Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

by Ken Kocienda

In the years since, I’d seen him demonstrate his calmness again and again. In the lead-up to a Steve demo, he could be counted on to keep his composure and smile through the tension. Henri acted as a buffer between his team of programmers and the company’s hard-to-please leaders. He edited expletives out of the executives’ requests before passing them down to individual coders. He might say to me “I just heard Steve reported a bad bug.” The actual message he’d received had been more like: “THE F***ING CAPS LOCK BUTTON DOESN’T WORK IN TODAY’S BUILD! DON’T YOU PEOPLE TEST THIS F***ING KEYBOARD?!” As Henri sifted through and related the details at such times, I appreciated his ability to project the confidence that everything would work out. He seemed to know that applying pressure on me wouldn’t help me figure out the fix for the bug any faster but that I would drop whatever I was doing and get right on it. In his way, Henri filled a role created by the personality of our intense CEO. He was a source of coolness that prevented us from constantly getting burned by Steve’s searing heat.

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