1.0 Leadership - STEVE JOBS

Steve Jobs 

• American entrepreneur who co-founded and chaired the Apple Corp. in Year 1996 - 2011.
• After forming  Apple Computer, Inc which went public in 1980, it was now worth a staggering $1.2 billion dollars
• He received a number of honors and public recognition for his influence in the technology and music industries.
• At the time of his death most of his wealth still came from Disney(due to Disney's purchase of Pixar in 2006. As the largest individual shareholder, he owned about $4.47 billion of Disney stock.
• Was ranked 39 Forbes 400 richest person in America.
• Died in 5th October 2011 due to pancreas neuroendocrine tumor. 

( Source: Forbes Magazine. "Steve Jobs." 2013. 4 September 2013. <http://www.forbes.com/profile/steve-jobs/> )

Below is a video clip about Steven Jobs ( Biography)

(Sources: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jqSK8Qv4ZY )

( Source:http://www.wallsave.com/wallpaper/1920x1200/apple-logo-beautiful-high-res-mac-110085.html )

Leadership qualities of Steve Jobs

1. Staying focus is rather important, when Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, it was producing a random variations of computers.After a few weeks of product review sessions, he called for a halt to this meaningless pursuit. He told his team members that their role was to focus on four great products. All other products should be filtered off. But by getting Apple to focus on making just four computers, he saved the company. “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,” he told Isaacson. “That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.”

( Source: Jash. 7 Leadership Qualities of CEO. 2013. 4 September 2013. <http://www.personic.com/uncategorized/7-leadership-qualities-ceos-can-learn-from-steve-jobs/> )

 

2. Simplicity is the key. Jobs’s ability to focus was complemented by his instinct to simplify things by zeroing in on their essence and eliminating unnecessary components. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” declared Apple’s first marketing brochure. During the design of the iPod interface, Jobs tried at every meeting to find ways to cut clutter. He insisted on being able to get to whatever he wanted in three clicks.

3. Be responsible through it all. Jobs and Apple took end-to-end responsibility for the user experience which something too few companies can do. Every aspect of the customer experience was tightly linked together with his business decision.

4. Learn to leapfrog when you're behind.The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first. It also knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind.  when Jobs built the original iMac, He concentrated in making it useful for managing a user’s photos and videos, but it was left behind when dealing with music. People with PCs were downloading and swapping music and then ripping and burning their own CDs. The iMac’s slot drive couldn’t burn CDs. But instead of merely catching up by upgrading the iMac’s CD drive, he decided to create an integrated system that would transform the music industry. The result was the combination of iTunes, the iTunes Store, and the iPod, which allowed users to buy, share, manage, store, and play music better than they could with any other devices.

( Source: Kalla, Susan. 10 Leadership Tips from Steve Jobs. 2 April 2012. 4 September 2013. <http://www.forbes.com/sites/susankalla/2012/04/02/10-leadership-tips-from-steve-jobs/> )

5. Put Products Before Profits: When Jobs and his small team designed the original Macintosh, in the early 1980s, his injunction was to make it “insanely great.” At his first retreat with the Macintosh team, he began by writing a maxim on his whiteboard: “Don’t compromise.” The machine that resulted cost too much and led to Jobs’s ouster from Apple. But the Macintosh also “put a dent in the universe,” as he said, by accelerating the home computer revolution. And in the long run he got the balance right: Focus on making the product great and the profits will follow.

6. Don’t Be a Slave To Focus Groups. When Jobs took his original Macintosh team on its first retreat, one member asked whether they should do some market research to see what customers wanted. “No,” Jobs replied, “because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.” He invoked Henry Ford’s line “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’” Caring deeply about what customers want is much different from continually asking them what they want; it requires intuition and instinct about desires that have not yet formed. “Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page,” Jobs explained. “The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do; they use their intuition instead,” he recalled. 

  ( Source: Jash. 7 Leadership Qualities of CEO. 2013. 4 September 2013. <http://www.personic.com/uncategorized/7-leadership-qualities-ceos-can-learn-from-steve-jobs/> )

7. Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish, Dare to dream: Jobs stayed hungry and foolish throughout his career by making sure that the business and engineering aspect of his personality was always complemented by a hippie nonconformist side from his days as an artistic, acid-dropping, enlightenment-seeking rebel. In every aspect of his life—the women he dated, the way he dealt with his cancer diagnosis, the way he ran his business—his behavior reflected the contradictions, confluence, and eventual synthesis of all these varying strands.

(Source: Alam, Nishan. Steve Jobs - the leader. 19 October 2012. 2013 September 2013. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZ-rWDDJG44> )

 ( Source: http://techjost.com/2013/01/07/apple-iphone-5-wallpapers/beautiful-apple-logo/ )


MY OPINION

     I feel that Steve Job's leadership style suites Apple corporation. His leadership style depicts great confidence in his own corporation's product while always aiming to surpass the rest. I think this kind of leader is needed to bring the Apple corporation forward. Leaders like Steve Jobs makes me admire them for their "never say die" attitude in spite of facing a David and Goliath situation against competitors like Microsoft corporation in the computer market. I would praise Steve Jobs's leadership for succeeding to bring Apple into the electronics market. However, I do want to criticize on Steve Job's overzealous in making Apple Corporation successful. According to Forbes issue on "Why Steve Jobs is hard to replace" , employees has gave testimonies of him cursing and firing all of his employees in the MobileMe team and changing the entire executive members on the spot just because they didn't do well in the targeted market. This, I feel that Steve Jobs "obsession in making Apple product becoming consumer's first choice is inhumane because he didn't even care about how the ex employees going to feed their family given that they were fired with immediate effect without prior notice at all. I think a great leader also needs a good interpersonal skill which in this case, Mr Steve Jobs failed to do so.

     Personally, I feel that whether or not a person is a leader depends greatly on his or her leadership ability (which translates into the ability to lead others well and effectively). leadership has to do with the ability to stand up and take the lead while other people follow. So, I believe that leaders are made, not born. 

     In Malaysia today, most fresh graduates are comfortable following than leading because of what they call the “the many trouble of leadership”, and only a handful who actually have what is takes to lead others. Many Malaysian graduates regard leadership as a willingness of putting oneself at risk  or taking responsibilities while others make excuses. How come these people would have such

"negative" thoughts while those minority would see things differently? My answer to this is that it has a lot to do with the family background of individual upbringing as well as the environment which they were in when they were young.

     I believe strongly that a person cant just learn all the leadership virtues like being courageous or having the readiness to stand out of the crowd because their parents were great leaders. Experience employs both direct and indirect ways in teaching us lessons in life, we can either learn directly from our own experiences through trial and error or from others.

     Just as with successful leaders, poor leaders are likely the product of their environment, further supporting my belief that a leader made. Therefore, one doesn't become a leader through genetics or instincts, but through a little of instincts, environment and important past experiences that forge a leader rather than form them.

Steve Jobs was MADE, not BORN

     In my previous post, I talked about Steve Jobs as my choice of leader. I believe that he is made to be a leader as he is seen today and not born. Steve Jobs was adopted by his parents, Paul and Clara Jobs. His father was a machinist and very skillful with his hands and he fixed cars as a hobby. Steve Jobs involvement in electronics was evident when in 1961 his parents moved to Mount View, which was near to Palo Alto, a fast booming hub for electronics  in the south of California. In his youth days, he also involved himself in areas of his future expertise like Homebrew Computer Club. (Encyclopedia, 2013)

     Here, we see that his environment greatly forge his personality to become a leader in his latter years. We see that he harness his skills in the days of his youth. That also brings me to my point that he was made to be a leader thanks to his father's influence on him from young. His involvement in college and friends around him simply sharpen and chisel out his leadership in him.

Bibliography:

Brashares, Ann. Steve Jobs: Think Different. Brookfield, CT: Twenty-first Century Books, 2001.

Butcher, Lee. Accidental Millionaire: The Rise and Fall of Steven Jobs at Apple Computer. New York: Paragon House, 1987.

Encyclopdia of World Biography:Steve Jobs Biography. 2013, 28th September 2013.

Wilson, Suzan. Steve Jobs: Wizard of Apple Computer. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow, 2001.

Young, Jeffrey S. Steve Jobs: The Journey is the Reward. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, 1988.