That personality was integral to his way of doing business, Isaacson writes, but the real lessons from Steve Jobs come from what he actually accomplished. His saga is the entrepreneurial creation myth writ large: Along the way he helped to transform seven industries: 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.
In the months since my biography of Jobs came out, countless commentators have tried to draw management lessons from it. Some of those readers have been insightful, but I think that many of them especially those with no experience in entrepreneurship fixate too much on the rough edges of his personality.
The essence of Jobs, I think, is that his personality was integral to his way of doing business. His petulance and impatience were part and parcel of his perfectionism. One of the last times I saw him, after I had finished writing most of the book, I asked him again about his tendency to be rough on people.
And as he battled his final illness, Jobs was surrounded by an intensely loyal cadre of colleagues who had been inspired by him for years and a very loving wife, sister, and four children. So I think the real lessons from Steve Jobs have to be drawn from looking at what he actually accomplished.
I once asked him what he thought was his most important creation, thinking he would answer the iPad or the Macintosh. Instead he said it was Apple the company. Making harvard business review pdf 2015 hindi enduring company, he said, was both far harder and more important than making a great product. How did he do it? Business schools will be studying that question a century from now. Here are what I consider harvard business review pdf 2015 hindi keys to his success.
When Jobs returned to Apple init was producing a random array bangladeshi movie common gender music computers and peripherals, including a dozen different versions of the Macintosh.
All other products should be canceled. There was a stunned silence. But by getting Apple to focus on making just four computers, he saved the company. Jobs would write them down—and then cross off the ones he decreed dumb. After much jockeying, the group would come up with a list of He relentlessly filtered out what he considered distractions. Colleagues and family members would at times be exasperated as they tried to get him harvard business review pdf 2015 hindi deal with issues—a legal problem, a medical diagnosis—they considered important.
But he would give a cold stare and refuse to shift his laserlike focus until he was ready. Near the end of his life, Jobs was visited at home by Larry Page, who was about to resume control of Google, the company he had cofounded.
Even though their companies were feuding, Jobs was willing to give some advice. Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up, he told Page.
What are the five products you want to focus on? To see what that means, compare any Apple software with, say, Microsoft Word, which keeps getting uglier and more cluttered with nonintuitive navigational ribbons and intrusive features.
Jobs learned to admire simplicity when he was working the night shift at Atari as a college dropout. The only instructions for its Star Trek game were: Insert quarter.
Avoid Klingons. Hovey complied. Jobs aimed for the simplicity that comes from conquering, rather than merely ignoring, complexity. Achieving this depth of simplicity, he realized, would produce a machine that felt as if it deferred to users in a friendly way, rather than challenging them.
They knew that simplicity is not merely a minimalist style or the removal of clutter. In order to eliminate screws, buttons, or excess navigational screens, it was necessary to understand profoundly the role each element played. During the design of the iPod interface, Jobs tried at every meeting to find ways to cut clutter. He insisted on being able to get to whatever he wanted in three clicks. One navigation screen, for example, asked users whether they wanted to search by song, album, or artist.
At first the team members were taken aback, but then they realized the button was unnecessary. Likewise, when Jobs was shown a cluttered set of proposed navigation screens for iDVD, which allowed users to burn video onto a disk, he jumped up and drew a simple rectangle on a whiteboard.
You drag your video into the window. In looking for industries or categories ripe for disruption, Jobs always asked who was making products more complicated than they should be. In portable music players and ways to acquire songs online fit that description, leading to the iPod and the iTunes Store. Mobile phones were next. Jobs would grab a phone at a meeting and rant correctly that nobody could possibly figure out how to navigate half the features, including the address book.
At the end of his career he was setting his sights on the television industry, which had made it almost impossible for people to click on a simple device to watch what they wanted when they wanted.
Jobs knew that the best way to achieve simplicity was to make sure that hardware, software, and peripheral devices were seamlessly integrated. An Apple ecosystem—an iPod connected to a Mac with iTunes software, for example—allowed devices to be simpler, syncing to be smoother, and glitches to be rarer. The more complex tasks, such as making new playlists, could be done on the computer, allowing the iPod to have fewer functions and buttons.
Jobs and Apple took end-to-end responsibility for the user experience—something too few companies do. From the performance of the ARM microprocessor in the iPhone to the act of buying that phone in an Apple Store, every aspect of the customer experience was tightly linked together. Both Microsoft in the s and Google in the past few years have taken a more open approach that allows their operating systems and software to be used by various hardware manufacturers.
That has sometimes proved the better business model. But Jobs fervently believed that it was a recipe for to use his technical term harvard business review pdf 2015 hindi products. Being in the Apple ecosystem could be as sublime as walking in one of the Zen gardens of Kyoto that Jobs loved. But it was also driven by his passion for perfection and making elegant products. It was an approach that did not always maximize short-term profits, but in a world filled with junky devices, inscrutable error messages, and annoying interfaces, it led to astonishing products marked by delightful user experiences.
Being in the Apple ecosystem could be as sublime as walking in one of the Zen gardens of Kyoto that Jobs loved, and neither experience was created by worshipping at the altar of openness or by letting a thousand harvard business review pdf 2015 hindi bloom.
The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first. It also knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind. That happened when Jobs built the original iMac. People with PCs were downloading and swapping music and then ripping and burning their own CDs. The result was the combination of iTunes, the iTunes Store, and the iPod, which allowed users to buy, share, manage, store, and play music better than they could with any other devices.
After the iPod became a huge success, Jobs spent little time relishing it. Instead he began to worry about what might endanger it. One possibility was that mobile phone makers would start adding music players to their handsets.
So he cannibalized iPod sales by creating the iPhone. At his first retreat with the Macintosh team, he began by writing holstenen maxim on his whiteboard: And in the long run he got the balance harvard business review pdf 2015 hindi Focus on making the product great and the profits will follow. John Sculley, who ran Apple from towas a marketing and sales executive from Pepsi.
He focused more on profit maximization than on product design after Jobs left, and Apple gradually declined. They make some great products, but then the sales and marketing people take over the company, because they are the ones who can juice up profits. 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 puna sandro silva zippy lora. But the products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these harvard business review pdf 2015 hindi 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 harvard business review pdf 2015 hindi, 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 harvard business review pdf 2015 hindi he was studying Buddhism in India as a college dropout.
Sometimes that meant that Jobs used a one-person focus group: He made products that he and his friends wanted.
For example, there were many portable music players around inbut 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.
Harvard business review pdf 2015 hindi 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 diams album s.o.s. 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.