Steve Jobs: Innovation, Capitalism, and the American Dream

The Apple Inc. CEO embodied all that this nation is supposed to stand for - ingenuity and innovation; endless opportunity in a free market; and the ability for anyone willing to sacrifice blood, sweat, and tears to achieve the American Dream.
At his core, Jobs was an inventor. He can rightfully be aligned with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Alexander Graham Bell.

He was a pioneer who created products - new and groundbreaking products - that would change the world.
Jobs is to thank for a new way of thinking (the first computer for public use, Apple II); for a new age of film (Pixar); for a new way to love music (iTunes); and for a totally new way of life (iPad, iPhone, everything).
Without a free market within which to work and develop, none of this would have been possible. And we would all be using PCs.
His company has created thousands of jobs worldwide since it was founded in 1977 and has inspired other companies along the way.
Of course Jobs operated with a desire to invent and build for the greater good; but he also wanted to make money. He understood the current markets and he envisioned future markets. He utilized very carefully detailed marketing plans and packaging designs to create not just a product but an accessory almost as necessary and useful as a bodily appendage.

Most of all, he had eager and willing consumers who were - and still are - excited about these new innovations. Demand is the root of Apple's success.
Profits are not deductions from the sum of the public good, but the real measure of the social value a firm creates. Those who talk about the horror of putting profits over people make no sense at all, writes Kevin D. Williamson for the National Review Online.
With investments from Wall Street and shareholders alike, Jobs was able to transform the downtrodden Apple Computer Inc. into the powerhouse that we know as Apple Inc.
Hey, Occupy Wall Streeters, if Steve Jobs represents capitalism that makes it not so bad after all, right? With an iPhone in hand, it is hard to deny that simple fact.
Capitalism is a system of give and take, but everyone profits. Some may have more pennies in their pockets than others but this is immaterial. The collective benefits overall.
A free market allows individuals to dream, to build, to create. Without it, the Steve Jobs of the world would surely cease to exist.
There is no need for a painter in a world of gray.
So what has Steve Job left behind? A company whose shares have risen more than 6,000 percent? Yes. Products that have changed the way the entire world connects and communicates? Yes.
Jobs is the pioneer of Manifest Destiny for the digital era.
More importantly, though, Jobs has inspired people to inspire others. In a time of vast uncertainty, economic turmoil, unemployment and hardship, Jobs' legacy is a beacon of hope.
The American Dream is not dead.
The American Dream is, of course, better categorized as a generic term that does not solely apply to one geographic region but rather an entire global community. It represents one principal notion - possibility.
Yesterday, Oct. 11, the winners of the Wendy Schmidt Oil Clean-Up X Challenge were announced. The contest was launched in July 2010 and asked inventors worldwide to develop innovative, rapidly deployable, and highly efficient methods of capturing crude oil from ocean surfaces writes PR Newswire. The contest developed in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The grand prize winner of $1.4 million, selected from 350 applicants from around the world, was Elastec/American Marine from Illinois.
Elastec/American Marine developed a system that recovered 4670 gallons per minute, compared to the average 1100, with an average ORE of 89.5 percent oil to water recovered.
The company is described in the PR Newswire report as: A manufacturer of oil spill and environmental equipment known for innovation in machinery design, is a self-funded, privately held Midwest Corporation that has grown to become one of the largest manufacturers of oil spill equipment in North America. The company, which started over 20 years ago as just an idea, has grown into a 100+ workforce.
That was a long-winded approach to getting to the point. To make a long story short, this company is just one of many that displays astounding advancement. Elastec/American Marine aspired to improve, to make the world just a little bit better of a place.
Or take the two 17-year-old whiz kids who got over 250,000 unique hits to their website during their coverage of the Apple keynote event simply because of keen intellect and self-promotion.
In 2007, at 13-years-old these two boys developed a jailbreak iPhone app that generated more than one million downloads.
They may become the next Apple CEOs, or scientists, or Nobel Prize winners. Millions of others will likely, hopefully, follow suit.
Stay hungry. Stay foolish, is a motto that may have fallen to the wayside of the American lexis. But it is a phrase that needs to be said again and again. It is probably the most valuable four words anyone could ever be told.
Jobs' most renowned brainchild will not go down in the history books as the iPhone or the iOS 5 or even Apple itself.
Jobs' brainchild is the reestablishment of the power of innovation, the asset of capitalism, and the endless possibilities of the American Dream just on the horizon. via ibtimes.com

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Steve Jobs: A Genius, Yes; A Role Model for the Rest of Us, No Way - Scientific American

I happened upon this article this morning in Scientific American on Steve Jobs and Leadership. In stating the obvious I am a fan of Mr. Jobs. However, while there are certainly aspects of his life to emulate, there are many others to denounce. For example, consider emphatic leadership. This is not an attempt to demoralize a gifted man. For turning around a business or career depends on which you choose. Jim Woods

 

The nearly three weeks since Steve Jobs’s death has been like an extended tribute to the first global head of state. The memorial ceremonies worldwide, the special commemorative issues and, today, the release of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, all bear testament to the Apple founder’s legacy. Jobs deserved it. As Isaacson pointed out on CBS’s 60 Minutes last night, Jobs transformed personal computers, telephones, even retail stores, among others—and he would have probably taken on television, if he had lived long enough.

Many heads of state assuredly do not merit such eulogies. Gaddafi is dead. And when the Turkmens turned out to mourn Saparmurat Atayevich Niyazov in 2006, they were probably secretly celebrating at least the recovery of the month of January, as Niyazov had renamed the first month of the year after his personal honorific, Türkmenbaşy.

One thread among the encomiums suggests that the world would be a better place if we just had more Steve Jobs in high places. Consider this from Thomas Friedman: “The melancholy over Steve Jobs’s passing is not just about the loss of the inventor of so many products we enjoy. It is also about the loss of someone who personified so many of the leadership traits we know are missing from our national politics.”

It would be unfortunate if the remembrance of Jobs spawns a legion of Steve wannabes. Jobs, in geekspeak, was an “N of 1.” Jobs’s perfectionism and design sense helped establish Apple’s signature “iBrands,” but these traits also transcended, to some extent,  a toxic personality that could have served as a model for the Kevin Spacey character in the movie “Horrible Bosses.” In the film, Dave Harken implies that a promotion awaits one of his employees but ends up awarding it to himself. The Jobs equivalent: stiffing early Apple employees out of stock options when the company first went public. The guy was a…

In the weeks since his death, Jobs has been compared to Einstein and Edison. Maybe so. But the problem with using his interpersonal style as a management role model is that the rest of us, to parrot Apple advertising, will assuredly blow it. In business, the control freak boss—the emblematic Jobs model—is a recipe for unintentionally delivering your best employees as new hires to your closest competitors. Talk to us about leveraging your capabilities.

Millions of people have to manage others, and this challenge doesn’t necessarily bring out the best in us. A 2005 article by two psychologists from the University of Surrey, “Disordered Personalities at Work,” found that senior British executives were more likely to demonstrate histrionic personality disorder (grandiosity and lack of empathy among other traits) than criminal psychiatric patients at Broadmoor Special Hospital in Berkshire, England, and they were equally likely to show narcissistic (perfectionism and a dictatorial bent) and compulsive tendencies. Is it that this type of person is attracted to the job or the workplace encourages this type of behavior? Who knows? But entreating subordinates to “insanely great” levels of performance, to quote Jobs’s hyperbolic rhetoric, is more likely to initiate a collective bargaining drive than produce the next iPad.

Even Jobs may have been at his best when he left behind the persona of the old Steve. New Yorker writer James Surowiecki and author of The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, noted in that magazine how Jobs loosened up in recent years on his insistence on totally closed architectures. The old Steve might have forbidden MP3s on iPods and apps for iPhones and iPads. Giving up a modicum of control eventually propelled the company to heights it had never before experienced—and cemented Jobs’s legacy in the most histrionic terms imaginable.

via blogs.scientificamerican.com

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The Steve Jobs Way and Leadership

Illustration by Jack Unruh

Steve Jobs’s business feats were legendary long before he died in October 2011. Apple Inc., considered a niche player for much of its history, is the most valuable company in the world by market capitalization as of this writing. Most business leaders would be thrilled to achieve Jobs’s level of market success, but should they aspire to lead like him? Before doing so, they should dig into his management style. Jobs the leader was at once dynamic and controversial, and his success relied heavily on the genius of Jobs the innovator.

Many other prominent leaders leave legacies that become clear only with time; however, we can evaluate Jobs’s leadership with tremendous clarity already today. This is thanks to Walter Isaacson’s masterful, eponymous biography of the entrepreneur (Simon & Schuster, 2011), a 600-page account that rarely feels flabby or boring. Jobs pursued Isaacson, a former CEO of CNN and managing editor of Time, for five years (the first of many examples of Jobs’s persistence in the book), and then gave him a free hand (a much rarer occurrence), promising: “It’s your book. I won’t even read it.”

The leader Isaacson portrays could have illustrated the Great Man theory popular in the mid-19th century, with its heroic leaders whose decisions and sheer force of will determined the world’s course. Steve Jobs was certainly a willful and driven leader, and the products and services he directed his companies to develop and commercialize changed the way many of us live, as well as the course of a diverse set of industries, including computing, publishing, movies, music, and mobile telephony.

At the same time, Jobs’s leadership style was complex. He was intensely focused when committed, confident enough to take risky leaps, and charismatic enough to enlist legions of employees and customers in the relentless pursuit of his aspirations. He was also interpersonally immature well into his adult life: impatient, stubborn, and hypercritical, if not downright cruel at times. Jobs may have been, as Isaacson says, “the greatest business executive of our era,” but he was a mercurial, demanding, and tyrannical one. All too often he was the antithesis of the “servant leader” model popularized in the 1990s (the giving, caring organizational mentor who in many ways contrasted with the hero model of a century prior).

However, Jobs’s seemingly destructive behaviors sparked peak performance as much as they undermined it, depending on where and how he applied them. They also helped shape the unique and powerful cultures Jobs seeded — twice at Apple, as well as at NeXT and at Pixar. (And few would have predicted Pixar’s runaway success in movie animation. Certainly not the Walt Disney Company, which eventually bought Pixar to secure its hit-making abilities, an action that made Jobs Disney’s largest shareholder.) Far better than most leaders, Jobs intuitively understood the power of cultural influence in sustaining the strategic capabilities implicit in his perpetual vision of creating, as he put it, “an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products...a company that will stand for something a generation or two from now.” It’s hard to argue with that aspiration; time will tell whether Apple makes it happen.

Jobs’s volatile approach to leadership is both fascinating and perplexing. For instance, Jobs had a fickle commitment construct — he fell in and out of love with people much too easily, both personally and professionally. In his relentless pursuit of top talent, he was able to create highly skilled organizations. But he also missed the potential contribution of many people who were not yet (and perhaps never would be) so-called A players. It is surprising, however, that many of the people Jobs abandoned along the way retained a grudging respect for his positive qualities — and a few even came back for more of his particular brand of abuse. via strategy-business.com

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Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group. A global management consulting firms specialized solely in helping organizations of all sizes in all industries catalyzing top line growth through strategic innovation and hypercompetition. Jim has over 25 years consulting experience in working with small, mid size and Fortune 1000 companies. He is a former U.S. Navy Seabee and grandfather of five. To arrange for Jim to speak at your next event or devise an effective growth strategy email or call us at 719-649-4118 for availability.james@innothinkgroup.com

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