Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda

Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda

* WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER *

An insider's account of Apple's creative process during the golden years of Steve Jobs.

Hundreds of millions of people use Apple products every day; several thousand work on Apple's campus in Cupertino, California; but only a handful sit at the drawing board. Creative Selection recounts the life of one of the few who worked behind the scenes, a highly-respected software engineer who worked in the final years of the Steve Jobs era--the Golden Age of Apple.

Ken Kocienda offers an inside look at Apple's creative process. For fifteen years, he was on the ground floor of the company as a specialist, directly responsible for experimenting with novel user interface concepts and writing powerful, easy-to-use software for products including the iPhone, the iPad, and the Safari web browser. His stories explain the symbiotic relationship between software and product development for those who have never dreamed of programming a computer, and reveal what it was like to work on the cutting edge of technology at one of the world's most admired companies.

Kocienda shares moments of struggle and success, crisis and collaboration, illuminating each with lessons learned over his Apple career. He introduces the essential elements of innovation--inspiration, collaboration, craft, diligence, decisiveness, taste, and empathy--and uses these as a lens through which to understand productive work culture.

An insider's tale of creativity and innovation at Apple, Creative Selection shows readers how a small group of people developed an evolutionary design model, and how they used this methodology to make groundbreaking and intuitive software which countless millions use every day.

Ken Kocienda worked at Apple on over fifteen years as a principal engineer for iPhone software. He mended motorcycles, worked in a newspaper's editorial library, taught English in Japan, and made fine art photography after graduating from Yale. He eventually discovered the internet, learned himself computer programming, and worked his way up through a series of dot-com-era businesses before settling at Apple in 2001, where he worked on the software teams responsible for the Safari web browser, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. Ken and his wife live in San Jose, California. His first book is titled Creative Selection.