Lessons from Steve

LESSONS FROM STEVE

by

Mike Lotzof

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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PUBLISHED BY:

Etram Publishing

Lessons from Steve

Copyright © 2012 Mike Lotzof

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each additional recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.

Your support and respect for the property of this author is appreciated.

Business and Professional Development Reading Material

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I am deeply grateful to Caren and Kerry who helped me edit the manuscript. Also thanks to my colleagues around the world who kept refocusing me and pushing me to get it finished.

Please note that I use Australian spelling throughout. You will see doubled letters (e.g. focussed), ou’s (e.g. colour) and ‘re’ (centre) as well as a few other differences from American spelling, except in quotations where the original spelling is retained.

Disclaimer

This eBooks has not been endorsed or supported in any way by or the estate of Steve Jobs. All of the information in the book has been obtained by interview, online research and public domain sources.

Reference to Microsoft, IBM and Sony trademarks and products is made without explicit permission, but fair use rights are claimed.

To facilitate readability, all quotations are identified through specific formatting.

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Table of Content

Preface

1. Failure isn’t fatal

2. Seeing the future

3. Creating exceptional performance

4. Performance magic

5. Delight and enchant the customer

6. Marketing matters

7. Making decisions

8. Driving innovation

Making it real – your next steps

The largest lesson I learned from Steve was that the joy in life is in the journey, and I saw him live this every day. Tim Cook, CEO Apple

"I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organise a company." Steve

Back to Table of Contents

PREFACE

Steve Jobs was a genius - a deeply flawed obsessive genius. This book gathers in one place the many lessons that Steve could have taught us had he been so inclined. But Steve rarely shared. He was extremely secretive. While his product legacy is superb, it is how he got there - the thinking behind his actions - that is so valuable to those of us who want to leap tall buildings and do amazing things.

I have never been an Apple fanatic, let alone a Jobsian acolyte, in fact the opposite was true. While I admired what Steve achieved, I was repelled by his reputation and put off by the cost of Apple products. However the Isaacson biography prompted an idea to extract Steve’s wisdom into a comprehensive, yet digestible form. There is much to learn from Steve especially in the areas of innovation, decision-making, marketing, customer fanaticism and presentation magic.

In addition to what has been published in books, there is a treasure trove of primary interview and presentation material available on-line. Unfortunately it is not easy for the time poor reader, searching for answers, to assemble all the material into a coherent format, nor are the lessons readily visible. Sometimes you need to join a lot of dots to see the underlying picture.

What follows is not a biography, but a selection of lessons that jump through time and space. Some important themes repeat across the different areas.

The world is desperate to reinvent itself. Corporations, large and small, are struggling to survive and grow. Some want to be the Apple of their field. Understanding and applying how Steve did what he did is a good start in transforming and building companies and economies. However, it is of little value to simply copy him. Our worlds are different.

To make Steve work for you, you need to dig down into his deepest thought processes. You need to explore his guiding principles. Once you truly understand them you can apply what you find to your environment.

"When you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple with all these simple solutions, you don’t really understand the complexity of the problem - your solutions are way too over-simplified and they don’t work.

Then you get into the problems and see that it’s really complicated. And you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That’s sort of the middle and that’s where most people stop, and the solutions tend to work for a while.

But the really great person will keep on going and find … the key, underlying principles of the problem - and come up with a beautiful elegant solution that works."

I encourage you to keep going. A great deal has been written about what Steve Jobs did, but none provide a coherent picture of the thought patterns and processes that allowed Steve to do what he did. There are fragments everywhere – most notably in the Isaacson biography, but as is the way with biographies, it is foremost a great narrative and the lessons are buried in the 600 pages of text.

It is impossible to simply intuit from Steve’s actions, what he was actually thinking. He rarely spoke about how he reached his decisions. He did however lay a trail of breadcrumbs – some obvious, some disguised – discoverable in hundreds of hours of interviews, presentations and digital recordings. They provide a rich primary source of insights into the guiding mind.

Lessons from Steve is the result of sifting, collating and piecing together a giant jig-saw puzzle.

Regardless of who you are, where you are in your career, what position you hold or organisation you are part of, there are Lessons from Steve that apply to you. Some of the lessons run counter to the teaching of the MBA schools, which rely on data and analytic models, instead of intuition; on formal hierarchy, instead of small teams of passionate specialists; on formal presentations instead of free-thinking; reporting instead of decision making. Steve will drive you to focus, MBAs advise diversification. Steve will give freedom to small groups of passionate people, MBAs will institute hierarchy and layers of control.

There may be things you will have to unlearn. It will take courage and perseverance to tap into skills you’ve be trained to suppress.

"Don’t be afraid, you can do it."

How to Approach the Material

After reading words of wisdom, I am often left with a sinking feeling and more questions than answers. How do I do this? How do I make it happen for me and my company? Often the response is, nice idea, but too hard, or worse, consultants arrive putting their spin on what it really means for you.

To truly appreciate how Steve did what he did, the lessons will need to be considered as a whole. Magic happens when the lessons are combined and the whole sculpture materialises, not just the nose, or foot or torso.

The ultimate secret of Steve’s success was his absolute commitment to applying his principles, in the most detailed way, to every part of his business. Success did not come because of great design, simplicity of use, powerful marketing, manipulative PR campaigns, or Steve being a cult leading savant guru. Success came because the mind-set described in the following chapters, was applied to every process, procedure and practice throughout Apple.

It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that.

While Apple’s competitors continue to focus on products, they will miss the essential difference that drives Apple’s performance - the mind set Steve created - the DNA – that permeates every cell of the Apple organism.

Make Steve work for you

While the lessons are universal, they cannot simply be applied like over-the-counter medicine. Making Steve work for you depends on the confluence of many factors, not the least being, who you are, who you want to be and the vision you will use to inspire others to help you create a vibrant, pulsating reality.

There are eight Lesson Chapters each containing multiple learnings, illustrated by reference to well documented events at Apple. Each chapter contains an introductory highlight to signpost the main themes. At the end of each chapter, in the Making Steve work for you section, are steps you could take to implement the Lessons. It is put in a broader context in the final chapter - Making it real – your next steps, which addresses the common problem we all face in taking great ideas and making them concrete. A suite of tools, including a workbook, is being developed.

Steve Jobs’ greatest legacy may not be the award winning products he spawned, but rather a mind-set he epitomised. For all the wisdom and cool toys, thank you. For all the nasty things he is reported to have done – who cares?

What not to do with the Lessons

My fear is that B Class, Steve wanabees, will take the worst elements of Steve’s character to justify bullying, ranting and raging and the belittling of others, to make themselves look good in the work place.

Steve’s defects diminished him and reduced his effectiveness. It is terrifying to think what he may have accomplished if he had not been such a self confessed ass-hole. He may still be alive – but then he would not have been Steve Jobs.

Learn from A Wise Person:

Apart from his family, the person who best knew Steve was the chief Apple designer, Jony Ives. In his eulogy for Steve held at the Apple headquarters at Cupertino, Jony touches on many of the characteristics that you will explore throughout the book.

Jony Ives Tribute

Steve used to say to me (and he used to say this a lot), Hey Jony, here’s a dopey idea. And sometimes they were — really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But sometimes they took the air from the room, and they left us both completely silent. Bold, crazy, magnificent ideas. Or quiet, simple ones which, in their subtlety, their detail, were utterly profound.

And just as Steve loved ideas, and loved making stuff, he treated the process of creativity with a rare and a wonderful reverence. I think he, better than anyone, understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished.

I loved the way that he listened so intently. I loved his perception, his remarkable sensitivity, and his surgically precise opinion. I really believe there was a beauty in how singular, how keen his insight was, even though sometimes it could sting.

As I’m sure many of you know Steve didn’t confine his sense of excellence to making products. When we travelled together, we would check in and I’d go up to my room. And I’d leave my bags very neatly by the door. And I wouldn’t unpack. And I would go and sit on the bed. I would go and sit on the bed next to the phone. And I would wait for the inevitable phone call: Hey Jony, this hotel sucks. Let’s go.

He used to joke that the lunatics had taken over the asylum, as we shared a giddy excitement spending months and months working on a part of a product that nobody would ever see. Not with their eyes. We did it because we really believed it was right because we cared. He believed that there was a gravity, almost a sense of civic responsibility, to care way beyond any sort of functional imperative.

While the work hopefully appeared inevitable, appeared simple and easy, it really cost. It cost us all, didn’t it? But you know what? It cost him most. He cared the most. He worried the most deeply. He constantly questioned, Is this good enough? Is this right? And despite all his successes, all his achievements, he never assumed that we would get there in the end. When the ideas didn’t come, and when the prototypes failed, it was with great intent, with faith, that he decided to believe we would eventually make something great.

But the joy of getting there! I loved his enthusiasm, his simple delight (often, I think, mixed with some relief) that, yeah, we got there. We got there in the end and it was good. You can see his smile, can’t you? The celebration of making something great for everybody, enjoying the defeat of cynicism, the rejection of reason, the rejection of being told a hundred times, You can’t do that. So his, I think, was a victory for beauty, for purity, and, as he would say, for giving a damn.

He was my closest and my most loyal friend. We worked together for nearly fifteen years. (And he still laughed at the way I say aluminium.)

For the past two weeks, we’ve all been struggling to find ways to say goodbye. This morning I simply want to end by saying, Thank you, Steve. Thank you for your remarkable vision, which has united and inspired this extraordinary group of people. For all that we have learned from you, and for all that we will continue to learn from each other: Thank you, Steve.

Back to Table of Contents

1. FAILURE ISN’T FATAL

Highlights

Failure is the handmaiden to success. In Failure isn’t Fatal we explore how Steve:

managed his big failures

learnt from his failures to change himself and how he managed

created a mind set in Apple where failure is not to be feared.

The Core:

embrace the risk of failure

persevere

learn from your mistakes and adapt

Steve endured a number of very public and private failures. He understood that success demands embracing the risk of failure that accompanies bold endeavour and that persistence and perseverance are essential when failure smacks you in the teeth. Steve could have quit before getting started. It would have been easy to give up when:

"we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.’"

Steve had the courage and determination to push on in spite of rejection and against the advice of others because he didn’t know that what he was about to do was impossible.

If wealth is a measure then Steve never failed. When he was booted from Apple, he was worth over USD150 million. Sure, it is easier to be courageous with millions in your pocket but, to a driven narcissistic personality, this very public rejection was a brutal failure.

"it is not our successes but our failures that define us. How we choose to deal with failure, learn from it and grow because it makes us who we really are."

In most of us, fear of failure drives conservative, risk-averse behaviour. Steve never let it stop him. He was never deterred when failure slapped him in the face. He was driven to succeed in spite of his failures and perhaps a deep need to be proven right and win approval.

Steve’s failures – large and small – changed his approach and shaped how and what he did.

Three Huge Failures

Apple 1985

Steve was fired from Apple because he made too many mistakes. He frightened and upset important, conservative people, who were concerned with the proper governance of a public company. He was involved in a clash of cultures between creative iconoclast and the traditional grey suited corporate executives. And there were justified doubts about his managerial competence.

Both Steve and the Apple board knew he was a poor CEO so Steve personally recruited a professional, Sculley, from Pepsi. Steve lured him using a classic piece of emotive language dosed with passion and charisma.

"Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?"

Steve was as far apart in style and method from Sculley and the board as could be imagined; setting up a fundamental clash of cultures that Steve failed to understand. He fell into the abyss between suits and creative mavericks.

Steve also failed to sell his vision to the board. Boards in the main are conservative, imagination free and too often self-preserving (serving). Boards also operate within cycles of quarterly reporting and profit expectations that are completely foreign constraints to creative mavericks. Invention and innovation is often a multi-year process with no certainty of commercial success. Boards have short decision and performance cycles. Invention and creation do not.

He was fired because of poor business decisions, his obsession with keeping control and his vile behaviour. In 1984, for Steve costs were not a limiting factor – adherence to the holy writ of design purity and quality was everything.

Steve called a board expecting Sculley would be leaving – after all it was Steve’s company. He had founded it. He was wrong. He was out of touch. His belief in himself was so absolute that he only heard his own voice as he followed his vision that he was changing the world.

His interpersonal behaviour was unacceptable. He was obsessive, narcissistic, domineering and arrogant. To employees he was dismissive, rude, insensitive and demeaning. He drove his Mac team to the point of exhaustion – fertile grounds for harassment and bullying lawsuits in our world.

Steve was indifferent to the rules that were there for other people. He refused to have number plates on his car, was cavalier about governance of the company, had strange attitude to personal hygiene, how he lived, dressed and ate. He knew and deliberately disregarded societal and corporate conventions. To others he was not just eccentric, which is to be expected of inventor types. He was so different as to be seen as weird and dangerous.

The successful, genial maverick will be tolerated and gently constrained. Steve was not genial. On the scale of maverick he was off the charts, so when he failed, his failures triggered all the animosities and fears that the self absorbed genius generates in the less creative.

One of the golden rules of investing in new inventions is to bring in professional management to manage the inventor. Steve was uncontrollable and the conflict tore Apple apart. Sales and profit failures had the inevitable consequence that the prophet would be