LEADERSHIP LESSONS FROM STEVE JOBS

Like Thomas Edison or Henry Ford, there is no doubt that Steve Jobs is now considered one of the world’s greatest game changers who ever lived. 

His impact changed in a great way how we live, work and play.  What made him become such a great

Steve Jobs.  Photo Credit: Albert Watson 

leader and influence in our lives?

Looking at his leadership style, I am listing here at least 11 of his leadership traits that enabled him to build Apple from almost nothing to one of the greatest and most valuable business organizations in the world today.   

Focus

On top of my list is his laser-like ability to focus on what he believed is important. 


When he came back as CEO of Apple in 1997 after he was ousted in a power struggle in 1985, the first thing he did to save the ailing company was to reduce the number of products it makes and focus only on a few.  He believed that deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.  Not long after this decision, the company made a dramatic turn around and saved it from ruin.    

Keep it simple

Call it a gift but Jobs has the knack for looking at the essence of things and come up with simple solutions to complex problems.  His ultimate aim is to make life easier for users of his products.  For me, the greatest example of this

is the on/off feature of a devise.  For most electronic products, it would be unthinkable to do without it. But to Jobs, he insisted on doing away with it.  The result:  a devise that shuts off on its own when not it use and automatically opens when the user starts engaging it. It is now a standard feature in many devices.  

Take full charge

Jobs, who is sometimes ridiculed as a control freak, is a 100% take-charge person.  He did not leave anything to chance.  He made sure that every element of his product passed his scrutiny and he had a hand in creating those elements to form part of an integrated whole.  “Jobs knew that the best way to achieve simplicity is 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” wrote his biographer Walter Isaacson. 

Take one step backward, to make two leaps forward

When he finds himself behind, Jobs made sure that he not only caught up but to leap forward in great stride.  This is how he left competition miles behind.  This happened when he built the original iMac.  It was useful for managing photos and videos but not when it comes to music. So he did not only catch up.  He integrated the iMac system that resulted in the combination of iTunes, the iTunes Store and the iPod allowing users to buy, share, manage, store and play music better than they could with any other devices.  He created iPhone to stay ahead of competition who he believed were thinking of adding music players to their handsets.

Put the horse before the cart    

Conventional thinking among business executives is that profits should come first before everything else in business.  For Steve Jobs, products should come first.  This belief caused his ouster from Apple and it took him over a decade to prove wrong those people who thought otherwise.  When Jobs and his team designed the original Macintosh in the early Eighties, his marching order was to make it “insanely great”.  Profit maximization or cost trade-off was the least of his concerns. The dramatic turnaround of Apple and how he built it into the world’s most valuable company is a testament to his belief that creating winning products comes first.

Follow your intuition

Steve Jobs relied more on his intuition when it comes to knowing what customers want. In the course of developing the Macintosh, one of his team members suggested that they should do market research to find out what customers wanted.  His reply was “If Henry Ford asked customers what they wanted, they would have told him, ‘A faster horse!’” 

It’s so much different to continually ask customers what they wanted than caring deeply about what they want. It required intuition and instinct to know their desires that have not yet formed. He said “Intuition is a very powerful thing—more powerful than intellect, in my opinion.”

To create great products, he made what he and his friends wanted. For instance, when he looked at the many portable music players in the market in 2000, he found that not one of them allowed him, a music fanatic, to have a simple device with which he can 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.”

Make the impossible possible

Jobs felt that life’s ordinary rules didn’t apply to him.  This he proved by changing the course of computer history with just a small fraction of the resources that Xerox or IBM had.  He had the ability to push people to do the impossible. During his early years at Atari, he pushed his partner Steve Wozniak to do a new computer game in just four days which Woz thought will take months to do.  He ended up doing it in just four days. 

When Corning developed a process for scratch-proof glass, Steve Jobs said that he needed it for iPhone and asked its CEO Wendell Weeks to deliver in six months.  To think that Corning was not making the glass and did not have the capacity yet, Weeks was stunned at Jobs confidence that he can do it. “Yes you can do it,” Jobs said.  Weeks did it under six months.  Not long after, every piece of glass on an iPhone or iPad is made in America by Corning.     

Judge a book by its cover

Jobs was aware that people form an opinion about a product or a company on the basis of how it is presented and packaged. “…people do judge a book by its cover,” he told his biographer Isaacson.

When he was about to ship the Macintosh in 1984, he was very attentive and concerned about every detail such as color and design of the box.  Likewise, he personally devoted so much time in designing and redesigning the jewel-like boxes that contained the iPod and the iPhone.  When a buyer open the box, Steve wanted to set the tone for how the buyer perceive the product.

Aim for perfection 

In almost every product Steve created, there were certain stages that he asked his people to do things all over again no matter what the cost.  That happened with the movie Toy Story at Pixar and when he was about to launch the Apple Stores.  He decided to delay everything for a few more months so the store layouts are designed around activities instead of product display and arrangements. His perfectionist tendencies went even further to the unseen parts of devices Apple makes. 

Even how the chips are arranged inside Apple II and the Macintosh did not escape his passion for perfection.  In both cases, he asked his engineers to redo how the chips inside are lined up.  He wanted them to be neatly arranged so the board would look nice. “I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it’s inside the box.”

Make no room for mediocre players

Jobs was known for being impatient and tough with people around him.  Though not praiseworthy, his treatment of people stemmed from his passion for perfection and his desire to work with only the best. It’s his way of being frank and honest when he felt that people were not giving their best.  Maybe he could get results by being nicer but he said that it’s not who he really is.

Even Apple’s co-founder Wozniak believed that Steve should have been nicer to people around him.  There must be other ways he could have motivated them instead of terrorizing them.  But then he said that if the Macintosh project had been run his way, things probably would have been a mess.

Despite Steve’s rudeness, he had that unique ability to inspire and generate loyalty among his top executives who tended to stick around and stayed longer.  He made people passionate about creating groundbreaking products and made them believe that they could accomplish what seemed to be impossible feats.  One of them, Debi Coleman recalled that Steve would shout at him in a meeting:  “You asshole, you never do anything right”.  Yet he considered himself the luckiest person in the world to have worked under Steve.

Meet with people face-to-face

Steve was a strong believer of face-to-face meetings.  He is not in favor of chats over email or any other sort of online communications. Even in the design of his office buildings, he made sure that there are opportunities for people to meet often by mingling.  “…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 said.

Jobs hated slide presentations.  He met with his executive team every week to discuss ideas without a formal agenda.  “People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint” he said.

See the forest, and also the trees

Jobs was both a big picture and detail person.  While appreciating the big picture, he had the ability to examine every detail and aspect of design.  He worries over the shape and color of the screws inside the iMac while having the grand vision of the personal computer as the “digital hub” for synchronizing the user’s music, videos, photos and content. 

Harmonize Humanities with the Sciences

Steve had his own role models too.  He was inspired by what Edwin Land of Polaroid said about the importance of people who could be at the intersection of humanities and sciences. This became the theme of his life, the essence of his story.

He was able to connect the humanities to the sciences, creativity to technology and arts to engineering. With an intuitive feel for business strategy, no one today could combine the arts and technology better than he did, in my view.

Interestingly, Steve possessed the traits of creative but strong personalities of Franklin and Einstein, both of whom have great feel for the humanities and the sciences. “…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 to have a creative edge in the future.” wrote Isaacson.