What can we learn from Apple’s late, lamented genius Steve Jobs? After his death, many eulogisers – like Eric Jackson and Gene Marks at Forbes magazine – quoted his famous address at Stanford University in 2005, as did Megan McArdle in The Atlantic (http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/follow-your-bliss-sort-of/246350/) when she rebuked him for advising students to “follow their bliss” – i.e. pursue their dreams. Good advice if you are the next Steve Jobs, McArdle noted tartly, but most people aren’t.
For Jackson, (http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2011/09/19/the-top-ten-lessons-steve-jobs-can-teach-us-if-well-listen/) Jobs was an inspiring CEO who taught us never to fear failure, not to rely on focus groups or worry about being right all the time, but to hire the best, expect a lot from yourself and others, rely on hard work and vision and trust your inner voice.
Obviously his formula for success must have been more complicated than that. Jobs has changed the way we live, work and play more profoundly than any entrepreneur since Henry Ford. And he did that, partly because, Marks noted (http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2011/10/10/steve-jobs-was-a-jerk-good-for-him/ ) he was also a jerk – “and good for him”. Jobs liked to be in control, didn’t suffer fools gladly and became America’s most inspiring CEO while outsourcing a lot of manufacturing to China.
So what lessons can we draw from this complex story? At Stanford (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/oct/09/steve-jobs-stanford-commencement-address?newsfeed=true ), he urged students to listen to the small voice inside them. He heard that voice when he was at Atari in the 1970s and kept listening to it even after his boss Joe Keenan had rejected his idea for a personal computer by shouting: “Get your feet off my desk, get out of here, you stink and we’re not going to buy your product.”
Impatient in meetings, Jobs could be patient when it counted: it would be eight years before the launch of the Apple Macintosh vindicated him and 12 years – between 1985 and 1997 – before his return from exile after John Sculley (the CEO he had hired!) had effectively fired him. At first, he thought of fleeing Silicon Valley but then he realised: “I had been rejected but I still loved what I did.” And so, like the many print tycoons who can’t bear to leave, Jobs stuck to what he loved.
His second coming at Apple was transformational. When first presented with the iPod, he didn’t marvel, he weighed it in his hand and said: “It’s too big”. As engineers protested, he dropped the prototype into a fish tank, pointed to the bubbles floating from it and said: “That means there’s still some space in it. It’s too big. End of conversation.” He still trusted his instincts
The trouble with the inner voice theory is that not all inner voices are as inspired as Jobs’s – as the deluded and misguided who audition for The X Factor’s theatre of cruelty prove every summer. Yet if you read biographies of successful business leaders, the existence of an inner voice – or some other strain of magical insight – is a recurring theme.
Jobs followed one of Tom Peters’ maxims. In his business bestseller In Search Of Excellence, published two years before the Mac was launched, the guru advised managers to “Stick to the knitting” – stay with the business you know. Jobs never strayed too far from the business he understood best: how consumers used digital technology, a subject on which he was as visionary as Einstein was about physics. (He realised, far earlier than Gates, that personal computers would become consumer goods and that “taste” – which he felt Microsoft severely lacked – would be crucial.) The technology took Apple into music and smartphones but Jobs never diversified far beyond that.
The shelves of Waterstones bulge with books promising to make you an inspirational business leader. But their sheer abundance is telling evidence that there is no right way to the top. (For example, Jobs, Gates, Larry Ellison and Michael Dell all failed to finish college, proof that in the US an expensive college education wasn’t a prerequisite for success.) Some CEOs argue privately that management is not a transferable skill but incredibly specific: you may understand the nuances – and make profitable use of the information at hand – as the boss of a wide-format printing company, but that doesn’t mean you could read the runes in the oil business.
Jobs has left us one powerful lesson. Whether you believe we should all follow our dreams or not, he had a point when he said: “Your time is limited so don’t waste it living someone else’s life”. The message for any business leader is surely: be yourself. That doesn’t mean you can’t be better, or learn from others, but there’s no point in trying to be the next Steve Jobs or the new anyone else.