Mere mortals dream
of changing the world; Steve Jobs, however, hoped to "make a dent in the
universe." Partly because of an
ambition that knew no earthly bounds, Jobs became one of the towering giants of
the twentieth century and beyond - the focus of business case studies, tech
newsletters, industry forums, and innumerable other venues. It's telling that Walter Isaacson, the author
of well-regarded biographies of Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin,
considered Jobs a worthwhile subject.
By borrowing - or
stealing - the concept of the graphical user interface from Xerox, then greatly
improving on it, Jobs helped bring useful and intuitive computers to the
masses. Later the iPod changed how music
is stored and consumed. Apple sold an
astounding 90 million iPhones - also known as "the Jesus phone" -
over the first three and a half years of existence, collecting about half of
all the profits for the global mobile phone industry. The company later sold a mind-boggling 15
million iPads in the nine months after its release, among the most successful
product launches in history. Thanks to
all these interwoven successes, Apple has recently become the most valuable
company by market capitalization in history, and has had a social and cultural
influence to match its financial glory.
Not only did he
play a central role in revolutionizing the computer industry, Jobs also upended
a range of other businesses. After he
took command of Pixar, then fast approaching bankruptcy, it quickly became the
gold standard in animation, creating hit after amazing hit, both critically and
commercially. Pixar was so spectacularly
successful that even the vaunted Disney, long the standard bearer in animated
movies, could no longer match the upstart studio, and bought it for the
princely sum of $7.4 billion. Moreover,
Isaacson notes, the transaction had the feel of a reverse takeover, with the
creative team at Pixar taking control of Disney's legendary animation studio.
More recently, he
helped bring change to several sectors of the publishing industry. The sheer reach of the iPhone and iPad
together made the "app" business model viable. Somewhat walled off from the worldwide web, applications
have changed many business models in an online world, allowing magazine publishers,
for example, to charge money for an exclusive readerly experience, and giving
book publishers a further outlet for their literary wares. In addition, Jobs entered the old and difficult retail industry
and achieved wild success. By employing
his famous eye for detail - only stone from a specific quarry near Florence,
Italy is good enough for Apple stores, Jobs decreed - he created Apple stores,
which broke a record for fastest march to $1 billion in sales, including
Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue store, which grosses more than any other location in
the world.
The Apple
co-founder's unparalleled accomplishments came despite his many glaring
defects. Jobs, nearly everyone agrees,
was petty, needlessly cruel, unreasonable, disloyal, unpredictable, and often
flat-out weird. Indeed, he often cried,
and for long stretches of time, rarely bathed.
Name a character flaw, and Jobs probably suffered from it - and the
people around him suffered because of it.
Yet even in the course of a foreshortened life, he achieved just what he
set out to do.
How was he able to
do it? This riddle is of interest not
only to entrepreneurs, business and civic leaders, but to investors, too. Some of his success, as always, had to do with
luck. For example, it’s not an accident
that many tech firms were founded in Silicon Valley in the postwar decades, and
Isaacson does an able job evoking the milieu in which Jobs came of age. And he had enviable personal qualities to go
along with the less desirable ones, including charm, a dramatic showman's
streak that helped with the public aspect of his job, and a "reality distortion
field" that helped him realize the seemingly impossible, even as it led to
many mistakes and miscalculations.
However, as Isaacson illustrates in generous detail, the answer lies largely
in that Jobs embraced the same kind of multi-disciplinary mode of thinking that
super investor Charlie Munger advocates.
Much of Jobs'
success derived from his natural curiosity and wide-ranging
self-education. Indeed, when he grew
tired of a standard, "by-the-book" degree at Reed College, he dropped
out, but remained on campus and audited classes that interested him. These included calligraphy, which he later
credited for the "multiple typefaces" and "proportionally spaced
fonts" featured on the Mac. The
"Less is More" Bauhaus movement informed the design of Apple products
Isaacson and a number of Jobs' friends believe that Jobs became the embodiment
of the convergence of hippie counter-culture and high technology. His many other influences included a lifelong
interest in Eastern spirituality, including Zen Buddhism and meditation;
organic gardening; listening to, studying and playing music; reading literature
and contemplating and writing poetry.
Isaacson argues
convincingly that Jobs was a "magician genius," whose world-changing
flashes of insight came more from intuition than from a rational mode of
thinking. As a young man, Jobs embarked
on a pilgrimage to India, where he learned to value intuition as much as
abstract and rational thought. Unlike
most analytical executives, Jobs paid no attention to market research,
preferring instead to intuit what customers want, often even before they knew
they wanted it.
Thanks to his broad
influences, Jobs was able to wear many hats at Apple. He knew enough about engineering and
electronics to understand the hardware, and had a sufficient grasp of
programming to stay abreast of the software.
Jobs had a rare and special talent for marketing and branding. Indeed, he personally oversaw all significant
aspects of Apple's marketing efforts, getting involved in the nuts-and-bolts of
billboards, magazine spreads, televisions commercials, and all other communications,
almost unheard of for a CEO. And he was
particularly good at aesthetics and design, devoting much of his time and
energy to ensuring a beautiful and elegant physical structure for all of
Apple's products.
It's possible that
Jobs reached too liberally for ideas. He
went on strange diets, and insisted, all olfactory evidence to the contrary,
that eating only fruits and vegetables meant it wasn't necessary to wear deodorant
or bathe. He christened one version of
Apple computers the "Lisa," after his daughter. And it’s debatable whether the use of
recreational drugs and Freudian analysis are helpful in business or
otherwise. Perhaps fatally, when he was
diagnosed with cancer, Jobs embraced a variety of unorthodox ideas, including
unproven remedies found on the internet and consulting a psychic, and refused
to undergo standard treatments for nine long months. However, his famed "reality distortion
field" bears much responsibility, too.
And, in fairness, it's impossible to be sure that a more orthodox
medical approach would have vanquished his cancer.
Still, the magic he
made came at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. If Apple and Pixar stay true to this ethos,
they may well endure for many years to come.
When it was time for Pixar to move into a new building, Jobs designed it
personally, ensuring that the central atrium would encourage inter-disciplinary
collaboration from members of different departments. He died before he was able to implement it,
but Jobs spent many hours in the last years of his life attempting to do the
same for Apple future headquarters. He
once explained the Xerox episode by proudly quoting Picasso: "Good artists
copy, great artists steal" (98). By
applying a range of ideas from different disciplines, whether borrowed, copied
or stolen, Jobs did more than create a masterpiece, he made a dent in the
universe.
Source: Isaacson,
Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
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