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The Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs
Technology Briefing |
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TranscriptSteve 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:
Recently, Isaacson himself attempted to boil down the management lessons in the 600-page tome to a concise list that anybody could understand. The result was "The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs," published in the April 2012 Harvard Business Review. Based on the hundreds of hours he spent with Jobs, as well as interviews conducted with others, Isaacson identifies the following 14 keys to Jobs' success:
Let's start with 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. Within a few weeks, Jobs created a two-by-two matrix defining the market along two dimensions: Consumer vs. Professional, and Laptop vs. Desktop. He decided to focus the company on four great products, one for each quadrant. All other products were canceled. 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 explained. "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 ask, "What are the 10 things we should be doing next?" After much jockeying, the group would come up with a list of 10 ideas. Then Jobs would slash the bottom seven and announce, "We can only do three." The second principle is Simplify Jobs simplified 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 more cluttered with non-intuitive navigational ribbons and intrusive features. 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. 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 on-line 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 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. Another principle underlying Jobs' phenomenal success was the idea of Taking End-to-End Responsibility 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. A fourth principle Jobs repeatedly used to great success was: 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. 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. Another key principle behind Jobs' success was his willingness to Put Products Before Profits. When Jobs and his small team designed the original Macintosh, in the early 1980s, he insisted that it be "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' ouster from Apple. 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. Perhaps none of Job's principles has been harder for most executives to adopt than: Don't Be a Slave to Focus Groups. 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. Instead of relying on market research, he honed his own 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. A rare management ability that Jobs mastered was Bending Reality. This refers to Jobs' famous ability to push people to do the impossible. As a member of the original Mac team once put it, "You did the impossible because you didn't realize it was impossible." Those who did not know Jobs have interpreted his so-called "Reality Distortion Field" as a euphemism for bullying and lying. Those who worked with him admitted that the trait 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. Jobs' eighth principle is Impute. Jobs knew that people form an opinion about a product or a company on the basis of how it is presented and packaged. His early mentor, venture capitalist Mike Markkula, used the term "impute" to describe this principle and he taught Jobs "that people do judge a book by its cover." When he was getting ready to ship the Macintosh in 1984, Jobs obsessed over the colors and design of the box. Similarly, he personally spent time designing and redesigning the jewel-like boxes that cradle the iPod and the iPhone and listed himself on the patents for them. He believed that unpacking a product was a ritual like theater. "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. Perhaps the one principle most commonly associated with Jobs was his 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. For example, 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 store layouts could be reorganized around activities rather than product categories. Jobs' perfectionism extended even to the parts that were unseen. 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 attractive, even though most people would never see it. Another crucial principle behind Apple's success is a willingness to Tolerate Only "A" Players. Jobs' treatment of people was intended to prevent what he called "the bozo explosion," in which managers are so polite that mediocre people feel comfortable sticking around. Was all his stormy and abusive behavior necessary? Probably not. There were other ways he could have motivated his team. However, it's important to appreciate that Jobs' 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. Another surprising principle Jobs insisted on was the need toEngage Face-to-Face. Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings. As he told Isaacson, "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." Jobs 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. According to Jobs, "people who know what they're talking about don't need PowerPoint." Principle number 12 is Know Both the Big Picture and the Details. Some CEOs are great at "vision," while others "sweat the details." Jobs was a master of both. 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; as a result, Apple got 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 such tiny details as the shape and color of the screws inside the iMac. Another uncommon trait that Jobs embodied was an insistence that the company Combine the Humanities with the Sciences. He connected creativity to electronics, arts to engineering. There are a number of people who were greater technologists, including his partner Steve Wozniak and his nemesis Bill Gates. Certainly there were better designers and artists. But no one else in our era could better combine elegant design with technology. And, the fact that he was able to couple this with an intuitive feel for business strategy made him truly unique among his peers. The final principle Isaacson identified in Steve Jobs was a commitment toStay Hungry and Stay Foolish. This largely stemmed from the fact that 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, which was marked by psychedelic drugs, rock music, and anti-authoritarianism. The second was the high-tech "hacker culture" of Silicon Valley, filled with engineers, geeks, cyberpunks, hobbyists, and garage entrepreneurs.Job overlaid on top of these influences the various paths to personal enlightenment he examined, including: meditation derived from Zen Buddhism, and yoga derived from Hinduism. A combination of these influences was found in Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, a favorite resource which Jobs took to college with him. On the back cover 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 the "hippie non-conformist side" from his days as an artistic, acid-dropping, enlightenment-seeking rebel. In every aspect of his life, his behavior reflected the contradictions, confluence, and eventual synthesis of all these varying strands. This ethos permeated Apple whenever Jobs was there. The famous "1984" ad showed a renegade woman outrunning the "thought police" to sling a sledgehammer at the screen of an Orwellian Big Brother. When he returned to Apple, Jobs helped write the text for the "Think Different" ads, which read as follows: "Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes ..." And, if there was any doubt that, consciously or not, Jobs 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." |
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