These Are The Best Business Books of 2018
5. Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs, by Ken Kocienda
Kocienda, a 15-year Apple veteran with a hand in the company’s most iconic products, is a generous, self-deprecating guide to life under Jobs. The phrase “creative selection” riffs on Darwin: It casts product development as a long iterative process in which only the strongest design aspects survive. The book’s “who”–that is, Jobs, as seen through Kocienda’s interactions with him–matters less than the “how.” Here Kocienda limns, through the lens of his own experience, the “essential elements” of Apple’s innovation culture, which include dreaming big, combining complementary skills, making tough choices, and developing taste and empathy. This is a book about the poetry of software creation, and occasionally a thriller, as Kocienda and his team battle doubt and fear of failure to achieve something not just great but magical.
