In Creative Selection, Ken Kocienda takes his reader inside Apple’s design process during “The Golden Age pf Steve Jobs.” He explains how and why, in order to “understand what makes Apple what it is, its essence, you need to understand software.” You also need to understand the unique importance of Steve Jobs’s “mission for Apple.”

Involvement in testing prototypes, Kociera explains, “was a key part of Steve mission for Apple, the most significant strand of Apple’s product DNA: to meld technology and the liberal arts, to take the latest software and hardware advances, mix them with elements of design and culture, and produce features and products that people found useful and meaningful to their everyday lives.”

It is helpful to remember that in 1859, Charles Darwin shared his thoughts about natural selection: “It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able to adapt to and to adjust best to the changing environment in which it finds itself.”

Individuals as well as organizations that are unwilling and/or unable to adapt simply cannot survive, much less achieve the clear sense of a compelling mission that drove Jobs and Apple then — and continues to drive Tim Cook and Apple now.

Especially now and in months to come, the “good enough” mindset is an organization’s worst enemy.

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Creative Selection was published by St. Martin’s Press (September 2018).  To learn more about Ken Kocienda, please click here. I also highly recommend Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs.