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. Question everything. 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. Mission counts. 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 walkman, 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 Steves 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. ....to be continued Quote of the day: “Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” -- Steve Jobs
Posted on: Thu, 13 Feb 2014 03:15:00 +0000
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