While I was staring at my feet, workingworkingworking, making the most of a $5 million engineering budget, marketing was getting $10–15 million. I needed to understand why.

So I asked.

And that’s what changed everything. As soon as I started talking to different teams, I realized my superpower.

Before I learned to create a little distance between what I felt and what I needed to express at work, I let too many of my worries and fears leak into my voice and into my daily interactions. Your team amplifies your mood, so when I was frustrated, those feelings rocketed around the office and came back tenfold. The more upset I got with our lack of progress, the more those frustrations infected the rest of the team. So I had to learn to modulate myself. To crank my personal style down a couple of notches to establish an effective management style.

I spent nine years at Apple. It’s the place where I finally grew up. I wasn’t just managing a team anymore. I was leading hundreds, thousands of people. It was a profound shift in my career and in who I was. After a decade of failure, I finally made something—actually two things—that people actually wanted. I finally got it right.

But it didn’t feel like success at first. Or even in the end. It was still work, every step of the way.

So, from that day on, I have always asked questions about how the gear works. I watched and listened to everything, absorbing as much knowledge and information as I could, so that I’d never have to hear those words again. You need to have the right words to communicate your ideas properly. There’s no point asking an engineer to make something sound ‘nice’ – it’s too vague. Better to say, can you compress the vocal, EQ the harshness out of it but add some air, then add a touch of reverb to sweeten it? Boom! The engineer knows exactly what you want. Knowing how the gear works gave me more power and creative control in the studio, so I could capture the sounds and feelings I imagined, rather than what the engineer wanted.

I [Jeff Killeen] found I had to be precise and resist my natural temptation to use too many superlatives when describing the accomplishments in the business. John would say, ‘You spin things all the time. You make everything sound good.’ I’d say, ‘John, that was good.’ And he would say, ‘But you make it sound like it’s even better than it is. We’re engineers. We don’t use words like terrific and outstanding. We say, “You did your job.” When you say that the team did a terrific job, they don’t believe you.’ We finally agreed that whenever he thought I was spinning, he would tell me. And whenever I thought he was underwhelming, I would tell him.”

Killeen elaborates on how he learned to communicate in an engineering culture. “The perspective from which John comes to the business is obsessive in a wonderful way. He harks back to the philosophy that he’s building a bridge and that a bridge cannot fail. I said, ‘John, but we’re not building a bridge, and failure is okay if we fail fast and incorporate that learning so that we can grow as fast as possible. It’s preferable to me to get eight things done well and fail a two versus doing three or four things to perfection.’ John said, ‘We’re not trained to accept a lot of failure or welcome it into the process.’ I said, ‘That’s a management concept we have to work on.