The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve
Jobs
His saga
is the entrepreneurial creation myth writ large: Steve Jobs cofounded 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. “The people who are crazy enough to think they can
change the world are the ones who do.”—Apple’s “Think Different” commercial,
1997. In the months since my biography of Jobs came out, countless commentators
have tried to draw management lessons from it. Some of those readers have been
insightful, but I think that many of them (especially those with no experience
in entrepreneurship) fixate too much on the rough edges of his personality. The
essence of Jobs, I think, is that his personality was integral to his way of
doing business. He acted as if the normal rules didn’t apply to him, and the
passion, intensity, and extreme emotionalism he brought to everyday life were
things he also poured into the products he made. His petulance and impatience
were part and parcel of his perfectionism. One of the last times I saw him,
after I had finished writing most of the book, I asked him again about his
tendency to be rough on people. “Look at the results,” he replied. “These are
all smart people I work with, and any of them could get a top job at another
place if they were truly feeling brutalized. But they don’t.”
Then he
paused for a few moments and said, almost wistfully, “And we got some amazing
things done.” Indeed, he and Apple had had a string of hits over the past dozen
years that was greater than that of any other innovative company in modern
times: iMac, iPod, iPod nano, iTunes Store, Apple Stores, MacBook, iPhone,
iPad, App Store, OS X Lion—not to mention every Pixar film. And as he battled
his final illness, Jobs was surrounded by an intensely loyal cadre of
colleagues who had been inspired by him for years and a very loving wife,
sister, and four children. So I think the real lessons from Steve Jobs have to
be drawn from looking at what he actually accomplished. I once asked him what
he thought was his most important creation, thinking he would answer the iPad
or the Macintosh. Instead he said it was Apple the company. Making an enduring
company, he said, was both far harder and more important than making a great
product. How did he do it? Business schools will be studying that question a
century from now. Here are what I consider the keys to his success.
Focus
When Jobs
returned to Apple in 1997, it was producing a random array of computers and
peripherals, including a dozen different versions of the Macintosh. After a few
weeks of product review sessions, he’d finally had enough. “Stop!” he shouted.
“This is crazy.” He grabbed a Magic Marker, padded in his bare feet to a
whiteboard, and drew a two-by-two grid. “Here’s what we need,” he declared.
Atop the two columns, he wrote “Consumer” and “Pro.” He labeled the two rows
“Desktop” and “Portable.” Their job, he told his team members, was to focus on
four great products, one for each quadrant. All other products should be
canceled. There was a stunned silence.
But by
getting Apple to focus on making just four computers, he saved the company.
“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,” he told me.
“That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.” After he righted the
company, Jobs began taking his “top 100” people on a retreat each year. On the
last day, he would stand in front of a whiteboard (he loved whiteboards,
because they gave him complete control of a situation and they engendered
focus) and ask, “What are the 10 things we should be doing next?” People would
fight to get their suggestions on the list. Jobs would write them down—and then
cross off the ones he decreed dumb. After much jockeying, the group would come
up with a list of 10. Then Jobs would slash the bottom seven and announce, “We
can only do three.” Focus was ingrained in Jobs’s personality and had been
honed by his Zen training. He relentlessly filtered out what he considered
distractions. Colleagues and family members would at times be exasperated as
they tried to get him to deal with issues—a legal problem, a medical
diagnosis—they considered important. But he would give a cold stare and refuse
to shift his laserlike focus until he was ready. Near the end of his life, Jobs
was visited at home by Larry Page, who was about to resume control of Google,
the company he had cofounded. Even though their companies were feuding, Jobs
was willing to give some advice. “The main thing I stressed was focus,” he
recalled. Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up, he told Page.
“It’s now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus on?
Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you
into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but
not great.” Page followed the advice. In January 2012 he told employees to
focus on just a few priorities, such as Android and Google+, and to make them
“beautiful,” the way Jobs would have done.
Simplify
Jobs’s
Zenlike ability to focus was accompanied by the related instinct to simplify
things by zeroing in on their essence and eliminating unnecessary components.
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” declared Apple’s first marketing
brochure. To see what that means, compare any Apple software with, say,
Microsoft Word, which keeps getting uglier and more cluttered with nonintuitive
navigational ribbons and intrusive features. It is a reminder of the glory of
Apple’s quest for simplicity. Jobs learned to admire simplicity when he was
working the night shift at Atari as a college dropout. Atari’s games came with
no manual and needed to be uncomplicated enough that a stoned freshman could
figure them out. The only instructions for its Star Trek game were: “1. Insert
quarter. 2. Avoid Klingons.” His love of simplicity in design was refined at
design conferences he attended at the Aspen Institute in the late 1970s on a
campus built in the Bauhaus style, which emphasized clean lines and functional
design devoid of frills or distractions. When Jobs visited Xerox’s Palo Alto
Research Center and saw the plans for a computer that had a graphical user
interface and a mouse, he set about making the design both more intuitive (his
team enabled the user to drag and drop documents and folders on a virtual
desktop) and simpler. For example, the Xerox mouse had three buttons and cost
$300; Jobs went to a local industrial design firm and told one of its founders,
Dean Hovey, that he wanted a simple, single-button model that cost $15. Hovey
complied. Jobs 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 truly understand the underlying challenges and come up
with elegant solutions.”
In
Jony Ive, Apple’s industrial designer, Jobs met his soul mate in the quest for
deep rather than superficial simplicity. They knew that simplicity is not
merely a minimalist style or the removal of clutter. In order to eliminate
screws, buttons, or excess navigational screens, it was necessary to understand
profoundly the role each element played. “To be truly simple, you have to go
really deep,” Ive explained. “For example, to have no screws on something, you
can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better
way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and
how it’s manufactured.” During the design of the iPod interface, Jobs tried at
every meeting to find ways to cut clutter. He insisted on being able to get to
whatever he wanted in three clicks. One navigation screen, for example, asked
users whether they wanted to search by song, album, or artist. “Why do we need
that screen?” Jobs demanded. The designers realized they didn’t. “There would
be times when we’d rack our brains on a user interface problem, and he would
go, ‘Did you think of this?’” says Tony Fadell, who led the iPod team. “And
then we’d all go, ‘Holy shit.’ He’d redefine the problem or approach, and our
little problem would go away.” At one point Jobs made the simplest of all
suggestions: Let’s get rid of the on/off button. At first the team members were
taken aback, but then they realized the button was unnecessary. The device
would gradually power down if it wasn’t being used and would spring to life
when reengaged. Likewise, when Jobs was shown a cluttered set of proposed
navigation screens for iDVD, which allowed users to burn video onto a disk, he
jumped up and drew a simple rectangle on a whiteboard. “Here’s the new
application,” he said. “It’s got one window. You drag your video into the
window. Then you click the button that says ‘Burn.’ That’s it. That’s what
we’re going to make.”In looking for industries or categories ripe for
disruption, Jobs always asked who was making products more complicated than
they should be.
In
2001 portable music players and ways to acquire songs online fit that
description, leading to the iPod and the iTunes Store. Mobile phones were next.
Jobs would grab a phone at a meeting and rant (correctly) that nobody could
possibly figure out how to navigate half the features, including the address
book. At the end of his career he was setting his sights on the television
industry, which had made it almost impossible for people to click on a simple
device to watch what they wanted when they wanted.
Take Responsibility End to End
Jobs
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. Jobs and Apple
took end-to-end responsibility for the user experience—something too few
companies do. From the performance of the ARM microprocessor in the iPhone to
the act of buying that phone in an Apple Store, every aspect of the customer
experience was tightly linked together. Both Microsoft in the 1980s and Google
in the past few years have taken a more open approach that allows their
operating systems and software to be used by various hardware manufacturers.
That has sometimes proved the better business model. But Jobs fervently
believed that it was a recipe for (to use his technical term) crappier
products. “People are busy,” he said. “They have other things to do than think
about how to integrate their computers and devices.” Being in the Apple
ecosystem could be as sublime as walking in one of the Zen gardens of Kyoto
that Jobs loved.
Part
of Jobs’s compulsion to take responsibility for what he called “the whole
widget” stemmed from his personality, which was very controlling. But it was
also driven by his passion for perfection and making elegant products. He got
hives, or worse, when contemplating the use of great Apple software on another
company’s uninspired hardware, and he was equally allergic to the thought that
unapproved apps or content might pollute the perfection of an Apple device. It
was an approach that did not always maximize short-term profits, but in a world
filled with junky devices, inscrutable error messages, and annoying interfaces,
it led to astonishing products marked by delightful user experiences. Being in
the Apple ecosystem could be as sublime as walking in one of the Zen gardens of
Kyoto that Jobs loved, and neither experience was created by worshipping at the
altar of openness or by letting a thousand flowers bloom. Sometimes it’s nice
to be in the hands of a control freak.
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.” But instead of merely catching up
by upgrading the iMac’s CD drive, he decided to create an integrated system
that would transform the music industry. The result was the combination of
iTunes, the iTunes Store, and the iPod, which allowed users to buy, share,
manage, store, and play music better than they could with any other devices.
After
the iPod became a huge success, Jobs spent little time relishing it. Instead he
began to worry about what might endanger it. One possibility was that mobile
phone makers would start adding music players to their handsets. So he
cannibalized iPod sales by creating the iPhone. “If we don’t cannibalize
ourselves, someone else will,” he said.
Put Products Before Profits
When
Jobs 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 price, just specify the
computer’s abilities,” he told the original team leader. At his first retreat
with the Macintosh team, he began by writing a maxim on his whiteboard: “Don’t
compromise.” The machine that resulted cost too much and led to Jobs’s ouster
from Apple. But the Macintosh also “put a dent in the universe,” as he said, by
accelerating the home computer revolution. And in the long run he got the
balance right: Focus on making the product great and the profits will follow.
John Sculley, who ran Apple from 1983 to 1993, was a marketing and sales
executive from Pepsi. He focused more on profit maximization than on product
design after Jobs left, and Apple gradually declined. “I have my own theory
about why decline happens at companies,” Jobs told me: They make some great
products, but then the sales and marketing people take over the company,
because they are the ones who can juice up profits. “When the sales guys run
the company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn
off. It happened at Apple when Sculley came in, which was my fault, and it
happened when Ballmer took over at Microsoft.” When Jobs returned, he shifted
Apple’s focus back to making innovative products: the sprightly iMac, the
PowerBook, and then the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad.
As
he explained, “My passion has been to build an enduring company where people
were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it
was great to make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great
products. But the products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley
flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It’s a subtle
difference, but it ends up meaning everything—the people you hire, who gets
promoted, what you discuss in meetings.”
Don’t Be a Slave To Focus Groups
When
Jobs 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!” Caring deeply about what customers
want is much different from continually asking them what they want; it requires
intuition and instinct about desires that have not yet formed. “Our task is to
read things that are not yet on the page,” Jobs explained. Instead of relying
on market research, he honed his version of empathy—an intimate intuition about
the desires of his customers. He developed his appreciation for
intuition—feelings that are based on accumulated experiential wisdom—while he
was studying Buddhism in India as a college dropout. “The people in the Indian
countryside don’t use their intellect like we do; they use their intuition
instead,” he recalled. “Intuition is a very powerful thing—more powerful than
intellect, in my opinion.” Sometimes that meant that Jobs used a one-person
focus group: himself. He made products that he and his friends wanted.
For
example, there were many portable music players around in 2000, but Jobs felt
they were all lame, and as a music fanatic he wanted a simple device that would
allow him to carry a thousand songs in his pocket. “We made the iPod for
ourselves,” he said, “and when you’re doing something for yourself, or your
best friend or family, you’re not going to cheese out.”
Bend Reality
Jobs’s
(in)famous ability to push people to do the impossible was dubbed by colleagues
his Reality Distortion Field, after an episode of Star Trek in which aliens
create a convincing alternative reality through sheer mental force. An early
example was when Jobs was on the night shift at Atari and pushed Steve Wozniak
to create a game called Breakout. Woz said it would take months, but Jobs
stared at him and insisted he could do it in four days. Woz knew that was
impossible, but he ended up doing it. Jobs’s (in)famous ability to push people
to do the impossible was dubbed by colleagues his Reality Distortion Field,
after an episode of Star Trek. Those who did not know Jobs interpreted the
Reality Distortion Field as a euphemism for bullying and lying. But those who
worked with him admitted that the trait, infuriating as it might be, led them
to perform extraordinary feats. Because Jobs felt that life’s ordinary rules
didn’t apply to him, he could inspire his team to change the course of computer
history with a small fraction of the resources that Xerox or IBM had. “It was a
self-fulfilling distortion,” recalls Debi Coleman, a member of the original Mac
team who won an award one year for being the employee who best stood up to
Jobs. “You did the impossible because you didn’t realize it was impossible.”
One day Jobs marched into the cubicle of Larry Kenyon, the engineer who was
working on the Macintosh operating system, and complained that it was taking
too long to boot up.
Kenyon
started to explain why reducing the boot-up time wasn’t possible, but Jobs cut
him off. “If it would save a person’s life, could you find a way to shave 10
seconds off the boot time?” he asked. Kenyon allowed that he probably could.
Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if five million people were using the
Mac and it took 10 seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to 300
million or so hours a year—the equivalent of at least 100 lifetimes a year.
After a few weeks Kenyon had the machine booting up 28 seconds faster. When
Jobs was designing the iPhone, he decided that he wanted its face to be a
tough, scratchproof glass, rather than plastic. He met with Wendell Weeks, the
CEO of Corning, who told him that Corning had developed a chemical exchange
process in the 1960s that led to what it dubbed “Gorilla glass.” Jobs replied
that he wanted a major shipment of Gorilla glass in six months. Weeks said that
Corning was not making the glass and didn’t have that capacity. “Don’t be
afraid,” Jobs replied. This stunned Weeks, who was unfamiliar with Jobs’s
Reality Distortion Field. He tried to explain that a false sense of confidence
would not overcome engineering challenges, but Jobs had repeatedly shown that
he didn’t accept that premise. He stared unblinking at Weeks. “Yes, you can do
it,” he said. “Get your mind around it. You can do it.” Weeks recalls that he
shook his head in astonishment and then called the managers of Corning’s
facility in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, which had been making LCD displays, and told
them to convert immediately to making Gorilla glass full-time. “We did it in
under six months,” he says. “We put our best scientists and engineers on it,
and we just made it work.” As a result, every piece of glass on an iPhone or an
iPad is made in America by Corning.
Impute
Jobs’s
early mentor Mike Markkula wrote him a memo in 1979 that urged three
principles. The first two were “empathy” and “focus.” The third was an awkward
word, “impute,” but it became one of Jobs’s key doctrines. He knew that people
form an opinion about a product or a company on the basis of how it is
presented and packaged. “Mike taught me that people do judge a book by its
cover,” he told me. When he was getting ready to ship the Macintosh in 1984, he
obsessed over the colors and design of the box. Similarly, he personally spent
time designing and redesigning the jewellike boxes that cradle the iPod and the
iPhone and listed himself on the patents for them. He and Ive believed that
unpacking was a ritual like theater and heralded the glory of the product.
“When you open the box of an iPhone or iPad, we want that tactile experience to
set the tone for how you perceive the product,” Jobs said. Sometimes Jobs used
the design of a machine to “impute” a signal rather than to be merely
functional. For example, when he was creating the new and playful iMac, after
his return to Apple, he was shown a design by Ive that had a little recessed
handle nestled in the top. It was more semiotic than useful. This was a desktop
computer. Not many people were really going to carry it around. But Jobs and
Ive realized that a lot of people were still intimidated by computers. If it
had a handle, the new machine would seem friendly, deferential, and at one’s
service. The handle signaled permission to touch the iMac. The manufacturing
team was opposed to the extra cost, but Jobs simply announced, “No, we’re doing
this.” He didn’t even try to explain.
Push for Perfection
During
the development of almost every product he ever created, Jobs at a certain
point “hit the pause button” and went back to the drawing board because he felt
it wasn’t perfect.
That
happened even with the movie Toy Story. After Jeff Katzenberg and the team at
Disney, which had bought the rights to the movie, pushed the Pixar team to make
it edgier and darker, Jobs and the director, John Lasseter, finally stopped
production and rewrote the story to make it friendlier. When he was about to
launch Apple Stores, he and his store guru, Ron Johnson, suddenly decided to
delay everything a few months so that the stores’ layouts could be reorganized
around activities and not just product categories. The same was true for the
iPhone. The initial design had the glass screen set into an aluminum case. One
Monday morning Jobs went over to see Ive. “I didn’t sleep last night,” he said,
“because I realized that I just don’t love it.” Ive, to his dismay, instantly
saw that Jobs was right. “I remember feeling absolutely embarrassed that he had
to make the observation,” he says. The problem was that the iPhone should have
been all about the display, but in its current design the case competed with
the display instead of getting out of the way. The whole device felt too
masculine, task-driven, efficient. “Guys, you’ve killed yourselves over this
design for the last nine months, but we’re going to change it,” Jobs told Ive’s
team. “We’re all going to have to work nights and weekends, and if you want, we
can hand out some guns so you can kill us now.” Instead of balking, the team
agreed. “It was one of my proudest moments at Apple,” Jobs recalled. A similar
thing happened as Jobs and Ive were finishing the iPad. At one point Jobs
looked at the model and felt slightly dissatisfied. It didn’t seem casual and
friendly enough to scoop up and whisk away. They needed to signal that you
could grab it with one hand, on impulse. They decided that the bottom edge
should be slightly rounded, so that a user would feel comfortable just
snatching it up rather than lifting it carefully. That meant engineering had to
design the necessary connection ports and buttons in a thin, simple lip that
sloped away gently underneath. Jobs delayed the product until the change could
be made. Jobs’s perfectionism extended even to the parts unseen.
As a young boy, he had helped his father build
a fence around their backyard, and he was told they had to use just as much
care on the back of the fence as on the front. “Nobody will ever know,” Steve
said. His father replied, “But you will know.” A true craftsman uses a good
piece of wood even for the back of a cabinet against the wall, his father
explained, and they should do the same for the back of the fence. It was the
mark of an artist to have such a passion for perfection. In overseeing the
Apple II and the Macintosh, Jobs applied this lesson to the circuit board
inside the machine. In both instances he sent the engineers back to make the
chips line up neatly so the board would look nice. This seemed particularly odd
to the engineers of the Macintosh, because Jobs had decreed that the machine be
tightly sealed. “Nobody is going to see the PC board,” one of them protested.
Jobs reacted as his father had: “I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even
if it’s inside the box. A great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the
back of a cabinet, even though nobody’s going to see it.” They were true
artists, he said, and should act that way. And once the board was redesigned,
he had the engineers and other members of the Macintosh team sign their names
so that they could be engraved inside the case. “Real artists sign their work,”
he said.
Tolerate Only “A” Players
Jobs
was famously impatient, petulant, and tough with the people around him. But his
treatment of people, though not laudable, emanated from his passion for
perfection and his desire to work with only the best. It was his way of
preventing what he called “the bozo explosion,” in which managers are so polite
that mediocre people feel comfortable sticking around. “I don’t think I run
roughshod over people,” he said, “but if something sucks, I tell people to
their face. It’s my job to be honest.”
When
I pressed him on whether he could have gotten the same results while being
nicer, he said perhaps so. “But it’s not who I am,” he said. “Maybe there’s a
better way—a gentlemen’s club where we all wear ties and speak in this Brahmin
language and velvet code words—but I don’t know that way, because I am
middle-class from California.” Was all his stormy and abusive behavior
necessary? Probably not. There were other ways he could have motivated his
team. “Steve’s contributions could have been made without so many stories about
him terrorizing folks,” Apple’s cofounder, Wozniak, said. “I like being more
patient and not having so many conflicts. I think a company can be a good
family.” But then he added something that is undeniably true: “If the Macintosh
project had been run my way, things probably would have been a mess.” It’s
important to appreciate that Jobs’s rudeness and roughness were accompanied by
an ability to be inspirational. He infused Apple employees with an abiding
passion to create groundbreaking products and a belief that they could
accomplish what seemed impossible. And we have to judge him by the outcome.
Jobs had a close-knit family, and so it was at Apple: His top players tended to
stick around longer and be more loyal than those at other companies, including
ones led by bosses who were kinder and gentler. CEOs who study Jobs and decide
to emulate his roughness without understanding his ability to generate loyalty
make a dangerous mistake. “I’ve learned over the years that when you have
really good people, you don’t have to baby them,” Jobs told me. “By expecting
them to do great things, you can get them to do great things. Ask any member of
that Mac team. They will tell you it was worth the pain.” Most of them do. “He
would shout at a meeting, ‘You asshole, you never do anything right,’” Debi
Coleman recalls. “Yet I consider myself the absolute luckiest person in the
world to have worked with him.”
Engage Face-to-Face
Despite
being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its
potential to be isolating, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings.
“There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed
by e-mail and iChat,” he told me. “That’s crazy. Creativity comes from
spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask
what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of
ideas.” He had the Pixar building designed to promote unplanned encounters and
collaborations. “If a building doesn’t encourage that, you’ll lose a lot of
innovation and the magic that’s sparked by serendipity,” he said. “So we
designed the building to make people get out of their offices and mingle in the
central atrium with people they might not otherwise see.” The front doors and
main stairs and corridors all led to the atrium; the café and the mailboxes
were there; the conference rooms had windows that looked out onto it; and the
600-seat theater and two smaller screening rooms all spilled into it. “Steve’s
theory worked from day one,” Lasseter recalls. “I kept running into people I
hadn’t seen for months. I’ve never seen a building that promoted collaboration
and creativity as well as this one.” Jobs hated formal presentations, but he
loved freewheeling face-to-face meetings. He gathered his executive team every
week to kick around ideas without a formal agenda, and he spent every Wednesday
afternoon doing the same with his marketing and advertising team. Slide shows
were banned. “I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of
thinking,” Jobs recalled. “People would confront a problem by creating a
presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather
than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they’re talking about don’t
need PowerPoint.”
Know Both the Big Picture and the
Details
Jobs’s
passion was applied to issues both large and minuscule. Some CEOs are great at
vision; others are managers who know that God is in the details. Jobs was both.
Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes says that one of Jobs’s salient traits was his
ability and desire to envision overarching strategy while also focusing on the
tiniest aspects of design. For example, in 2000 he came up with the grand
vision that the personal computer should become a “digital hub” for managing
all of a user’s music, videos, photos, and content, and thus got Apple into the
personal-device business with the iPod and then the iPad. In 2010 he came up
with the successor strategy—the “hub” would move to the cloud—and Apple began
building a huge server farm so that all a user’s content could be uploaded and
then seamlessly synced to other personal devices. But even as he was laying out
these grand visions, he was fretting over the shape and color of the screws
inside the iMac.
Combine the Humanities with the
Sciences
“I
always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked
electronics,” Jobs told me on the day he decided to cooperate on a biography.
“Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said
about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of
humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.” It was as
if he was describing the theme of his life, and the more I studied him, the
more I realized that this was, indeed, the essence of his tale. He connected
the humanities to the sciences, creativity to technology, arts to engineering.
There were greater technologists (Wozniak, Gates), and certainly better
designers and artists. But no one else in our era could better firewire
together poetry and processors in a way that jolted innovation.
And
he did it with an intuitive feel for business strategy. At almost every product
launch over the past decade, Jobs ended with a slide that showed a sign at the
intersection of Liberal Arts and Technology Streets. The creativity that can
occur when a feel for both the humanities and the sciences exists in one strong
personality was what most interested me in my biographies of Franklin and
Einstein, and I believe that it will be a key to building innovative economies
in the 21st century. It is the essence of applied imagination, and it’s why
both the humanities and the sciences are critical for any society that is to
have a creative edge in the future. Even when he was dying, Jobs set his sights
on disrupting more industries. He had a vision for turning textbooks into
artistic creations that anyone with a Mac could fashion and craft—something
that Apple announced in January 2012. He also dreamed of producing magical
tools for digital photography and ways to make television simple and personal.
Those, no doubt, will come as well. And even though he will not be around to
see them to fruition, his rules for success helped him build a company that not
only will create these and other disruptive products, but will stand at the
intersection of creativity and technology as long as Jobs’s DNA persists at its
core.
Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish
Steve
Jobs was a product of the two great social movements that emanated from the San
Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s. The first was the counterculture of
hippies and antiwar activists, which was marked by psychedelic drugs, rock
music, and antiauthoritarianism. The second was the high-tech and hacker
culture of Silicon Valley, filled with engineers, geeks, wireheads, phreakers, cyberpunks,
hobbyists, and garage entrepreneurs. Overlying both were various paths to
personal enlightenment—Zen and Hinduism, meditation and yoga, primal scream
therapy and sensory deprivation, Esalen and est.
An
admixture of these cultures was found in publications such as Stewart Brand’s
Whole Earth Catalog. On its first cover was the famous picture of Earth taken
from space, and its subtitle was “access to tools.” The underlying philosophy
was that technology could be our friend. Jobs—who became a hippie, a rebel, a
spiritual seeker, a phone phreaker, and an electronic hobbyist all wrapped into
one—was a fan. He was particularly taken by the final issue, which came out in
1971, when he was still in high school. He took it with him to college and then
to the apple farm commune where he lived after dropping out. He later recalled:
“On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning
country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so
adventurous. Beneath it were the words: ‘Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.’” Jobs
stayed hungry and foolish throughout his career by making sure that the
business and engineering aspect of his personality was always complemented by a
hippie nonconformist side from his days as an artistic, acid-dropping,
enlightenment-seeking rebel. In every aspect of his life—the women he dated,
the way he dealt with his cancer diagnosis, the way he ran his business—his
behavior reflected the contradictions, confluence, and eventual synthesis of
all these varying strands. Even as Apple became corporate, Jobs 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.
Source: Walter Isaacson
