Everlasting Steve Jobs

"Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower."

"The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament."

"Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

Being in the Apple ecosystem could be as sublime as walking in one of the Zen gardens.

"Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets."

“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

The Real Leadership

Lessons of Steve Jobs

14

The Pantheon of America’s Great Inventors

• Thomas Edison

• Henry Ford

• Walt Disney

• Steve Jobs

Jobs: Timeline of Life and Career

• February 24, 1955: Steven Paul Jobs was born in California. He grew up in the area that was to become known as Silicon Valley.

• 1974: Jobs worked as a technician with the video game maker Atari (雅达利 ). He saved money and then traveled to India to find spiritual enlightenment.

• April 1, 1976: Jobs and Steve Wozniak cofound Apple Computer after working on the design of their first computer in the garage of Jobs' home. They introduced the Apple I.

•  

• January 24, 1984: Apple introduces the Macintosh, an all-in-one desktop machine that is widely credited with revolutionizing the personal computer industry.

• September 1985: was ousted from Apple following a long-running dispute with other top executives.

• 1986: Jobs formed a new software company called NeXT Inc., and bought a computer animation studio from Stars Wars creator George Lucas. The studio, Pixar, makes some of the most popular computer-animated films, including Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Monsters Inc., and Finding Nemo.

•  

• 1997: NeXT struggled and was bought by Apple, which also had been losing money. Jobs returned to Apple and eventually to his role as chief executive.

• 1998: Apple introduced its newest personal computer, the iMac, and returned to profitability.

• October 2001: Apple introduced the iPod, promoting the personal digital music player as "1,000 songs in your pocket."

• April 28, 2003: Apple launched the iTunes Music Store, an online store selling 200,000 songs for 99 cents apiece. The company also introduced an upgraded iPod that was thinner and lighter, and capable of holding up to

• 7,500 songs.

• August 2004: Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and underwent surgery.

• October 2005: Apple introduced a new iPod that played videos in addition to music. The iTunes stores sold one million videos in less than three weeks.

• January 2007: Apple introduced the iPhone.

• September 2007: Apple introduced the iPod Touch, which used a touch-screen interface and had wireless networking capabilities.

• June 2008: Apple introduced an updated iPhone, capable of running software applications - apps - that are designed by other companies, creating a new

• industry of phone apps.

•  

• July 2008: Apple created the App Store as the new iPhone 3G went on sale. More than 10 million apps were downloaded during the store's first few days.

• February 2009: Jobs began a six-month medical leave of absence. It was later revealed that he underwent a liver transplant.

• January 2010: Apple introduced its first touch screen tablet computer, the iPad.

• January 2011: Jobs took a second medical leave of absence but tells Apple employees he would remain involved in major strategic decisions.

•  

• March 2011: Jobs appeared at an Apple event to introduce the iPad 2. The Financial Times said Apple's stock rose about 2 percent in the minutes after he began speaking.

• August 10, 2011: Apple briefly surpassed oil company ExxonMobil to become the world's most valuable company.

• August 24, 2011: Jobs resigned as Apple chief executive. Tim Cook, Apple's chief operating officer, took over as CEO.

• October, 2011, Jobs died and the world mourned him.

Jobs: The Keys to Success

• Focus

• Simplify

• Put products before profits

• Don’t be a slave to focus groups

• Bend reality

• Impute

• Push for perfection

• Tolerate only “A” players

• Engage face-to-face

• Know both the big picture and the details

• Combine the humanities with the sciences

• Stay hungry, stay foolish

Focus• Deciding what not to do is as important as

deciding what to.

• One should be able to relentlessly filter out “distractions”.

• List 3-5 things you want to focus on, get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down.

• Don’t let the distractions turn you into Microsoft, as they cause you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.

Jobs’ 2-by-2 grid

• Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

• Make the design more intuitive and simpler.

• Real simplicity should come from conquering, rather than ignoring, complexity.

• Achieve the depth of simplicity.• Simplicity is not merely a minimalist style or the

removal of clutter.• To be truly simple, you have to go really deep.

Simplify

• a ribbon is an interface where a set of toolbars are placed on tabs in a tab bar.

The ribbon in Microsoft Office Word 2010

Navigational Ribbons

• People are busy. They have other things to do than think about how to integrate their computers and devices.

• One needs passion for perfection and making elegant products.

• It was an approach that did not always maximize short-term profits, but led to astonishing products marked by delightful user experiences.

Take responsibility end to end

• An innovative company knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind.

• One can’t relish the huge success of one product, instead, he should worry about what might endanger it.

• A company need to think about cannibalizing one of its own products by creating a new product, because “if we don’t cannibalize ourselves, someone else will.”

When behind, leapfrog

• Make the product “insanely great”.

• Never speak of profit maximization or cost trade-offs.

• Don’t compromise.

• Focus on making the product great and the profits will follow.

• There is only a subtle difference between the focus on products and on profits, but it ends up meaning everything – the people you hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings.

Put products before profits

• Do count on market research to tell you what customers want, because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.

• “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’” —— Henry Ford

• 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.

• When you are doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you’re not going to cheese out.

Don’t be a slave to focus groups

• Have the ability to push people to do the impossible.

• You did the impossible because you didn’t realize it was impossible.

• Reality Distortion Field (RDF)

a term coined by Bud Tribble at Apple Computer in 1981, to describe company co-founder Steve Jobs’ charisma and its effects on the developers working on the Macintosh project. Tribble claimed that the term came from Star Trek. The RDF was also said by Andy Hertzfeld to be Steve Jobs’ ability to convince himself and others to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, bravado (逞能，蛮干 ), marketing, appeasement (姑息政策 ) and persistence. RDF was said to distort an audience's sense of proportion and scales of difficulties and made them believe that the task at hand was possible.

Bend reality

• Empathy

• Focus

• Impute

People do judge a book by its cover.

The tactile experience can set the tone for how one perceives a product.

One can use the design of a machine to “impute” a signal rather than to be merely functional.

It (the handle) is more semiotic than useful.

Impute

• Hit the pause button when feeling it not perfect.

• Perfectionism even extends to the parts unseen.

• Nobody will ever know, but you yourself will know.

• It is the mark of an artist to have a passion for perfection.

• A great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody’s going to see it.

Push for perfection

• Jobs’s impatient and petulant treatment of people, though not laudable, emanated from his passion for perfection and his desire to work with only the best.

• It was his way of preventing what he called “the bozo explosion” in which managers are so polite that mediocre people feel comfortable sticking around.

• He infused Apple employees with an abiding passion to create groundbreaking products and a belief that they could accomplish what seemed impossible.

• When you have really good people, you don’t have to baby them. By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things.

Tolerate only “A” players

• Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings. He loved freewheeling face-to-face meetings.

• Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions.

• “I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking. ”

• “People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”

Engage face-to-face

• Jobs’s passion was applied to issues both large and minuscule.

• Some CEOs are great at vision others are managers who know that God is in the details. Jobs was both.

• “One of Jobs’s salient traits was his ability and desire to envision overarching strategy while also focusing on the tiniest aspects of design.” —— Jeff Bewkes, Time Warner CEO

• Even as he was laying out the grand visions such as turning personal computers into digital hubs, building a huge server farm and so on, he was fretting over the shape and color of the screws inside the iMac.

Know both the big picture and the details

• “I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics.”

• When Jobs learned the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, he decided that was what he wanted to do. This was the essence of his tale.

• Even when he was dying, Jobs set his sights on disrupting more industries.

• His rules for success helped him build a company that not only will create these and other disruptive products, but will stand at the intersection of creativity and technology as long as Jobs’s DNA persists at its core.

Combine the humanities with the sciences

• On its cover was the famous picture of Earth taken from space, and its subtitle was “access to tools”…on the back cover of the final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”

• “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes… While some see them as crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

—— Apple’s Think Different Commercial

Stay hungry, stay foolish

【 END 】