Business Lessons I Learned from Steve Jobs
One of the
best techniques for success in business and in life is intelligent selection of
role models. They can serve as sources of wisdom and inspiration, as bright
lights illuminating the path to the person you want to become. In Steve Jobs I
found much that was worthy of emulation, so I decided to put together a list of
business and life lessons I learned from biographies and interviews of him.
Here they are:
1
Be bold.
When Steve was just 12, he
called the co-founder of electronics giant Hewlett-Packard to get spare parts
for a hobby project. Hewlett was so impressed in that one conversation that he
gave Steve a job that summer that started him on his career in technology.
2
Always ask, why do we do it
that way? Often the answer is just inertia: it’s done that way today because it
was done that way yesterday, not because it’s the best way. By questioning the
way things were, he became an expert at seeing how things could be better. He
envisioned desktop publishing, the networked office, and the pervasive,
transformative power of the internet long before most others.
3
Make your
own rules.
At college he skipped the
required classes and instead just took whatever interested him. (This included
a calligraphy class, which contributed to Apple’s leadership on fonts and
desktop publishing.) After a while he decided that school was too expensive for
his parents to pay for, so he stopped paying his tuition, but he was so
charismatic that the dean allowed him to audit classes and stay in a dorm with
friends, effectively going to college for free.
4
Live with
intensity.
Life is short. Don’t spend it
living someone else’s life, and don’t spend it on small matters. If something
isn’t worth doing with intensity, then it’s not worth doing at all.
5
Learn from
the best.
Steve wanted to innovate, so he
studied the leading innovators. In Apple’s early days, this was Xerox Parc, so
he visited their research labs and saw demonstrations on cutting-edge
technologies that changed the trajectory of his company, including graphical
user interfaces, object oriented programming, and networked computing.
6
Let
everything be your teacher.
Apple took the best ideas from
all fields. The early Macintosh team included people with backgrounds in music,
poetry, art, history and other liberal arts, who also happened to be among the
best programmers in the world. If not for computer science, they would’ve done
amazing things in these other fields. Bringing together diverse expertise made
the products better in countless ways.
7
Think for
yourself.
At Apple, Steve didn’t use
focus groups and did little or no market research. To be innovative, you can’t
rely on customers to tell you what to do, because they don’t know they want and
need things that don’t exist yet. You have to think for yourself, in product
innovation and all other areas of business.
8
Learn to
program.
Even if you don’t intend to
pursue a career in programming, Jobs thought it was worthwhile to learn to
program, as it helps you learn to think clearly (and provides you with
immediate feedback when you’re not). He felt a business school degree was
unnecessary for entrepreneurs, since business isn’t rocket science, and can be
learned on the job.
9
Passion is
essential to success.
When hiring, Steve looked for
some of the same traits others do, including intelligence and creativity. But
his primary recruiting criterion was a passion for the product that person
would be working on. In fact, his passion was so contagious that he was
careful to first gauge the passion of the recruiting candidate before
expressing his. Also, he emphasized that passion matters much more than money.
When Apple came up with the Macintosh, IBM was spending at least a hundred
times more than Apple on R&D, but it didn’t matter.
10
Microsoft’s Zune music player
failed. Why? Because it was worse than the iPod. But why was it worse? Because
mission matters. The Apple team loved music and art and their mission was to make
a device they themselves wanted to use. Also, they were inventing something
completely new, the first of its kind, which is a powerful motivating mission.
The Zune was neither innovative nor driven by a passionate mission, so it’s no
surprise that it failed. Really, Sony should’ve owned the MP3 player market,
but it also lacked mission; it feared cannibalization of its walk-man, and its
company divisions had separate P&L and didn’t work well together, so there
was no room for a shared mission.
11
Make something
for yourself.
Jobs and Wozniak built the
first Apple for themselves because computers at the time were too expensive for
them to afford. When their friends saw it, they wanted them too, so the Steve’s
built a kit which enabled their friends to build their computers quickly. Then
a local store wanted several dozen pre-built computers, and they realized the
retail market was a much bigger opportunity than the do-it-yourself hobbyist
market. That’s how Apple got started. Many other successful companies were also
born from entrepreneurs creating something that they wanted for themselves, or
something that removed a pain point from their lives. By starting a company
that makes a product or service you want to use, you’ll be able to better judge
its quality, and you’ll also be more passionate about it.
12
The
execution matters more than the idea.
The idea is the easy part.
Getting from a great idea to a great product requires genius, craftsmanship and
toil to navigate the problems, opportunities, interconnections, subtleties and
trade-offs. This is under-appreciated by most people because when it’s done
right, the product’s users don’t know about these complexities; the product
just works the way it should.
13
For most things in life, the
difference in magnitude between ideal and average is two to one, or less. This
isn’t the case in some fields, such as innovative technology product
development. Here, sometimes the difference is ten to one. Sometimes it’s a
difference not of magnitude but of kind, in that one person or team can do
something that another couldn’t do, even given infinite time. In these fields, A
players are much, much more valuable than B players. A company should be
prepared to pay a lot for these stars, but only if they’re capable of
differentiating quality; otherwise they might be paying A money for B players.
The additional benefit of hiring A players is that it’s self-reinforcing: A
players like working with other A players, so having A players makes it easier
to hire and retain other A players.
14
In the early days, when Jobs
couldn’t directly persuade Wozniak to quit his day job to work on the Apple
full time, Jobs persuaded Wozniak’s friends and family, and then they persuaded
Wozniak to do it. Later, when Jobs was building the world’s first automated
computer factory (which he described as machines building machines), he went to
Japan and visited not five or ten but eighty automated factories. These are
just two examples of how extraordinary results require extraordinary effort.
15
Master the
art of persuasion.
John Sculley had spent fifteen
years climbing the ranks at Pepsi, and seemed destined to spend his life there.
Jobs wanted him to join Apple, so he shattered those plans with a single
question: do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you
want to change the world? On another occasion, a Mac developer told Jobs he
couldn’t cut ten seconds off the start-up time. Jobs said, what if you could
save a life by doing it? The developer said yes, if it was a matter of life or
death he could. Jobs replied by saying that 10 seconds per day for 10 million
users is the equivalent of 100 lifetimes a year saved. The developer made it happen.
16
Build a
toolbox of techniques for getting what you want.
If logic was on his side, Steve
would use that first. If not, he would use charisma, persuasion, or sheer force
of will. Often it was a combination of all these. A lot of the tactics mentioned
in this article were also used in service of getting what he wanted: being
bold, thinking for himself, questioning everything, and making his own rules.
17
Leverage
what already exists.
As kids, Jobs and Wozniak heard
about a guy who had found a way to make free long distance phone calls, so they
scoured libraries and found an obscure technical journal at a university with
the satellite codes necessary to send instructions through AT&T’s system as
if coming from AT&T itself. After three weeks of work they had built a
device that enabled free long distance calls. The lesson they learned was that
they themselves could build something that could control billions of dollars of
existing infrastructure, that they could leverage the world.
18
Believe in
the power of technology to change the world.
As a kid, Steve was affected by
a Scientific American article he saw that listed the efficiency of locomotion
of different species. The condor was first, and the human was closer to the
middle than the top of the list. But a human on bicycle was the clear winner.
With this simple comparison he saw how humans as tool builders can amplify our
abilities and change what’s possible. Later he even used this idea in an ad,
calling Apple Computer the bicycle of the mind.
19
Act like what you do matters,
because it does. You will have some impact on the world, so let it be a
positive impact, in the service of something bigger than yourself.
20
Steve was able to convince
people of almost anything, and sometimes even to make false things true. He
could create self-fulfilling prophesies through charisma and sheer mental
force. Those around him called it his reality distortion field, and it worked
even when people were aware of it and anticipated it. They eventually accepted
it as a force of nature, like gravity.
21
First
impressions matter.
If one characteristic of your
product, your service, or yourself is high quality, people are likely to assume
the others are too. But if they see one feature or trait that’s low quality,
they’ll lower their overall impression and expectations. So impute greatness by
making sure the most prominent features, the ones people will see first, are as
high quality as possible.
22
Make
something beautiful.
Everyone creates things. You
can create beautiful things or ugly things, so why not create beautiful things?
Life isn’t just about function; aesthetics matter so let everything you do be a
work of art. What is beautiful? You get to define it for yourself. For Steve,
beauty was elegant, simple, intuitive, and powerful.
23
When
looking for role models, admire the trait, but don’t worship the person.
Don’t expect to find perfect
role models. People are complex creatures, each with much that’s worth
emulating and much that’s not. Steve Jobs was no different in this regard. He
had much to teach about how to succeed in business, but he also had many
personality traits that I wouldn’t advise modelling yourself after. With any
role model, focus on the traits they have that you think will help you move in
the direction of the career and life that you want.
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