STEVE JOBS : A LEADER WHO DEFINED RULE BOOK…

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:

• Young Steve

 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.

• Seeding Apple

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.

• Exit From Apple

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.

• Life after Apple

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.

• Reinventing Apple

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