How Steve Jobs Learned From Japan to Revolutionize Apple

As Apple marks its 50th anniversary this week, a new report from the Financial Times reveals that the company’s world-dominating success wasn’t just built on Silicon Valley genius, but on a forgotten manufacturing philosophy from post-war Japan.

While Steve Jobs is often celebrated for his design eye, the FT notes that the ability to build millions of iPhones with almost zero defects traces back to a management course taught in occupied Tokyo in 1945. The seminars, led by American engineer Homer Sarasohn, taught Japanese executives that quality wasn’t a band-aid, but a total system of repetitive precision.

In the early 1990s, during his time at NeXT, Jobs was initially skeptical of these bureaucratic processes. He famously bragged that his high-end NeXT Cube computer was “not made in Osaka.” However, after NeXT’s hardware failed to find a market, Jobs began a decade-long digestion of Japanese quality ideas.

He eventually met with industry legends like Joseph Juran, the “architect of quality.” Juran convinced Jobs to stop relying on brute force and instead treat business as a scientific, repetitive process. Jobs later applied these lessons to Pixar to fix its burnout culture, and eventually brought that quality DNA back to Apple in 1997.

The results of this shift were global. By mastering the very lessons the U.S. had originally taught Japan (and later forgot) Apple didn’t just compete with icons like Sony, Panasonic, and Sharp; it essentially turned them into subcontractors.

The FT piece emphasizes that the massive supply chain Apple built in China is the endpoint of a multi-decade chain of knowledge. It is a level of complexity that experts say cannot be easily replicated elsewhere with simple tax breaks or ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

What do you think will be the next big thing from Apple? This year’s foldable iPhone?