What can we learn from the great Steve Jobs?

The visionary Apple founder continues to inspire would-be tech entrepreneurs long after his death in 2011. The Grant McGregor team considers what we can learn from the way he approached his work, his ideas about innovation and his fanatical attention to detail.

Last month, President Biden posthumously awarded the USA’s highest civilian honour to the tech entrepreneur and Apple founder Steve Jobs. The Medal of Freedom(1) was awarded to Jobs because of his exemplary contribution to the United States.

Steve Jobs founded Apple in April 1976. The business was an early success. After the company launched the Apple II in 1977, sales skyrocketed – from $2 million to $600 million by 1981. In that year, Apple went public. Two years later, the fledgling business entered the Fortune 500. At the time, no other business had risen so quickly.

To prepare Apple for its public launch, Steve Jobs had asked former Pepsi-Cola CEO John Sculley to lead the business. However, when sales of the Apple Macintosh were disappointing, in 1985 Sculley persuaded Apple’s board of directors to push Steve Jobs out of Apple.

Steve Jobs moved on to invest in the NEXTSTEP computer business and then to invest $10 million of his personal fortune to buy Pixar, a struggling graphics supercomputing company owned by George Lucas. His gambles paid off.

Pixar company released “Toy Story” in 1995. The movie revolutionised the market for computer-animated films. Pixar went public with a record-breaking offering and, in 2006, the Walt Disney Company purchased Pixar for $7.4 billion. It made Steve Jobs the legendary company’s largest single shareholder, holding around seven percent of Disney’s stock.

Around this time, Apple’s new CEO, Gilbert Amelio, bought Steve Jobs’ NEXTSTEP business for $400 million after he bought into the potential Steve Jobs had identified for its operating system to replace the Macintosh’s aging OS.

Gilbert Amelio brought Steve Jobs back to Apple as a consultant and, a year later, in June 1997, the Apple board invited Steve Jobs to once again lead the company that he had co-founded. It was the start of an amazing period for Apple. Under Steve Jobs, the company launched the iMac, the iPod, the iTunes store, the iPhone and the iPad. All of which led to it becoming the first publicly traded company to reach a $1 trillion market value – although this was, sadly, a number of years after Jobs’ untimely death.

The Harvard Business Review(2) says, “His saga is the entrepreneurial creation myth writ large… 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.”

We’ve tried to collate some of his wisdom and insights over the years here.

#1. Marketing as an event

The launch of the Apple Macintosh in 1984 is now acclaimed as the archetype for modern marketing. This type of theatrical product launch has now become commonplace in the tech industry. Theatre took a major role in Apple’s marketing – the company’s commitment to customer experience paved the way for celebrating the “unboxing” experience.

#2. Ask for help

“I’ve never found anybody who didn’t want to help me if I asked them for help,” Steve Jobs explained(3) in 1994, before relating the story of how, as a twelve year old, he called up Bill Hewlett from technology business Hewlett Packard to request spare parts to build a frequency counter and ended up getting an internship.

“Most people never pick up the phone and call; most people never ask. And that’s what separates the people who do things from the people who just dream about them.”

#3. Pay it forward

Steve Jobs believed in asking for help, but he also believed in helping those who ask for help. In that 1994 interview, he explained, “When people ask me, I try to be responsive and pay that debt of gratitude back.”

#4. Ask pertinent questions

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he stopped producing 70 percent of its product lines. Instead, he focused on four key products which each addressed a particular consumer need. How did he decide which to focus on? By asking a very simple question(4): Who is Apple and where do we fit in this world?

#5. Focus your energies

Steve Jobs believed that deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do – and that is as true for products as it is companies. Apple’s marketing brochure for the Apple II declared that “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”(5).

It was a philosophy shared by Apple’s industrial designer, Jony Ive(6). Both men sought a simplicity that was not superficial; one that cuts deep to the very heart of utility. It is the simplicity that comes from mastering complexity rather than ignoring it. And it is evident in the industry-leading design of Apple’s products.

#6. Intuition is powerful

Steve Jobs believed that as product designers, Apple’s task was “to read things that are not yet on the page.”

He emphasised the difference between caring deeply about what customers want and continually asking them what they want. Drawing on the assertion often attributed to Henry Ford(7) that “If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me they wanted a faster horse!”, Steve Jobs eschewed focus groups and market research.

Instead, innovation at Apple depended heavily on his own intuition about what consumers wanted. And he believed intuition to be very powerful(8) – more powerful than intellect.

#7. Think different

A similar vein of thought ran through Apple’s famous 1997 “Think Different” commercial, which concluded, “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

#8. Don’t be afraid to take risks or offend people

Steve Jobs was disappointed in the speed of change delivered under President Barack Obama, reportedly saying, “He’s having trouble leading because he’s reluctant to offend people or piss them off… that’s not a problem I ever had.”

In fact, Steve Jobs was criticised for his management style from time to time. He had a reputation of being tough on people. But when questioned by biographer Walter Isaacson(9), Steve Jobs replied, “Look at the results… 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 brutalised. But they don’t… And we got some amazing things done.”

Monday, 22 August 2022