I remember only 2 things said by professors in business school:
1. "A degree in business is a degree in nothing."
2. "25 years after graduation, 500 Yale MBAs were asked what was the most important course. Organizational Behavior was their #1 answer." Ridiculous, I thought, it had to be Finance or Marketing. They were right. Nothing is more important in business that your relationship with other people. Nothing.
I'm halfway through the book, and I have to say I'm loving it. I had pretty low expectations coming in -- I think the blog is great but couldn't see it hanging together as a full book -- but they have been easily surpassed.
Barnes and Noble filed it under author name "F" for "Fake Steve" in the humor section -- took a little while to find it.
the last paragraph of this article is advice i've been given many times. steve jobs history of success is so similar to so many other successful people.
What people (or young people, since the older ones get this faster) tend to forget is: Steve Jobs came to be at a very particular time. The idea of a minicomputer in your home in the 70's was inconceivable. But within those few years afterwards, it became not just a success, it was a defining success of a generation.
And at the same time Wozniac pioneered everything. Wozniac was the genius that made the designs, the computers, the software, and the floppy drives work. Jobs was also never the CEO of Apple until later on in life. Ron Wayne, that teenage kid that helped Woz but I can't remember his name, Mike Markula, the VisiCalc team, and Jef Raskin have more to do with the success of Apple than anything a trip to India and commune living can ever do.
But that's not to say Steve Jobs isn't special. He survived. 30 years later and he's still here. The one that sticks around, writes the history books.
I think you're underestimating Jobs. Wozniak could not have started Apple without him any more than vice versa.
Jobs makes products happen. He can't build whatever it is himself, but he can choose among all the options unerringly, and get his choices built. He's like a really effective patron of the arts.
Not only could Woz not start Apple without Jobs, he would NOT have started it at all if his friends didn't convince him to join Jobs as a co-founder. He didn't want to leave his job at HP (although he may have left partly because HP refused to develop his ideas), or being anything more than an engineer at Apple even though he co-founded it.
Don't get me wrong -- Woz was certainly an engineering genius, but he didn't have any of the vision that Jobs had for building something great. To Woz it was just something interesting to do. Jobs saw the potential of what Woz was able to create. Those two as a pair were the perfect storm that ushered in a personal computing revolution.
I suppose it is possible that Steve Jobs is the Forrest Gump of technology: for thirty years, he has just happened to be standing next to the biggest innovators in consumer technology. I've never met Steve, and Apple doesn't leak many rumors, so it's hard for me to know.
But if Steve's secret is being in the right place at the right time, he sure has a knack for finding that place. First the Apple II. Then the Mac. Then NeXT (which, once rebranded as "Mac OS X", finally became a huge success). Pixar. The iPod. The iPhone.
I think Steve Jobs is more than merely lucky.
And the fact that so many of the engineers who worked for Jobs are famous is evidence of his management skill. I've heard it said that the job of a good manager is to hire the best engineers and then get out of their way. You have to relentlessly clear all obstacles from their path, give them whatever they need to do great work (which includes holding them to high standards) and constantly promote them and their work, both inside and outside the company.
I'm not saying that Steve Jobs is necessarily the perfect manager. I often wonder whether I would enjoy working for him. (Just as, when I watch a movie like Full Metal Jacket, I wonder whether I would survive basic training.) But you can't argue with the results: people who work with Steve Jobs become geek legends. Woz. Raskin. Hertzfeld. Atkinson. Ive.
The Mac was Jef Raskin's baby, Steve tried to kill it multiple times because it inteferred with his pet project of Apple III and Lisa. Eventually with both project a proven failure in the market, he jumped ship to Raskin and took over the Mac project.
NeXT was a dismal failure. The product was too expensive for its market, it sold little in its market. They made NeXTStep, true, but due to a bit of Gassee's inability to market it properly, BeOS lost out despite how many internally wanted it instead.
All that said though, no, I don't think it's Steve's luck that's gotten him to where he is. His ability I believe is in leadership, vision, and strategy. Having seen him in action, I think his greatest asset is his ability to effect others. He makes them better, he knows what he wants immediately and has the strategic vision to see it through. His ability to get certain products right has propelled him higher and higher into upper management. Now that he's the CEO his vision only elevates and pushes more product out the door. The chicken and egg problem for others emulate though is: how do you get into a position of power, or, how do you push out people to push out the right product?
As for Marine boot camp and the subsequent combat tours, I can tell you without a doubt FMJ, nor any other movie, even come close.
"The Mac was Jef Raskin's baby, Steve tried to kill it multiple times because it inteferred with his pet project of Apple III and Lisa."
Raskin's Mac was wildly different from Jobs's Mac. Raskin's idea for the Macintosh was a sub-$1000 consumer appliance. No GUI. It's really only because of the cross-pollination between the Lisa and Mac teams that the Mac became as revolutionary as it did.
"... I think Steve Jobs is more than merely lucky. ..."
"... A reality distortion field. In his presence,
reality is malleable. He can convince anyone
of practically anything. It wears off when he's
not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic
schedules. And there's a couple of other things
you should know about working with Steve. ...
Well, just because he tells you that something is
awful or great, it doesn't necessarily mean he'll
feel that way tomorrow. You have to low-pass
filter his input. And then, he's really funny about
ideas. If you tell him a new idea, he'll usually tell
you that he thinks it's stupid. But then, if he actually
likes it, exactly one week later, he'll come back to
you and propose your idea to you, as if he thought
of it. ..." [0]
Reality distortion effect at work?
Andy Hertzfeld has probably the best description of how Jobs does what he does best. http://folklore.org has the best articles describing the inner workings of Apple from the blokes who worked there.
...that doesn't hold a candle to today. Make no mistake about it: the stunning success of the microcomputer was caused by businesses, not individuals. And that success took quite a while... Microsoft-1975, Apple II-1977, IBM PC-1981, adoption by business 1984-1990.
Fast forward 2007. A reader of this post with nothing right now could conceivably have millions of users within a year. You said it yourself: "inconceivable". That word no longer exists. THAT's why today is "the best of times".
1. "A degree in business is a degree in nothing."
2. "25 years after graduation, 500 Yale MBAs were asked what was the most important course. Organizational Behavior was their #1 answer." Ridiculous, I thought, it had to be Finance or Marketing. They were right. Nothing is more important in business that your relationship with other people. Nothing.