I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple's CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

During a period of exciting discovery or progress there is no time to plan the perfect headquarters. The time for that comes later, when all the important work has been done. Perfection, we know, is finality; and finality is death.

It is by no means certain that an influential reader of this chapter could prolong the life of a dying institution merely by depriving it of its streamlined headquarters. What we can do, however, with more confidence, is to prevent any organization strangling itself at birth. Examples abound of new institutions coming into existence with a full establishment of deputy directors, consultants and executives; all these coming together in a building specially designed for their purpose. And experience proves that such an institution will die. It is choked by its own perfection. It cannot take root for lack of soil. It cannot grow naturally for it is already grown. Fruitless by its very nature, it cannot even flower. When we see an example of such planning—when we are confronted for example by the building designed for the United Nations—the experts among us shake their heads sadly, draw a sheet over the corpse, and tiptoe quietly into the open air.

What he's done, says John Maeda, an industrial-design specialist formerly of the MIT Media Lab and now president of the Rhode Island School of Design, is "prove that at a technology company, you don't need everyone to get it. You need one. One. It's not a democratic model; it's a model based on convergence. And convergence is not something you can make other people understand. You either understand it or you don't. And Steve Jobs understands better than anyone ever has. I have a lot of companies that call me and say, We want to make another iPod. Meaning they want it to be white. Meaning they want something that does this and this, and looks something like an iPod. But that's not how it works. The iPod looks the way it does because of what's inside. And you can't see that. Everyone's like, Steve Jobs is all about nice-looking hardware. No. He's all about the software. He can see software; that's his gift. It's tangible to him. So he's all about the invisible. He's all about making the invisible visible, about making people see what he sees. Apple products look a certain way because they have to. That's what's meant by design. Steve Jobs is not a designer, and he's not a software engineer. But he's the one who mediates between them, the one who knows that the place where the visible and the invisible meet is also the place where we go to meet both. He's the one who knows how human that place is. He's the one who makes sure it stays human."