Mar
30
Steve Jobs and his leadership
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Fortune has a great feature on Steve Jobs, titled "Steve Jobs speaks out" that looks at some of Steve’s perspectives on business, leadership and technology. In the article Steve reveals some interesting insights into Apple and his leadership principles.
On Apple’s focus
"Apple is a $30 billion company, yet we’ve got less than 30 major products. I don’t know if that’s ever been done before. Certainly the great consumer electronics companies of the past had thousands of products. We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.
"I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done. The clearest example was when we were pressured for years to do a PDA, and I realized one day that 90% of the people who use a PDA only take information out of it on the road. They don’t put information into it. Pretty soon cellphones are going to do that, so the PDA market’s going to get reduced to a fraction of its current size, and it won’t really be sustainable. So we decided not to get into it. If we had gotten into it, we wouldn’t have had the resources to do the iPod. We probably wouldn’t have seen it coming."
Focus is critical for effective leadership, with so many options choosing the right one can be extremely difficult. Small changes can have big results, if you focus on the key issues and execute relentlessly on those key issues. To focus on the most important issues means you have to say not to a whole range of alternative opportunities.
On finding talent
"When I hire somebody really senior, competence is the ante. They have to be really smart. But the real issue for me is, Are they going to fall in love with Apple? Because if they fall in love with Apple, everything else will take care of itself. They’ll want to do what’s best for Apple, not what’s best for them, what’s best for Steve, or anybody else.
"Recruiting is hard. It’s just finding the needles in the haystack. We do it ourselves and we spend a lot of time at it. I’ve participated in the hiring of maybe 5,000-plus people in my life. So I take it very seriously. You can’t know enough in a one-hour interview. So, in the end, it’s ultimately based on your gut. How do I feel about this person? What are they like when they’re challenged? Why are they here? I ask everybody that: ‘Why are you here?’ The answers themselves are not what you’re looking for. It’s the meta-data."
Passion rules! Passion is about our emotional energy and a love for what we do. Without passion it becomes difficult to fight back in the face of obstacles and difficulties. People with passion find a way to get things done and to make things happen, in spite of the obstacles and challenges that get in the way.
On his marathon Monday meetings
"When you hire really good people you have to give them a piece of the business and let them run with it. That doesn’t mean I don’t get to kibitz a lot. But the reason you’re hiring them is because you’re going to give them the reins. I want [them] making as good or better decisions than I would. So the way to do that is to have them know everything, not just in their part of the business, but in every part of the business.
"So what we do every Monday is we review the whole business. We look at what we sold the week before. We look at every single product under development, products we’re having trouble with, products where the demand is larger than we can make. All the stuff in development, we review. And we do it every single week. I put out an agenda — 80% is the same as it was the last week, and we just walk down it every single week.
"We don’t have a lot of process at Apple, but that’s one of the few things we do just to all stay on the same page."
Social architecture, meetings and their structure (drama, purpose and conflict) keep people engaged in the organisations vision. Regular meetings ensure effective communication and that the organisation is making steady progress towards the vision.
Technorati Tags: Communication, Passion, Meetings, Talent, Focus, Priority, Apple, Steve Jobs, Example, Strategy, Management, Business, Leadership
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Here’s a great reference/resource for those interested in leadership.
Link: http://www.bookreviewsummaries.com
What’s funny is that there was another story about Steve Jobs that, unfortunately, painted his leadership in a somewhat more negative light. Supposedly, there are two things he’ll regularly do that get on some of his worker’s nerves. One, he sometimes takes credit for someone else’s ideas. Not that he openly does it, but he forgets he heard it from someone else and they just don’t remind him of it. And two, when he thinks he’s right, there is no discussion; they just have to do it his way. One of those actions almost got him in trouble with the SEC, but it seems he was able to survive it in the long run.