Steven Paul Jobs
Steven Paul Jobs was born on
February 24, 1955 in San Francisco, California. His unwed biological parents,
Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali, put him up for adoption. Steve was
adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, a lower-middle-class couple, who moved to the
suburban city of Mountain View a couple of years later. He attended Homestead
High School in Cupertino California and went to Reed College in Portland Oregon
in 1972 but dropped out after only one semester, staying on to "drop
in" on courses that interested him. However, he remained at Reed crashing on friend's
sofas and auditing courses including a calligraphy class, which he attributes
as being the reason Apple computers had such elegant typefaces. He studied as
an undergraduate: physics, literature, and poetry, at Reed College, Oregon, an
interesting combination of subjects. During his high school years, Jobs worked
summers at Hewlitt-Packard, it was there that he first met his future business
partner Steve Wozniak.
He teamed up with Steve Wozniak in
1976 to sell personal computers assembled in Jobs' garage. That was the
beginning of Apple Computers, which revolutionized the computing industry and
made Steve Jobs a multimillionaire before he was 30 years old. He started the NeXT Corporation
when he was forced out of the company in 1985, but returned to his old company
in 1996 when Apple bought NeXT. Steve Jobs soon became Apple's chief executive
officer and sparked resurgence in the company with products like the colorful
iMac computer and the iPod music player. Steve Jobs was also the CEO of Pixar,
the animation company responsible for movies like Toy Story and Monsters, Inc. In
2006, the Walt Disney Company purchased Pixar for $7.4 billion in stock and the
deal made Jobs the largest individual shareholder of Disney stock.
Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic
cancer in 2003 and had surgery in July of 2004. His health was in the news
again in 2008, when his extreme weight loss sparked rumors that his cancer had
recurred. Jobs refused to speak publicly about his health, but in January of
2009 he took a formal six-month leave of absence from Apple, saying that his
health problems were "more complex than I originally thought." He had
a liver transplant later that year and returned to work at Apple in June of
2009. In January of 2011 he again announced, without offering details, that he
was taking a medical leave of absence, and in August of that year he resigned
as CEO. He died five weeks later; his
official death certificate reported that Jobs died of respiratory arrest
resulting from pancreatic cancer that had spread to other organs.
The top ten achievements of Jobs' career:
1. Jobs
goes into business with Steve Wozniak and develops the first line of personal
computers called the Apple II series in the late 1970's.
2. In
the early 1980's Jobs creates Macintosh, an all-in-one desktop computer.
3. Jobs
leaves Apple and starts a new company called NextStep and founds the NeXT
Computer in 1985.
4. Jobs
buys The Graphics Group, later renamed Pixar in 1986.
5. Pixar
produces box-office hits such as "Toy Story," "A Bug's
Life," "Monster's Inc.," "Finding Nemo," "The
Incredibles," and "Ratatouille."
6. Jobs
returns to Apple in 1996 after it announces that it will buy NeXT, which
branches out and introduces other digital appliances such as the iPod portable
music player, iTunes digital music software.
7. Apple
creates the iTunes store, revolutionizing the downloading of music.
8. Apple
releases the iMac in 1998, which becomes the fastest-selling PC in history.
9. Apple
creates a line of cell phones, introducing the iPhone in 2007, which includes
the features of an iPod and its own mobile browser.
10. Apple
releases the iPad, a tablet computer that displays media such as books, music,
movies and web content.
10 Powerful Quotes from Steve Jobs:
- I’m not dismissing the value of higher education; I’m simply saying it comes at the expense of experience.
- The greatest artists like Dylan, Picasso and Newton risked failure. And if we want to be great, we’ve got to risk it too.
- How does somebody know what they want if they haven’t even seen it?
- Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you, and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
- I would rather gamble on our vision than make a ‘me, too’ product.
- We’ve got to make the small things unforgettable.
- Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently…they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.
- You’ve got to have a problem that you want to solve; a wrong that you want to right.
- It [what you choose to do] has got to be something that you’re passionate about because otherwise you won’t have the perseverance to see it through.
- In your life you only get to do so many things and right now we’ve chosen to do this, so let’s make it great.
After I read all the articles about
Steve Jobs, I found that to become a success entrepreneur, we need to have some
of the characteristics. First of all, an entrepreneur must be focus. 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 they considered important. But he would give a cold stare and
refuse to shift his focus until he was ready. Next, talent searching is also
very important for an organization to success. Steve Jobs understаnds thаt the
retаining аnd investing in people is one of the business’s most importаnt
аssets. Аnd this аttitude towаrds work mаkes employees become more loyаl аnd
gives them feeling of sаfety. Last but not least, an entrepreneur should always
has a succession planning. Steve Jobs is networker and fаcilitаtor that brings
people working together towаrd one goаl. He аlso mаde leаders from his
employees аnd empowers them so they cаn mаnаge without his help аnd orders.
Article 1
Why Is Steve Jobs Important?
Article 2
Article 3
Why Is Steve Jobs Important?
Steve Jobs is the co-founder of Apple Computers, the makers of well-designed, well-coordinated, and good-looking personal home computers.
Steve Jobs teamed together with Steve Wozniak to invent one of the first ready-made personal home computer.
Steve Jobs was also a smart business who became a multimillionaire
before the age of thirty. In 1984, Steve Jobs founded NeXT computers. In
1986, he bought the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd and
started Pixar Animation Studios.
What Impact Did Steve Jobs Have On The History of Computers?
Steve Jobs co-invented the Apple I and Apple II computers together with Steve Wozniak
(main designer) and others. The Apple II is noted as the first
commercially successful line of personal computers. In 1984, Steve
Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and others co-invented the Apple Macintosh computer, the first successful home computer with a mouse-driven graphical user.
Steve Jobs Quotes:
Woz was the first person I met who knew more about electronics than I did.
A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right
thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we
kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue
to open their wallets.
Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.
Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to
them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new.
Steve Jobs - Biography:
Steve
Jobs was born on February 24 1955, in Los Altos California. During his
high school years, Jobs worked summers at Hewlitt-Packard, it was there
that he first met his future business partner Steve Wozniak.
He studied as an undergraduate: physics, literature, and poetry, at Reed
College, Oregon, an interesting combination of subjects. Steve Jobs
formally only attended only one semester at Reed College, however, he
remained at Reed crashing on friend's sofas and auditing courses
including a calligraphy class, which he attributes as being the reason
Apple computers had such elegant typefaces.
Atari
After leaving Orefon in 1974 and returning to California, Steve Jobs started working for Atari,
an early pioneer manufacturer of personal computers. Jobs' close
personal friend Steve Wozniak was also working for Atari, and the future
founders of Apple teamed together to design games for Atari computers.
Hacking
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak
also proved their chops as hackers, and designed a telephone blue box. A
blue box was an electronic device that simulated a telephone operator's
dialing console and provided the user with free phone calls. Steve Jobs
spent plenty of time at Wozniak's Homebrew Computer Club, a haven for
computer geeks and a source of invaluable information about the field of
personal computers.
Out of Mom and Pop's Garage
Jobs and Wozniak had learned
enough to try their hand at building personal computers. Using Steve
Job's family garage as a base of operation, the team produced fifty
fully assembled computers that were sold to a local Mountain View
electronics store called the Byte Shop. The sale encouraged the pair to
found the Apple Corporation on April 1, 1979.
Apple Corporation
The Apple Corporation was named after
Steve Job's favorite fruit. The Apple logo was a representation of the
fruit with a bite taken out of it. The bite represented a play on words -
bite and byte.
During the early 80's,
Steve Jobs controlled the business side of the Apple Corporation and
Steve Wozniak, the design side. However, in 1984 a power struggle with
the board of directors caused Steve Jobs to leave Apple.
NeXT
After things at Apple got a little rotten, Steve Jobs
founded NeXT, a high-end computer company. Ironically Apple bought NeXT
in 1996, and Steve Jobs returned to Apple to serve once more as its CEO
from 1997 until his recent retirement in 2011.
The NeXT was an amazing workstation computer that sold poorly. The
world's first web browser was created on a NeXT, and the technology in
NeXT software was transferred to the Macintosh and the iPhone.
Disney Pixar
In 1986, Steve Jobs bought "The Graphics Group" from Lucasfilm's
computer graphics division for ten million dollars. The company was
later renamed Pixar. At first Jobs intended that Pixar become a high-end
graphic hardware developer, but that goal was not well achieved, and
Pixar moved on to do what it does best - make animated films. Steve Jobs
negotiated Pixar and Disney to collaborate on a number of animated
films including Toy Story. In 2006, Disney bought Pixar from Steve Jobs.
Expanding Apple
Before his death, Steve Jobs was listed as the inventor and/or
co-inventor on 342 United States patents, with technologies ranging from
computer and portable devices, user interfaces, speakers, keyboards,
power adapters, staircases, clasps, sleeves, lanyards and packages. His
last patent was issued for the Mac OS X Dock user interface and was
granted the day before his death.
Article 2
Honors and public recognition
After Apple's founding, Jobs became a symbol of his company and industry. When Time named the computer as the 1982 "Machine of the Year", the magazine published a long profile of Jobs as "the most famous maestro of the micro".
Jobs was awarded the National Medal of Technology by President Ronald Reagan in 1984, with Steve Wozniak (among the first people to ever receive the honor), and a Jefferson Award for Public Service in the category "Greatest Public Service by an Individual 35 Years or Under" (also known as the Samuel S. Beard Award) in 1987. On November 27, 2007, Jobs was named the most powerful person in business by Fortune magazine. On December 5, 2007, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver inducted Jobs into the California Hall of Fame, located at The California Museum for History, Women and the Arts.
In August 2009, Jobs was selected as the most admired entrepreneur among teenagers in a survey by Junior Achievement, having previously been named Entrepreneur of the Decade 20 years earlier in 1989, by Inc. magazine. On November 5, 2009, Jobs was named the CEO of the decade by Fortune magazine.
In September 2011, Jobs was ranked No.17 on Forbes: The World's Most Powerful People. In December 2010, the Financial Times named Jobs its person of the year for 2010, ending its essay by stating, "In his autobiography, John Sculley,
the former PepsiCo executive who once ran Apple, said this of the
ambitions of the man he had pushed out: 'Apple was supposed to become a
wonderful consumer products company. This was a lunatic plan. High-tech
could not be designed and sold as a consumer product.' How wrong can you
be".
At the time of his resignation, and again after his death, Jobs was widely described as a visionary, pioneer and genius—perhaps one of the foremost—in the field of business, innovation, and product design, and a man who had profoundly changed the face of the modern world, revolutionized at least six different industries, and who was an "exemplar for all chief executives". His death was widely mourned and considered a loss to the world by commentators across the globe.
After his resignation as Apple's CEO, Jobs was characterized as the Thomas Edison and Henry Ford of his time. In his The Daily Show eulogy, Jon Stewart
said that unlike others of Jobs's ilk, such as Thomas Edison or Henry
Ford, Jobs died young. He felt that we had, in a sense, "wrung
everything out of" these other men, but his feeling on Jobs was that
"we're not done with you yet."
Article 3
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
