Steve Jobs
by Walter Isaacson · 23 Oct 2011 · 915pp · 232,883 words
the Lisa project, which was beginning to disappoint Jobs. And somewhere off Jobs’s radar screen, at least for the moment, there was a small skunkworks project for a low-cost machine that was being developed by a colorful employee named Jef Raskin, a former professor who had taught Bill Atkinson
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a “Mac in a book.” On a walk with Kitchen, Jobs spotted a building in nearby Menlo Park and declared that they should open a skunkworks facility to work on these ideas. It could be called AppleLabs and Jobs could run it, going back to the joy of having a small
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with the title of board chairman and be a product visionary with no operational duties. But by this point, even the idea of starting a skunkworks such as AppleLabs was no longer on the table. It finally sank in. Jobs realized there was no appeal, no way to warp the reality
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, 402 Ames Research Center, 8–9 Anderson, Fred, 313, 316, 317, 332, 349, 459 backdated stock options controversy and, 450–51 Angelou, Maya, 330 “Annie” skunkworks project, 94, 109 Ansen, David, 290 “Antennagate,” 519–23 Antz (film), 427–30 Anywhere but Here (Simpson), 4, 254–55 AOL, 502 AOL Time Warner
For the Win
by Cory Doctorow · 11 May 2010 · 624pp · 180,416 words
on her column. She was getting ready to shut the lid and head for bed, so she pulled her mail once more. From: kettlewell-l@skunkworks.kodacell.com To: schurch@sjmercury.com Subject: Embedded journalist? Thanks for keeping me honest today, Suzanne. It’s the hardest question we’re facing today
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will. Please. Your pal, Kettlebelly She stared at her screen. It was like a work of art; just look at that return address, “kettlewell-l@skunkworks.kodacell.com”—for kodacell.com to be live and accepting mail, it had to have been registered the day before. She had a vision of
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press-conference, catching Freddy’s column, and registering kodacell.com on the spot, then waking up some sysadmin to get a mail server answering at skunkworks.kodacell.com. Last she’d heard, Lockheed-Martin was threatening to sue anyone who used their trademarked term “Skunk Works” to describe a generic R
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her heel and stalked back to her computer and thumped the spacebar until the thing woke from sleep. From: schurch@sjmercury.com To: kettlewell-l@skunkworks.kodacell.com Subject: Re: Embedded journalist? Kettlebelly: that is one dumb nickname. I couldn’t possibly associate myself with a grown man who calls himself
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had done for some time, without realizing it. She was on the toilet when she heard the ping of new incoming mail. From: kettlewell-l@skunkworks.kodacell.com To: schurch@sjmercury.com Subject: Re: Embedded journalist? I will never call myself Kettlebelly again. Your pal, Kettledrum. Oh-shit-oh-shit-oh
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an order of magnitude or so, and then all the server-provisioning—calculated to survive the old slashdottings—shredded like wet kleenex. From: kettlewell-l@skunkworks.kodacell.com To: schurch@sjmercury.com Subject: Re: Embedded journalist? This stuff is amazing. Amazing! Christ, I should put you on the payroll. Forget I
The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business Is Small
by Steve Sammartino · 25 Jun 2014 · 247pp · 81,135 words
the creators of the new revised infrastructure in their industry. They have to try to put themselves out of business; that is, to have a skunkworks mentality. It can’t be about new products or incremental innovations. It needs to be about building new methods with which to go to market
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X lab is to create 10-fold improvements in the technology they release. As with all classic skunkworks, they’re in a different building so that the existing business culture doesn’t infect their purpose. skunkworks: a small, independent, loosely structured group who research and develop a project primarily for the purpose
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consistently being beaten by startups, why not join them? There’s no reason why any large company can’t redirect R&D capital into a skunkworks, or their own venture-capital arm. Outsourcing is not a new concept. It’s used for creative advertising development, manufacturing, administration, legal and accounting. Almost
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where a company thinks it has all the answers, which is something no company can do in times of rapid change. Instead, maintain an independent skunkworks mentality of self-hacking and disruption. The structure can’t be that of the industrial model; it just doesn’t work anymore. The ‘now’ question
In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
by Steven Levy · 12 Apr 2011 · 666pp · 181,495 words
. But in Building 43, there was something of a freak-out. The search team set up a war room, hurriedly launching an effort dubbed the skunkworks. (That appellation, first used at Lockheed aircraft during World War II, is a generic term for an off-the-books engineering effort that operates outside
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a company’s stifling bureaucracy. The fact that Google needed a skunkworks was telling in itself.) Its OKR was to change the look of search 25 percent within a hundred days. Within the search team itself, Googlers
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logo and the search box; when the user moved the mouse or typed, then the rest of the text would come into view. Though the skunkworks began with a sense of urgency, the pressure eventually subsided as it became clear that the survival of Google didn’t hinge on its efforts
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, 125, 129, 139 Sina, 278, 288, 302 Singh, Sanjeev, 169–70 Singhal, Amit, 24, 40–41, 48–52, 54, 55, 58 Siroker, Dan, 319–21 skunkworks, 380–81 Skype, 233, 234–36, 322, 325 Slashdot, 167 Slim, Carlos, 166 SMART (Salton’s Magical Retriever of Text), 20 smart phones, 214–16
The Bond King: How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost It All
by Mary Childs · 15 Mar 2022 · 367pp · 110,161 words
to that recommendation, Pacific Equity Management Company. That quickly became Pacific Investment Management Company. PacMutual would eventually assign them a grown-up to babysit the “skunkworks,” as they jokingly called the backwater investing operation (if they knew about it at all): Bill Podlich had joined the company in 1966 as a
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, they easily became a “three-legged stool”—Gross in bond trading, Muzzy in client services, and Podlich in business strategy. They had balance. As the skunkworks proved they could make money trading bonds, they looked for ways to get clients, to manage money for companies beyond PacMutual. Corporations wanted to invest
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money was on the sales side.” Portfolio managers made fifteen thousand dollars a year; salesmen made one hundred thousand and up. And for years, the skunkworks didn’t make any money; it was perennially at risk of being shut down, whenever the PacMutual executives got tired of unnecessary risk taking. But
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didn’t last. But then came cash. Pat Fisher, who joined in 1976 and ran the entire back office, pointed out that every time the skunkworks got a new account, it was more work for her employees, who had to record and process every new trade without error. They needed some
Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams
by Tom Demarco and Timothy Lister · 2 Jan 1987 · 261pp · 16,734 words
Are Rules and We Do Break Them The engineering profession is famous for a kind of development mode that doesn’t exist elsewhere: the skunkworks project. Skunkworks implies that the project is hidden away someplace where it can be done without upper management’s knowing what’s going on. This happens when
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of DEC’s most successful products, came to the market in this manner. There is a lore about such projects. The amusing thing is that skunkworks is really just another word for insubordination. Management says no, and the project goes on anyway. One of our clients tried to cancel a product
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employees, 10 Indoor and outdoor space pattern, 87 Industrial Revolution, 14 Innovation, leadership for, 101 Insecurity of management, 96 Inspirational posters, 151–152 Insubordination in skunkworks projects, 164 Interchangeable view of employees, 9–10 Internal competition in teams, 155–158 Interrupt-consciousness, 64 Interruptions flow factor, 62–64 from fragmentation, 197
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Sirens of false hope, 32–34 Sheep Look Up (Brunner), 50 Short-term perspective of turnover, 118–119 Sibling competition, 155–156 Sick organizations, 162 Skunkworks projects, 164 Socialization process in hiring, 106 Sociology, project failures from, 4–5 Software Engineering Economics (Boehm), 109 Southern California Edison, 123 Soviet society, 233
Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It)
by Salim Ismail and Yuri van Geest · 17 Oct 2014 · 292pp · 85,151 words
promising ideas and concepts can be identified and pursued in a systemic and comparable way. Many other companies are also exploring experimentation—not just in skunkworks, but also on core processes. It is not, however, a totally new concept. The Japanese have long followed the practice of kaizen: constant improvement as
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a Brickhouse for atoms look like?” he asked. We now know what he meant. In launching the Google[X] lab, Google has taken the classic skunkworks approach to new product development further than anyone ever imagined. Google[X] offers two fascinating new extensions to the traditional approach. First, it aims for
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) ( ) Failure and Risk are encouraged, but in name only and not tracked or quantified ( ) Failure and risk-taking are allowed and measured, but sandboxed in skunkworks or very defined boundaries (e.g. Lockheed Skunk Works) ( ) Failure and risk-taking are expected, pervasive, measured and even celebrated across the organization (e.g
Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader
by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli · 24 Mar 2015 · 464pp · 155,696 words
school and university market more than ever. Workstations were quickly becoming the lab benches for many disciplines at research universities and in corporate R&D skunkworks. It was only natural that Apple would want to offer its own unique approach to these machines as well. Apple’s suit stalled Steve’s
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that it was now simply known as the “box” business. Steve needed a lot more than just another box. He found his answer in the skunkworks of a building several blocks away from the corporate offices. That’s where Jony Ive, the designer who had so impressed Fred Anderson, was toiling
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to have the greatest impact on Steve’s decision about what Apple would pursue next. One of these was called Project Purple. It was a skunkworks effort Steve had ordered up to devise a new approach to what was proving to be an elusive “form factor” for personal computing: an ultralight
Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)
by Adam Fisher · 9 Jul 2018 · 611pp · 188,732 words
. Jef was completely obsessed with that. Steve Wozniak: Jef is the one who brought that idea to us. Andy Hertzfeld: The Mac was initially a skunkworks. At the time it was not an important project at Apple. It was a very minor thing. Randy Wigginton: And Steve went over to Macintosh
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stuff. That was my first day. At that point Lisa was still two or three years away from shipping. The Macintosh group was a classic skunkworks operation: a breakaway engineering team tasked with the research and development of an alternate future. It’s the engineering equivalent of a special forces unit
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supposed to launch right around January 15, 1993, because they were aiming for Macworld. Kristin Spence: That added to the whole vibe. It was a skunkworks operation in the extreme. We were so committed and passionate about what we were doing. We were living it 24/7. There would be times
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monopoly with an MP3 player that can also place a phone call. Thus, Jobs concludes, Apple has to act first. So he sets up a skunkworks: Project Purple. Then, to make sure that the phone-of-the-future project has the proper urgency, Jobs divides Purple into two groups—and pits
The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality
by Blake J. Harris · 19 Feb 2019 · 561pp · 163,916 words
10, 2012 UNLIKE SO MANY SILICON VALLEY SUCCESS STORIES, THE TALE OF OCULUS doesn’t begin in a garage, a dorm room, or a small skunkworks lab. Instead, in a twist befitting the humble origins and pragmatic eccentricities of its founder, the tale of Oculus begins in a trailer. More specifically
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Robinson, software engineer David Gundry, and a pair of QA (quality assurance) analysts: Ian Shiels and Louisa Clarke. On paper and in person, this small skunkworks team had little in common. Except for two things: they all had relatively low-level roles working on CCP’s hit space adventure MMORPG EVE
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Online, put players inside those ships, and then create around that a multiplayer dogfighting game. Conceptually, this idea quickly caught traction with CCP’s VR skunkworks team. But just as quickly, they began to encounter all sorts of challenges unique to designing a game for VR. For example: simulator sickness was
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