After Steve Jobs died, his friend Larry Ellison was
asked by Kara Swisher what were the key things that we – regular people – could
learn from him.
Ellison’s answer went something like: “There will never
be another Steve Jobs. We can’t be the special person he was. We are who we are and just have to appreciate
how great he was.”
I agree that it would be silly to start a graduate
degree program in “Being Steve Jobs.” We
would look at the graduates from the program and shake our heads, saying
“he/she reminds me nothing of Steve.”
We will never have the same charisma as he did when we
give a speech – even if we wore black turtlenecks, blue jeans, and copied his
cadence and tone of his speech. (And, to be fair, on the flip-side, we’ll
probably never chew people out the way he did.)
But, with all that said, it struck me the other day out
of the blue that Steve’s been gone from this Earth for over a year now. He’s of course not forgotten. We refer to him all the time whenever we
discuss Apple (AAPL) – mostly to complain that the current team isn’t doing
things (or doing things) that Steve would (or wouldn’t).
I remember how inspired by him I was when he was alive
and how sad I was when he died – even though I’d never met him. I remember, at the time of his death, saying
to myself I needed to remember all the things that made him – in my eyes,
anyway – a great person/executive/leader and try to incorporate those lessons
in my life.
I don’t want to be Steve Jobs, but I want to learn from
Steve Jobs.
As I reflected about this the other day, I tried to
recall off the top of my head the biggest life lessons I should try to always
carry with me in life. Of course, we all
get busy and it’s difficult to always be conscious of key things we need to
hold on to.
I sat down and wrote this list of Steve’s life lessons
to remind me:
1. He loved what he did – his company, the people who
worked there, their products – and couldn’t have done anything else.
Sure he became a billionaire over time when he brought
Apple back from the brink of bankruptcy, but I don’t think Steve could have
done anything else. He wouldn’t have done anything else. Apple was his calling
— even after he got fired from the company.
We all have bad jobs at one point or another in our lives. But the big
question you have to ask yourself is: am I in the right job for me? Have I
found the right company? Is this the right set of people I want to be with?
Will this lead to fulfilling work and thus a fulfilling career? If yes, great.
If no, change things quick. Life doesn’t go on forever (as we also saw from
Steve). Get on your right path now.
2. Don’t tolerate bozos around you.
Throughout his life, Steve had a great “bozo” detector.
He did a super job of not letting bozos proliferate at his companies. He weeded
them out if they were there – until they weren’t. You’ll never be perfect at it and neither was
Steve but the key thing is that bozos sap energy from you and the best people
in the company working with you. Bozos make bozo decisions. Bozos hire worse
bozos beneath them. Stamp them out.
Don’t let them take root around you.
3. You can’t do it all yourself.
Between Steve Jobs’ first stint at Apple and his last,
he became a much better manager of people.
He still could tear the hide off someone if he didn’t think they did
their job, but his outbursts were far fewer and far less hostile later in life
than before. He learned you can’t do it all yourself in your career — at least
not if you want to see your work succeed on a massive scale. You need people. They must be talented. They must be inspired.
They must be held accountable. They must be given the opportunity to succeed
and fail on their own and not just be a puppet for your will. In short, you have to learn to be a great
leader and manager of people if you want to see your great ideas and hard work
truly have a huge impact on the world.
4. If you want to sell an idea, product or service, put
yourself in the other person’s shoes.
If you had to pick one thing that was special about
Steve and Apple compared to all the companies that came before it, you’d have
to say it was that Apple – more than any other company of our time – was always
the best at dreaming up a new product that we never could have imagined
beforehand but seemed so natural to us the first time we held it. That’s empathy. That’s seeing the world not
as it is but as it should be. It’s
started from that first touch the user has with a product and says “ahh” to the
beginning and building what is needed which may look nothing like what exists
today.
5. Be the best at your niche in the world but don’t be
so exclusive that a majority of the world can’t experience it.
One of the things Steve learned with his first stint at
Apple and then at NeXT was that he produced some amazing technology – that cost
way too much money for most people to buy.
The technology was beautiful. The Mac faithful loved it. And yet
Microsoft (MSFT) continued to dominate the bulk of the market because it cost
less and was good enough. Jobs really
took that to heart when he came back to Apple.
Not only were the iPod, iPhone, and iPad completely new and exciting —
they were aggressively priced. People
expected the new iPad to cost over $1,000. When it was close to half of that,
people were shocked. Competitors could
only win share back by making no profit on their tablets in response. Apple still found a way to make money at
their lower price. You can have the best
ideas in the world for whatever your niche is but it won’t make a think unless
you find a way to get it in front of people.
With the Internet today, you can be a hat maker in Timbuktu but – if
you’ve got something good – people will be able to find you. Just make sure
your stuff isn’t wildly over-priced when they do find you.
6. You don’t beat the competition at their game. You
redefine the game.
How did Apple go from being 3 months away from being
shut down to introducing the iPhone 10 years later? They didn’t play the computer game the way
everyone said they needed to play it.
Napster was created and made music essentially free. Apple created the
next “Walkman” in the iPod which forced users to pay for music. Dell was the dominant PC player during much
of that time, selling bland looking computers with no middle man to keep costs
down. Apple created a bunch of Apple
stores. This was as radical as if Google
decided today that they were going to build a bunch of Google stores. The leading smart phones before the iPhone
all had physical keyboards like the BlackBerry, Palm Treo, Good technology, and
the first versions of Google’s Android.
Apple came up with something utterly different. So much so that most people referred to it in
the first couple of years as the “Jesus Phone.”
Don’t just beat the competition. Think different to create a new game.
7. Don’t mess around with your health.
I once was chatting with someone about the lessons Steve
Jobs’ life could teach us. I ran through a list of business ideas. He stopped
me in said: “you’re forgetting the most important lesson from his life: don’t
mess around with your health, especially when doctors give you serious
advice.” And he was right. It’s great to
celebrate Steve’s life and learn from it now but, the fact is, he should still
be here. And he probably would still be
here if he had aggressively treated his cancer, like his doctors wanted, when
they first found it. Instead, Steve messed around with a bunch of naturopathic
solutions that weren’t effective. When he
finally decided to take his doctors’ original advice, too much time had past to
save him.
8. Never rest on your laurels.
Apple went from death’s door to the dominant player in
mobile in about 10 years. And, once they
reached the top, their competitors seemed to implode including Research In
Motion (RIMM), Motorola, Sony and HTC.
Most companies in that situation would have eased up. The CEOs and
senior managers would have taken time out to pose for Fortune magazine covers
and gone on about 8 different corporate boards each to further raise their
profile and cash in on their success. When
the world is worshipping you, you take your foot off the gas. You figure that
you can coast for a little bit — especially after 10 tough years of rebuilding
the company. Apple did none of that. And even though they didn’t, they’re still
in a hug dog fight right now against Samsung and Google (GOOG). Just imagine if they had decided to mail it
in for a few years after shipping the iPhone.
9. It’s not just the package but also the presentation.
Steve Jobs was almost mythical the way could do a
presentation. There really wasn’t any equal of his in the last 50 years I can
think of. Apple critics didn’t like the
way this aspect of Apple and Jobs got so much attention. They would constantly
refer to their products they liked instead (Microsoft or Google) and list off
all the product or performance features which were better in their views to
Apple’s. They claimed that Jobs had cast some kind of shaman-like spell over
others and if you peeled that away, you’d see that their product was better.
Rather than hate the showman-like aspect of Jobs though, better to appreciate
it. It’s about the steak and the
sizzle. You’ve got to have a good steak
– no matter what business you’re in. However, it’s only human nature to be attracted
by the sizzle as well. Jobs wasn’t the
first business person to figure this out. A guy named P.T. Barnum was pretty
good at it too. Instead of complaining that it’s not fair others don’t give you
as much respect because your company has no sizzle, why not try to create some
yourself in addition to your solid products?
10. Are you doing work you’d be proud to show your
friends and family?
At the end of the day, all big companies allow their
employees to hide from responsibility and accountability. That’s why so many big companies fail — their
leaders get disconnected from what’s happening on the ground in their
businesses and no one is course-correcting where the problems are. Apple has a great way of pushing down
responsibility to a few people in each area and then holding them responsible
for those areas. That doesn’t mean it
always go perfectly as the Maps episode last year shows. However, notice that
there was a consequence for that failure with the departure of certain
people. The bottom line rule of thumb
here is: are you doing work on something you’d be proud to show your most
discerning friends and family? Across
product groups and job functions, the great thing about Apple is that they were
able to achieve that high bar across so many people in their large company.
