The surprising story of how the iPhone was invented illustrates how to change your boss’s mind

No matter how powerful a story you craft and how inspirational you are in delivering it, you will meet some resistance. That will be true even of some of those you would most expect to immediately appreciate your vision. This is why you must act with resolve.

As Apple’s former chief design officer and cofounder of LoveFrom, a small collective of creators, Jony Ive is an obsessive student of design and the creative process. In a lecture at Cambridge University, when receiving the Stephen Hawking Fellowship award, he commended the importance of resolve as the necessary partner to creativity. “There is a fundamental conflict between two very different ways of thinking,” Ive observed. “It is the conflict between curiosity and the resolve and focus that is necessary to solve problems.”

Yet, he proceeded to emphasize, curiosity and resolve are not truly mutually exclusive. You have to find the balance of dancing between them. While you must be “utterly driven and completely focused to solve apparently insurmountable problems,” he continued, “solving those problems requires new ideas.” There is a back and forth between exercising your curiosity to keep discovering better ways to solve the problem and digging in to create the solution. “The difference between an idea and a product is that you’ve solved the problems,” Ive observed.

One of my favorite stories of how this dance between curiosity and resolve led to brilliant problem-solving, and a breakthrough achievement, is that of the creation of the iPhone.

Contrary to popular myth, the iPhone was not the brainchild of Steve Jobs. In fact, Jobs almost prevented its creation. Hard to believe, right? Remember, even the disrupters can be disrupted— and can need others to help them prevent being disrupted.

In his book The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, author Brian Merchant tells the behind-the-scenes story of how the iPhone came into being. At the start, Jobs knew nothing about it. “The iPhone began as an experimental project undertaken without his knowledge,” Merchant said in an interview.

The year was 2004, and smartphones were on the rise. Beyond email, what caught the attention of a group of Apple designers was the increasing functionality of phones as cameras and MP3 players. Phones like the Nokia 5310 were becoming more and more popular for their music playing capabilities.

At the time, the iPod accounted for greater than half of Apple’s sales. Losing market share to Nokia, or any emergent devices, was not an option. Tony Fadel, the designer of the iPod, who would later go on to develop the first three versions of the iPhone, had a finely tuned receiver’s mind. He saw the writing on the wall: Apple needed to invent a phone. “We had the music player doing video and audio and photo,” Fadel recounted. “We had iTunes. Then futurephones came out. They started playing MP3. This is a holy shit moment. Phones could steal everything we were doing. What could we do to counter this?”

Apple had proven its creativity in solving existential problems in spades. But the issue this time was that Jobs was no fan of Apple designing a phone. As Merchant recounts, “‘The problem with a phone,’ Jobs said, ‘is that we’re not very good going through orifices to get to the end users.’ By orifices, he meant carriers like Verizon and AT&T, which had final say over which phones could access their networks.”

Jobs also wasn’t convinced that the emergent smartphone category would reach a wide-enough market. He believed the potential for smartphones was limited to “pocket protector” or email-obsessed business users.

My friend and early iPhone engineer Andy Grignon shared with Merchant, “The exec team was trying to convince Steve that building a phone was a great idea [but] he didn’t really see the path to success.” He did decide, though, to contract with phone maker Motorola to make a phone for Apple. This doesn’t sound like the Steve Jobs we know, allowing another company to deliver an experience connected to an Apple platform without controlling the user experience. But that’s exactly what happened. Jobs hated the final product. But nonetheless, he agreed to go ahead and launch the phone, and it hit the market in September 2005 at the same time as the Moto ROKR E1. It was a total bomb.

Meanwhile, back on November 7, 2004, then-Apple VP Michael Bell reportedly sent a late-night email to Jobs detailing the reasons that Apple should design its own phone. As the story goes, Jobs called Bell immediately, with the pair debating for hours. Jobs finally relented. But he wanted complete control of the design, without any service providers stepping in. He was so adamant about this that he considered buying cellular spectrum to exclusively sell the phone directly. Apple almost became a mobile virtual network operator! However, Cingular, now AT&T, offered free rein over the design in exchange for exclusivity.

Jobs made another make-or-break demand. He told the team he needed to see an interface that might be intuitive and exciting to lay users [everyday users], “not just tech product geeks,” Merchant reports.

The original iPhone design was anything but. The team made the common mistake of sticking closely to a prior successful design rather than creating a novel solution. They tried to create a phone that was a souped-up version of the company’s ultra-successful iPods.

David Tupman, who headed iPod hardware at the time, shared with Merchant: “We put a radio inside, effectively an iPod Mini with a speaker and headphones, still using the touch-wheel interface.” It’s again hard to believe, but Jobs was a fan of this early design. Others working on the design, however, felt very differently. Grignon revealed, “It was just obvious that we were overloading the click wheel with too much. And texting and phone numbers—it was a f***ing mess.”

But the team showed great resolve. Though they had won Jobs over, they had a ways to go yet on their hero’s journey. They had to dig deeply into their creativity and generate a truly bold new design, which was also beautiful.

“We tried everything,” Fadell recalled. “We tried for seven or eight months to get that thing to work. Couldn’t do it. We added more buttons and it just became this gangly thing.” Finally, they broke free from their resolve to make that design work and reignited their curiosity—what might an entirely different approach to designing a smartphone look like? They danced an exquisite dance from then on, envisioning the beautiful object that made the iPhone so irresistible while also applying their resolve to find solutions to a host of daunting engineering problems. The iPhone was launched in 2007, by Jobs with his awe-inspiring storytelling panache, to thunderous applause.

Grignon would become the first person to receive a call from an iPhone.

As for Fadell, he would found a company called Nest Labs in 2010, with Matt Rogers, where he created the also beautifully enticing Nest Thermostat and proceeded to sell the company to Google in 2014 for $3.2 billion.

The creation of the iPhone is a quintessential story of the power of a mindshift. The design team were open to receiving the signals of emergent disruption. They then astutely perceived that they could combine the brilliance of Apple design with the emergent smartphone trend. Next they wove together their insights about the emerging trend to conceive a powerful story that allowed Jobs to experience his own mindshift. They then together achieved the creation of one of the most successful and influential new products in history no one else saw coming.

Excerpted with permission from the publisher from Mindshift: Transform Leadership, Drive Innovation, and Reshape the Future, by Brian Solis. Copyright © 2024 by John Wiley & Sons. All rights reserved. This book is available wherever books and eBooks are sold.