaming as a potential stand-alone profit area, or is it important for other reasons? TC: Music is interesting because it inspires people. It motivates people. There is a deep emotional connection. Apple was serving musicians with a Macintosh back in ’84–’85. So it’s something that’s deep in our DNA. Music is a service that we think our users want us to provide. It’s a service that we worry about the humanity being drained out of. We worry about it becoming a bits-and-bytes kind
of world, instead of the art and craft. You’re right, we’re not in it for the money. I think it’s important for artists. If we’re going to continue to have a great creative community, [artists] have to be funded. I look at my own life, and I couldn’t make it through a workout without music. I don’t go to the gym for the fun of it. You need something to push you, to motivate you, and for me, that’s music. It’s also the thing at night that helps quiet me. I think it’s better than any medicine.
FC: Other home-speaker devices have not
emphasized listening to music the way the HomePod does. They play up the digital assistant. It’s an interesting choice you’ve made, to go the other way. TC: Yeah. Think about the production that goes into a recording of a song. Great artists spend enormous time thinking about every detail. If you get this little squeaky speaker, all of that is gone! All of the art and craft of music is gone. [HomePod] is the realization that that is important. Part of the enjoyment in music is hearing the full sound.
FC: What do people misunderstand or
underappreciate about Apple? TC: For a casual observer who hasn’t been a user of our products, the thing that they might miss is how different Apple is versus other technology companies. A financial person just
looking at revenues and profits may think, They’re good [at making money]. But that’s not who we are. We’re a group of people who are trying to change the world for the better, that’s who we are. For us, technology is a background thing. We don’t want people to have to focus on bits and bytes and feeds and speeds. We don’t want people to have to go to multiple [systems] or live with a device that’s not integrated. We do the hardware and the software, and some of the key services as well, to provide a whole system. We do that in such a way that we infuse humanity into it. We take our values very seriously, and we want to make sure all of our products reflect those values. There are things like making sure that we’re running our [U.S.] operations on 100% renewable energy, because we don’t want to leave the earth worse than we found it. We make sure that we treat well all the people who are in our supply chain. We have incredible diversity, not as good as we want, but great diversity, and it’s that diversity that yields products like this. We’re all very different. You could walk down this aisle and talk to 10 people, and they’d be totally different, but we all have the same common purpose. That’s the thing that joins us all together. And it’s that goal that drives everybody to keep working ungodly hours and trying to do the best work of our lives.
APRIL 2018 FASTCOMPANY.COM 17
These Mesmerizing Images Of Athletes Reinvent Sports Photography BY JESUS DIAZ
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[Photo: Pelle Cass]
P
hotographer Pelle Cass is pioneering a fascinating way of capturing sports on camera. Instead of focusing on particular moments, he tries to catch everything that happens on one particular arena and merge it into one single image. The result is akin to the frescos that decorate baroque palaces and church ceilings–visual choreography involving hundreds of characters frozen in one single graceful moment. It’s an arduous process that requires infinite patience and a keen eye, both to take the photos and especially to post-process them. Speaking with Cass over email, he told me that most of these composite pictures require at least a thousand individual photos taken over the course of about one hour. He then has to go through all those photos and select the ones that are interesting and work well with the overall final composition, placing them in 400 to 500 layers in Photoshop. It’s a process that usually takes him 40 to 60 hours. Since he started this series last fall, Cass says, he checks the athletics calendars of the local colleges with big sports programs around his Brookline, Massachusetts, studio–whether it’s Harvard, Boston University, Boston College, Northeastern, or MIT. “I don’t need permission or a press pass or anything,” he says. “Sometimes I have to buy a five dollar ticket or maybe buy a brownie at the fundraising table. But I just walk in and get to work.” This is important, as in a professional sports arena, he would have to use specific locations to shoot– and compete with other photographers. “It takes me a while to consider the angles and figure out where I want to set up,” he says, picking “high, distant vantage points if I can find them.” He also says that he likes “photographing more obscure sports since big spectacles are covered […] I think sports are paid too much attention, sometimes at the expense, in college sports, of education.” Before settling down to work, Cass does a couple of test shots at different locations–important, since he needs an hour of activity to complete one image. Once he picks a sport, he starts shooting immediately, careful not to touch the tripod under any circumstances. “It’s boring and fascinating at the same time,” he confesses, because he can’t really watch the competition. Instead, he has to focus on observing where the athletes tend to move, and where they rarely go on a court or in a venue (not to mention pressing the shutter when they do something interesting). He never moves the figures he captures. “I don’t change a pixel,” Cass says, “I simply decide what stays and what goes. That way, I can say that I’m recording something real and true, even if the eye never sees it that way.” Back in the studio, it’s time to select the images that go into the final composition. “It takes a long time to get to know what’s in a thousand images, so I just plunge in and start
trying things. I often start with figures that are the most expressive or unusual and build from there,” he explains. “It’s a little like a slow-motion game of Tetris,” one in which he tries to fit people in a space so they fit with each other. Sometimes he trashes everything and starts again. Other times, he ends with two unique versions of the same session. Cass particularly loves the idea of capturing photos in which the stands are pretty much empty, reversing the typical sport photo in which a massive public watches just a few athletes. In his photos, the crowd is in the field, with hundreds of players dancing with each other across time and space He’s far from finished with this series. “I’m in the process of trying to photograph as many sports as I can,” Cass says, “ticking off new locations and new sports from my list is a priority.” You can follow his fascinating work on Instagram.
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