WHAT LEADERSHIP LESSONS WE LEARN FROM STEVE JOBS LIFE

“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

—Apple’s “Think Different” commercial, 1997

Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in his parents’ garage in 1976, was ousted in 1985, returned to rescue it from near bankruptcy in 1997, and by the time he died, in October 2011, had built it into the world’s most valuable company. Along the way, he helped to transform seven industries: personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, retail stores, and digital publishing. He thus belongs in the pantheon of America’s great innovators, along with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Walt Disney. None of these men was a saint, but long after their personalities are forgotten, history will remember how they applied imagination to technology and business.

Walter Isaacson in writing Steve Jobs biography describes the 14 imperatives behind Jobs’s approach: focus; simplify; take responsibility end to end; when behind, leapfrog; put products before profits; don’t be a slave to focus groups; bend reality; impute; push for perfection; know both the big picture and the details; tolerate only “A” players; engage face-to-face; combine the humanities with the sciences; and “stay hungry, stay foolish.”

The greatest achievement of Steve Jobs was creating the Apple company, making it an enduring company which will be the subject of study by many business schools around the world for many years to come.

The Keys to Steve’s success are summarized as follows:

1. Focus where he made the company to focus on only a few great products at any one time before moving to other products.
2. Simplify he aimed for the simplicity that comes from conquering, rather than merely ignoring, complexity. Achieving this depth of simplicity, he realized, would produce a machine that felt as if it deferred to users in a friendly way, rather than challenging them. “It takes a lot of hard work,” he said, “to make something simple, to utterly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions.”
3. Take Responsibility End to End, he knew that the best way to achieve simplicity was to make sure that hardware, software, and peripheral devices were seamlessly integrated. An Apple ecosystem—an iPod connected to a Mac with iTunes software, for example—allowed devices to be simpler, syncing to be smoother, and glitches to be rarer. The more complex tasks, such as making new playlists, could be done on the computer, allowing the iPod to have fewer functions and buttons.
4. When Behind, Leapfrog, the mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first. It also knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind. That happened when Jobs built the original iMac. He focused on making it useful for managing a user’s photos and videos, but it was left behind when dealing with music. People with PCs were downloading and swapping music and then ripping and burning their own CDs. The iMac’s slot drive couldn’t burn CDs. “I felt like a dope,” he said. “I thought we had missed it.”
5. Put Products before profits, when he and his small team designed the original Macintosh, in the early 1980s, his injunction was to make it "insanely great." He never spoke of profit maximization or cost trade-offs. "Don't worry about the price, just specify the computer's abilities," he told the original team leader.
6. Do not be a slave to focus on groups, when he took his original Macintosh team on its first retreat, one member asked whether they should do some market research to see what customers wanted. “No,” Jobs replied, “because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.” He invoked Henry Ford’s line “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’”
7. Push for perfection, during the development of almost every product he ever created, his moto was perfectionism.
8. Know both the big picture and the details, his passion was applied to both large and minuscule.
9. Combine the Humanities with the sciences, he thought of himself to be as a humanities person as a kid, but he liked electronics.
10. Stay hungry, stay foolish, even as Apple became corporate, he asserted his rebel and counterculture streak in its ads, as if to proclaim that he was still a hacker and a hippie at heart. The famous “1984” ad showed a renegade woman outrunning the thought police to sling a sledgehammer at the screen of an Orwellian Big Brother. And when he returned to Apple, Jobs helped write the text for the “Think Different” ads: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes…” If there was any doubt that, consciously or not, he was describing himself, he dispelled it with the last lines: “While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

Acknowledgement is made to Walter Isaacson who published a version of this article in the Harvard Business Review in April 2012.

I would like to ask you as a reader of this article to consider the great lessons that could be learned from Steve jobs life and apply in your daily life to see the great changes that will manifest and leading you to accomplish your life dreams.

If you need help Louis Jahshan is available to give you a hand, please do not hesitate to book an obligation free session through Calendly https://calendly.com/louisjahshan/60min