Matt is right, the Jony Ives book is useful and interesting about how great product design is done.
I'm always interested in the stories people tell themselves about presenting and it contains some theories about how you present to Steve:
1. Only present good things:
‘When it came to showing models to Steve Jobs, we would select models that we ourselves thought were good,’ said Satzger. ‘Steve would then approve – or not. Many times he said simply “No” to a model design. But we never presented anything to Steve that we didn’t want him to pick.’
2. Present three bad things and then one good one:
Fadell hadn’t met Jobs before, but he’d been coached on how to make sure Jobs picked the right design: present three options and save the best for last.
3. Present one good thing among lots of bad ones:
‘If you give Steve one thing, he’s going to hate it, even if it’s great,’ remembered Wasko. ‘So you have to make some other crap to put on the table.’
4. If it's important, show him in private:
Jony reasoned that he had to show the work in progress to Jobs in private, with no one else around. ‘Because Steve is so quick to give an opinion, I didn’t show him stuff in front of other people,’ Jony said. ‘He might say, “This is shit,” and snuff the idea. I feel that ideas are very fragile, so you have to be tender when they are in development. I realized that if he pissed on this, it would be so sad because I know it was so important.’ Jony followed his instincts and showed Jobs the system in private. The gambit worked, and Jobs loved the idea. ‘This is the future,’ said Jobs.
All these are probably true. They're not all self-contradictory. And presumably Jobs was smart enough to know what was going on, so some of it must just have been ritual and superstition, but this is how people try and find magical methods in organisational madness.
