A large part of being a great leader comes with the anticipation of unexpected problems and a willingness to tackle them. But really, what it all boils down to is people skills and innovation. The fluid mindset of a leader is far more important than any rigid practices or principles.
But what qualities make a truly good leader? Apple is nothing short of an industry-defining feat of entrepreneurship, spearheaded by one man and his compelling leadership style. That man? Steve Jobs. What made Apple such a distinct brand amidst a world of fast-growing tech companies was its simplicity — a brainchild of Jobs and his artistic flair.
More than that, he was a man of his people, a hard worker by heart and a creative who fell deeply in love with his work. He was an entrepreneur that would go on to inspire generations of businesspeople long after his death. But what else made Jobs such a deeply respected, entrepreneurial maverick?
See, unlike Branson, Jobs was reluctant to delegate. He wanted to be interwoven in every tiny fibre that formed the backbone of his company, driving it forward and remaining at the forefront of every new venture. As a business grows alongside these responsibilities and demands more and more work, delegating tasks to others becomes an ever-tantalising prospect.
With so many balls to juggle, enlisting the help of other staff members to take the load off our back seems like a tempting offer. Of course, it was necessary to a degree, as with any large-scale company requiring an expansive workforce. But even with the groundbreaking advances that Apple has seen since its birthday in , Jobs remained as ingrained in his company as he possibly could right from the get-go.
Of course, delegating jobs to others in your company is important. Delegation is sometimes necessary, but you have a job to do.
It seemed obvious to them after a while. Call it imposter syndrome, but this premise still renders true. Creatives often consider their inventions to be obvious, but few see life through the same lens as them. Some of the greatest innovations in history come from this exact principle: combining one idea with another to spawn a novel creation. With the iPhone, for instance, Jobs took his love for calligraphy and design and amalgamated it with his passion for technology.
What followed was the first tech company to place such a meticulous focus on design and aesthetics. How can this principle be extrapolated and utilised in the workplace, though? Well, often it just requires us to take a step back. But how can we see room for improvement without stepping back and looking at the bigger picture? Take Airbnb, for instance. The idea of online property rental is nothing new. But combining that idea with an attractive user interface, easy-to-use platform and internal rating system?
Every innovative idea takes a problem and provides a solution. For Apple, that problem was that tech was ugly. It was bulky and unattractive. Jobs took the idea of a computer and made it better. Every great business solves a key problem for its consumer base, and solving problems is often a case of simply marrying together two ideas to create something unique.
No, instead you should be prepared to get your hands dirty from time to time. There has to be balance within a company, however. Jobs was a master at both leading by example and empowering and inspiring his staff to complete tasks on their own. He became a role model for his workforce by demonstrating characteristics he wished to see them display, like his meticulous attention to detail..
See, every good company has a mission statement. But every great company has a workforce built up by individuals that know that mission statement by heart and use their every working hour to drive it forward. By remaining an integral part of Apple from start to finish, regularly dropping in to check up on his staff members and chipping in with new ideas, Jobs enabled that mission statement to permeate across all employees of his workforce.
Keeping them informed will help to maintain morale and empower your clients. Furthermore, as a leader, you should seek to remain as closely tied-in with your company as you can. Avoid running things from afar if you wish to keep your workforce engaged and inspired. Instead, nurture relationships with valued staff members and ensure to stay present throughout the growth and development of your business. At Idea Drop , we firmly believe that senior leaders should endeavour to remain active participants in the innovation process by suggesting ideas, providing feedback and essentially leading by example.
It is the best way to motivate and empower your staff to keep coming up with brilliant ideas with impact. 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 to , 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. It happened at Apple when Sculley came in, which was my fault, and it happened when Ballmer took over at Microsoft. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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 , 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.
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. 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 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 million or so hours a year—the equivalent of at least 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 stared unblinking at Weeks. You can do it. He knew that people form an opinion about a product or a company on the basis of how it is presented and packaged.
When he was getting ready to ship the Macintosh in , 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. 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. The handle signaled permission to touch the iMac. 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.
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. 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. A similar thing happened as Jobs and Ive were finishing the iPad. At one point Jobs looked at the model and felt slightly dissatisfied. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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.
Was all his stormy and abusive behavior necessary? Probably not. For you. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options. Get the Insider App. Click here to learn more. A leading-edge research firm focused on digital transformation. Good Subscriber Account active since Shortcuts. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile. Log out. US Markets Loading H M S In the news.
Dylan Love. A different kind of FDA. His 5-star hotel room wasn't up to his standards so he immediately got out of it.
He chewed out a poor Whole Foods employee for no apparent reason. He wanted nothing to do with his daughter for a long time. When his parents dropped him off at college, he never said goodbye. He fired people without notice. He short-changed his best friend on a bonus. He never gave one of the earliest Apple employees stock options. He would harass people interviewing for work. Steve Jobs fired the guy in charge of MobileMe in front of a crowd of Apple employees.
Jobs got in a huge fight with his ad team over what the iPad commercials should look like. Why was Jobs such a rude person? He also nearly blew up his third grade teacher.
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