In product design within a large (or even medium) organization it takes strong institutional restraint to avoid generating camels (horses designed by committee)

In product design within a large (or even medium) organization it takes strong institutional restraint to avoid generating camels (horses designed by committee). The way that Apple appears to have consistently avoided that pitfall (for whatever other pitfalls they did fall into) is to heavily empower a single person to make the fundamental design decisions and to be the source of red light/green light for the rest of the designs. Both Jobs and Ives filled that role with varying degrees of success; it will be interesting to see what institutional structure arises with Ives mostly out of the picture. Remember, Apple is sustaining the one of the highest-cap businesses on Earth, with ~200k employees, on approximately 10 hardware products. That takes an immense amount of focus.