STEVE JOBS @ Glance…….
Steve
Jobs is no more. Surely, his accomplishments are far-reaching and impossible to
easily summarize. Apart from revolutionizing the computer, music and publishing
industries in his lifetime, Steve Jobs’ death has pointed out that he may have
transformed just one more – the leadership industry. Here’s one way of looking
at the scope of his achievement: It is the dream of any entrepreneur to effect
change in an industry. Well, Jobs transformed half a dozen of them forever,
from personal computers to phones, animation, music, publishing and video
games. He was a great negotiator, a skilled motivator, a decisive judge, a
farsighted tastemaker, an excellent showman and a gifted strategist. Most people
will try to fit him into old moulds, trying to confine his spirit within the
familiar terms: Vision, Innovation, Communication, and Inspiration. There was all
of that, for sure, but these encomiums alone do not quite succeed in capturing
him. We haven’t lost the best CEO of this generation – we’ve lost one of the
greatest artists of our times. Under his leadership, the previously tottering
Apple not only recovered, but climbed its way to the top to become the most
valuable company in the world, based on market cap!
 |
| Steve Jobs... |
Unlike
most technologists and entrepreneurs who appear to succeed only once, Steve
Jobs was distinctly different, in that he constantly repeated his success. He
never gave up and steadfastly pursued his dreams, and is believed to have never
been driven by the riches or the fame that followed his success. Jobs was
clearly obsessed with the products that his company rolled out, and pursued
them to the minutest detail. He was a perfectionist, and a strongly opinionated
one at that.
Jobs
was destined to change many industries during his life time. He had a fairly
difficult childhood. He was given up for adoption, dropped out of school, but
eventually went on to start a company that practically shaped the personal
computer industry. He never had any fancy degrees. In fact, he had no degree at
all! Of course, this does not mean that you don’t aspire and work towards
higher degrees, but these alone cannot guarantee success. Rather, dedicated pursuit
of goals and determination can be magical wands. Following Jobs’ example,
parents should ask themselves how they can encourage their children to pursue
their dreams with limitless passion and safeguarded from the fear of failure.
A WONDER CALLED
STEVE….
To
unravel the enigma that was Steve Jobs, let’s take a walk through his life:
Steven Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco,
California, on February 24, 1955. His biological parents, unwed college
graduates Joanne Simpson and Abdulfattah Jandali, gave him up for adoption to a
lower middle-class couple from south of the Bay Area, Paul and Clara Jobs. It
was not until Jobs was 27 that he was able to uncover information on his
biological parents.
 |
| Young Steve Jobs... |
Jobs
grew up in California, a willful, free-spirited young loner, with a penchant
for trouble. In his high school years, he was already fascinated with
electronics. In 1969, he met Steve Wozniak, better known as ‘Woz’, who was five
years older, and already anelectronics whiz. Jobs attended college, but soon dropped
out. He embraced the hippie lifestyle – drugs, Zen and Eastern philosophy. In
1974, he took a position as a video game designer with Atari. Several months
later, he left Atari to find spiritual enlightenment in India. After months
spent traveling through India in rags, he returned to California and started a
thriving business with Woz. They built and sold ‘blue boxes’ that let users
make long distance calls for free.
In
1976, Jobs, then 21, and Wozniak started a new business to build computers for
hobbyists. Jobs chose the name Apple Computer.
Steve
Jobs saw that many people were interested inhis friend Woz’s brilliant amateur
work – a computer circuit board – and suggested that they sell the board to
them. Apple Computer was born.
Apple’s
first year in business consisted of assembling the boards in Steve’s garage and
driving to local computer stores to try and sell them. Meanwhile, Woz worked on
a new, much-improved computer, the Apple II, which he finished in 1977. Both
Woz and Steve knew the Apple II was a breakthrough computer, much more advanced
than anything the market had ever seen. Thus, Steve set out to find venture
capitalists to fund Apple’s expansion. After a while, he made a deal with Mike
Markkula, an enthusiastic former Intel executive, who invested $250,000 in
their business and assured them that their company would enter the Fortune 500
list in less than two years’ time.
 |
| Steve Jobs with Mike Markkula... |
Mike
was right. The Apple II soon became the symbol of the personal computing
revolution worldwide and Apply Computer went public in December 1980, after
just four years of existence. Steve Jobs’ net worth crossed the $200-million
mark on that day – he was only 25.
In
the pursuit of what he believed, however, Jobs never hesitated to inflict his
tantrums on anybody, including on Woz, whose relationship with Jobs soon
collapsed. In his messy personal life, Jobs refused to acknowledge his baby
daughter, Lisa, and acquiesced to letting her grow up in poverty. Of course, he
continued his dedication to creating revolutionary
products, and his fervor inspired his Apple cohorts.
Apple’s
president and board, though, avoided giving him full authority, and Steve wasdigging
his own corporate grave. The Apple III, which he supervised, never worked properly.
He dreamed of creating a business computer – which would be his creation, not Woz’s.
The result was a business-oriented computer that Jobs named Lisa, after his
unacknowledged daughter. Yet, Steve Jobs was soon thrown out of the Lisa
project because he was considered too temperamental a manager. Deeply angry, he
took revenge by taking over a small project called Macintosh, determined to
make it a cheaper GUI computer that would cannibalise the sales of Lisa.
Around
this time, IBM entered the personal computer business, legitimising the
industry. The lower price tag on its PCs made the $10,000 Lisa a clear flop.
Since Jobs was not allowed to run Apple, he recruited Pepsi executive John
Sculley, thinking that he could push Sculley around.
In
1984, the first Macintosh made its debut. Macintosh’s point-and-click
technology (partly derived from Xerox’s 1970s Palo Alto Research Center)
reduced the need for users to remember innumerable tricky-touse DOS commands,
and brought out the visual and user-friendly potential of computers. The rivals
only fully caught up a decade later, with Windows 95. However, despite positive
sales and a performance that was superior to IBM’s PCs, the Macintosh was still
not IBM-compatible. It was cheaper than the Lisa, but Jobs had blundered – the
closed box had no expansion slots, and its limited memory made it impractical. Only
the old Apple II now kept the company afloat. Woz publicly quit Apple, and
denounced its management. The board took the Macintosh division away from Jobs,
and turned to Sculley, who insisted on full authority and got it.
Jobs
tried to stage a coup, but was caught and demoted. He planned to send Scullery
to China on a business tour and take over the corporate control of Apple in his
absence. Scullery went to China, but he soon got wind of Steve’s plan and
returned from there. He then presented the issue to Apple’s Board of Directors,
and asked them to vote against Steve in his presence. Everyone from the board
voted against Steve, and he was fired from his own company.
[The
background to this was that Apple’s board was unhappy with Steve’s
indisciplined behavior. The warbetween Board and Steve started when Apple was
designing the personal computer, Lisa. Steve was expelled from this project in
1982 and asked to work for Macintosh. Lisa was presented in 1983, but did not
perform well. It was believed to be a marketing failure. On the other hand, the
Macintosh project assigned to Steve did extremely well. Steve now lost faith on
Scullery, and wanted to wrest back control. He started doing odd things like
organising meetings late into the night,sending out long faxes and many such
indisciplined activities. The Board lost patience, and decided to fire Steve.]
Later,
in 1993, Scullery was also forcibly replaced from the post of CEO. When
Scullery was replaced, Apple was in a poor condition, as the company’s margins
had eroded, sales had diminished and the stock had declined.
Steve
was stunned by his removal. Apple was his life, and he had just been kicked out
of it. He started travelling, looking for new ways to expend his energy. In
1985, Jobs founded another computer company, NeXT. Its machines were not a commercial
success, but some of the technology was later used by Apple, where Jobs was
eventually to return. However great it was, the NeXT ‘Cube’ didn’t sell. It was
overpriced and missing useful software. The company was bleeding money. All its
co-founders left one after the other, as did its first investor from outside,
the Texan billionaire Ross Perot. By 1993, NeXT had to give up its hardware business,
and focus only on promoting its advanced software technology. Now, NeXT
Software turned into a niche software development business.
In
the meantime, in 1986, Jobs bought ‘The Graphics Group’, the computer graphics department
of Lucas film. The group was responsible for making high-end computer graphics
hardware, but under its new name, Pixar, it began to produce innovative
computer animations. Their first title under the Pixar name, ‘Luxo Jr.’ (1986)
won critical and popular acclaim. In 1991, Pixar signed an agreement with Disney,
with whom it already had a relationship, to produce a series of feature films,
beginning with Toy Story (1995).
Until
then, Pixar too had been going through a difficult time. The movie was to be
released in the Thanksgiving of 1995. As the date approached, Steve Jobs realized
what an incredible power the Disney brand was. He decided that Pixar would go
public the week after the release of Toy Story, to cash in on the media hype
surrounding the first computer-generated animation movie of all times. This
strategy worked wonders – Toy Story’s box-office success was only surpassed by
the Pixar stock’s success on Wall Street. Steve Jobs, who owned 80% of the
company, saw his net worth rise to over $1.5 billion – five times the money he
had ever made at Apple in the 1980s!
The
studio merged with Walt Disney in 2006, making Steve Jobs Disney’s largest
shareholder.
Speaking
of Apple, the fruit company was in the midst of its worst year ever. After the
release of Windows 95, the Mac, which had turned profitable but had failed to
evolve for a decade while Steve Jobs was away, started losing its market share
at an alarming rate.
By 1996, the company’s newly-appointed CEO,
Gil Amelio, was looking for new software to replace the old and bloated Mac OS.
He eventually chose Steve’s NeXTSTEP. Apple paid $400 million to acquire NeXT,
and Steve was back to the company that had thrown him out a decade before. His
official title was that of ‘informal adviser to the CEO’.
Shortly
after, when Amelio announced Apple’s losses of$700 million for the first
quarter of 1997, the board decided that it was time to get rid of this terrible
manager. Steve Jobs organised a board coup, and was named interim CEO of Apple
in July 1997.
Steve
Jobs quickly brought the lost confidence back to the Apple community. The
company launched a revolutionary marketing campaign around a new slogan Think
Different, spreading the idea that people who used Macs were dreamers who could
change the world. Six months after he was back, Steve Jobs had led the company
to profitability.
Yet,
Apple’s real resurgence came a little later, when Steve introduced a new,
amazing consumer desktop computer – the iMac. Introduced in May 1998, it was
Apple’s first really innovative product since the unveiling of the original
Macintosh in 1984. The iMac’sstunning translucent design blew away the whole personal
computer industry, which had failed to produce anything but black or beige
boxes for over a decade. Moreover, the iMac was a hot seller, and was
instrumental in bringing tonnes of developers back to the Mac platform. Design
innovations continuedthroughout 1998 and 1999, with the launch of coloured
iMacs and the iBook, Apple’s consumer notebook. After three years of being in
charge, Steve Jobs had brought Apple back to greatness. He was finally accepted
as the full-time CEO of Apple in January 2000 – this was the first time that
one person became the CEO of two public companies at the same time.
The
digital hub strategy was unveiled by Steve Jobs at Macworld, San Francisco, in
January 2001. This was a vision for the future of the PC. Although many
analysts and self-appointed experts were proclaiming that PCs would disappear
within a couple of years to be replaced by Internet terminals, Apple believed
they would evolve into digital centers or hubs for our new digital lifestyles.
- Miracle Days –
iPod, iPhone and iPad
The
greatest momentum for Apple came from an unexpected source – the iPod. The iPod
was an integral part of the digital hub strategy. For the first time, people
were buying Macs just so that they could use this little music player the size
of a cigarette box. Apple cashed in on that success and went further in the
following years, first by making the iPod Windowscompatible in 2002, and then
by opening the iTunes Music Store and developing a Windows version of iTunes in
2003.
 |
| Steve During Launch of Ipod |
In 2006, for the first time in its history, the firm from Cupertino left its
niche market to become as influential a player in consumer electronics as
Microsoft was in the PC space. The iPod’s market share was close to 75%!
The
master move, of course, came in January 2007, when Steve Jobs introduced the
iPhone at Macworld. The iPhone was arguably the ultimate Apple product. Its
beautiful hardware ran no less than Apple’s full operating system, OS X. Three
years after it was introduced, it is already fair to say that the iPhone will
go down in history as the first digital convergence device, equivalent to
putting a computer, an iPod and a phone in your pocket. It was such an obvious
part of Apple’s move outside the PC business that Steve announced at the end of
Macworld 2007, that the company’s name would be changed from Apple Computer
Inc. to Apple Inc.
In late 2003, Steve was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. It
was only in August 2004 that he agreed to undergo surgery. Although Steve and
Apple kept denying any serious problem,to everyone’s surprise, in December
2008, they announced that the CEO would not go on stage for the last Macworld
keynote in history in January 2009. Steve Jobs took six months off (the first
half of 2009), as he was awaiting a liver transplant, which he underwent in
April 2009.
2010 saw the incredible rebirth of Steve Jobs as a veryactive CEO.
In August 2011, Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple, but remained at the company as
Chairman of the company’s board. On October 5, 2011, at around 3:00 p.m., Jobs
died at his home in Palo Alto, California, aged 56, six weeks after his
landmark resignation. A legendary life thus came to an end.
WHY
WAS HE DIFFERENT ?????
If
we look closely, Steve Jobs was singularly devoted not to technology, but to
how people interacted with technology. It wasn’t for us to fit into a world of
computers, but for computers to fit into a world of people. That is what made Jobs
different.
Jobs
lived above his company and its products. This is what made Jobs one of the
great leaders of our time. He didn’t lead a company – he led us. He inspired
us. He had a cause, and we followed him in his pursuit. Let me portray some facets
of the genius that was Steve – what made him an iconic businessman, which
transformed in a major way the lifestyle of human beings and their interaction
with technology.
#Following
are his qualities we can obtain from his life:
*MAN
OF PASSION
*MAN
OF INNOVATION
*Trust
in Success
*Belief
on ‘Oneself’
*Striving
for Perfection and Simplicity
*Creating
a Small team of Talents
*Brand
Fanaticism
*Radical
Customer Devotion
*Belief
of: Killer Products Bring Killer Profits
*Ability
To Express Ideas For Realization
FINAL WORDS….
We
know that there are basically two types of organizational leaders – the
transactional and the transformational. Transactional leaders are the ones who
work with the safety of the status quo. Transformational leaders strive with
all their might to change the existing order of things. They are the ones who
bring about major, positive change for a group, organization or society. We
have seen that Steve Jobs was able to direct his people and make them do things
which they had never done before, but these things were also essential for the realization
of his vision and plans. I leave it your judgment to deduce what style of
leadership Jobs followed.
It
is quite logical to assume that Jobs’ style of management changed over the
years. This is also indicated in the following quote – “When Jobs was ousted
from Apple in 1985, he was often termed as arrogant and bully combined with
perfectionist attitude, something that indicates the ‘Authority-Obedience
Manager’” (Fortune 2009, The Decade of Steve). In 2009, due to medical reasons,
Steve delegated his responsibilities to Tim Cook, Apple’s COO for six months,
and everything went on smoothly. Perhaps, he had mentored his executive team successfully
to think and decide like him, which indicates that his style had probably moved
on to being a ‘Team Manager’.
Interestingly,
Jobs may not be the embodiment of an effective leader – in a way; he was far from
being a classical ‘text-book’ example. Nevertheless, his charisma,
self-confidence and passion for work overshadow all his flaws, making him one
of most successful CEOs of the decade.
Paragraphs worth reading that did not make the cut:
This description of the leader as an
unseen, supportive hand doesn’t sit well with everyone, but it’s had legions of
adherents—including me—for a long, long time. Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism,
in the 6 th century BC, wrote, “A good leader is best when people barely know
that he exists. Not so good when people obey and acclaim him. Worse when they
despise him.”
On a more contemporary note, Jim
Collins and Jerry Porras, in their 1994 book Built to Last, found that leaders of successful
companies that endure over time and are industry
leaders—Steve Jobs’s career-long aspiration for Apple—have leaders that “do not have the personality traits of the
archetypal high-profile, charismatic visionary leader.” They offer the example of 3M’s
decidedly non-charismatic leader, William McKnight (no relation) who guided
this revered industry titan for 52 years using a leadership style that
emphasized personal humility, accepting mistakes, empowering people, and taking
small steps, all anathema to Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs was
exceptional—exceptionally inspiring and exceptionally exasperating, even
withering. He built, arguably, the most creative company in the world. He was
also exceptionally good at selecting talent, i.e., people who are not only
world-class at what they do but also have the hide of a rhinoceros. Many,
perhaps most people don’t fit either description. Unless you’re a Steve Jobs,
you’re going to have to settle for mere mortals talent-wise and people who
require a more encouraging hand.
Special Thanks
& References:
·
* Alan
Deutschman (2000), The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, extract of published
article
·
* Erik
Qualman (2011), Steve Jobs – 10 Lessons in Life& Leadership, October 5,
2011, www.socialnomics.net
·
*Jeffrey
S. Young and William L. Simon John (2005), iCon Steve Jobs - The Greatest
Second Act in the History of Business
·
*MacGateway
(2011), The Leadership Style of Steve Jobs- In His Own Words
·
*Steve
Jobs (2005), Address at Stanford University’s 114th Commencement on June 12,
2005
·
*Paul
Bridle (2009), Leadership Lesson, Steve Jobs Apple, published in Business
Trends
·
*Steve
Jobs (1995), In Daniel S. Morrow’s transcript of a video interview with Steve
Jobs on April 20, 1995
