What would Steve Do?
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In writing Provoke, I drew on Apple and Steve Jobs repeatedly to illustrate the importance of disruption leading to innovation and excellence. Apple is the gold standard for what a company could do if it allowed itself the permission to actively disrupt the status quo. Under the late Jobs, Apple disrupted the music industry with the iPod, then the phone industry with the iPhone, then the PC market by creating the tablet computing category. What singular vision, focus and self-confidence to succeed so brilliantly on all those fronts at the same time!
Sadly, there is only one Apple (and nobody knows what will happen to the company without Jobs). There is only one Google. Then there are hundreds of other companies with enormous talents stagnating because they are not allowed to imagine or think outside the box.
On October 5, when the sad news of Steve Jobs passing reached me, I was in San Francisco with about 70,000 people at the Oracle Open World conference. Silence fell. We all felt an incredible sense of loss, not just for a great man who would be missed, but for shoes too big to be filled.
Jobs expanded our imagination, made the impossible possible, set standards that others could not reach, and brought magic to the world. Remember a decade ago when he gave us the dancing profiles of people around the world and the white head phone wires? The iPod wasn’t about technology. It was about joy. Steve Jobs got that. Remember the first time people felt like the world of information was at their fingertips? That’s what the iPhone was about, not making calls. Jobs got that, too. The iPad is about controlling the world by touch, not a keyboard or mouse. Jobs understood that as well.
He dared to imagine. His imagination was not bounded by fear, ego or conformity. He didn’t shy from turning industries upside down over and over again, each time delighting the customer. That is courage as an art form.
I wrote Provoke because I believe we need more of Steve Jobs’ spirit in this world. Instead of being courageous, so many companies cower and copy. Incredibly talented people are frustrated, but they stay with their jobs because they can’t afford to leave. Being a visionary and inspiring others is no longer a requirement for the people leading companies…but it should be. We must return to being vibrant, fearless and daring.
It is perhaps both poetic and ironic that my book Provoke is going to be published only weeks after his untimely death. Perhaps with a deep shared passion about the necessity to dream, to disrupt, to innovate and repeatedly achieve excellence. In that I find great meaning and purpose.
Just because the leadership of a company is not embracing innovation, should the 80,000 employees stop as well? Of course not. Let’s replace the command and control models with “inspire and imagine engines,” bringing passion where passion belongs: where we spend the bulk of our days. Imagine what we could do.
Steve Jobs’ legacy is not about technology or design. It’s about courage and passion. That’s one virus that should spread worldwide. If we allow ourselves the courage to dream impossible, what could we not create? How could we change the world?You’re familiar with the phrase “What would Jesus do?” In the world of innovation and technology, let’s start asking something different. What would Steve Jobs do? The answer might be different for everyone, but I can tell you what Steve wouldn’t do. He wouldn’t wait for someone else to shake things up.
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In many ways, we know what Steve would do. I read the biography and watched Apple’s products from the 1984 Macintosh (the Apple ][ was more Wozniak’s, while the Mac showed what it would be with Jobs in charge) to today. A clear pattern emerges.
Jobs was all about user experience. He imagined how a user would use a new thing and that was it. All else was subordinated to that vision. How Jobs got his ideas is harder to discern, but once he had the idea, everything else was aligned with it.
The Mac was all about the mouse and the GUI, and you were supposed to use the software and hardware that Jobs thought you should use to do the tasks Jobs thought you should do with them. Hence the Mac was a sealed box that you couldn’t even open with a standard screwdriver, you couldn’t plug new cards into any slots, you couldn’t attach a color monitor (monochrome only!), you couldn’t put the screen in text-mode rather than graphics-mode, you couldn’t buy a printer from anyone but Apple, and the OS did not promise a keyboard equivalent for everything in case you didn’t have a mouse. The design was consistent with the vision in every detail, even where those were its failings.
The iPhone was all about the screen, so Jobs made sure the screen was superb quality, didn’t scratch if you put it in your pocket, and had super smooth touch-screen action, and he did his darnedest to all but eliminate the border around it because the user should be seeing nothing but screen. Very sleek, very cool, but you couldn’t replace the batteries or really talk about plugging in peripherals, and Apple screened the apps that would be available and decided where you could get them from.
The strength of Jobs’ style is that thinking first about the user and user experience and aligning everything else so strongly to that is the surest road to an object people will love. Nothing clunky, unresponsive, noisy, or obviously designed by committee. No clutter of either the visual kind or the kind that makes for too many features and a difficult user interface. The New Thing did what it did, it did nothing else, and it did it smoothly and exactly how you’d want it to, once you bought into the vision.
The problem, of course, is that some users like to play outside the walled garden. The Mac came into a world in which computer hardware makers still thought they could be the providers of most of the software too, an idea we now find hopelessly quaint. The Mac of the ’80s was the best at desktop publishing, education, and music, because Jobs imagined desktop publishing, education, and music. Few chose Macs over PCs for industrial control or made them into single-board computers for embedded applications, because that was too far outside the box.
In so many ways, Steve showed us where the box was. Most stayed there, but even the disruptive who left the box started from it.
I think Jobs legacy was to inspire and develop a new standard across every part of how we live our lives. He bred a culture and generation who believe in his products and what they stand for, are advocates in utility, and defined a new level of consistency–a 20 miler philosophy.
It seems that anything he put his attention to, was with such a level of discipline and rigor that he was able to reach great heights. He lead and structured Apple in a way to balance and drive technology, read and create the market, and answer the need seekers. He lead an incredibly complex strategy, which lead to the output of being so simple.
So many lessons can be learned through his actions. I am incredibly interested to see how the new wave of leaders can take the next step (not leap) forward. Can Cook handle and execute at Apple? Time will tell.
Job set a new standard for user experience and leveraged off the problems that users found with the multiple configurations of standard PCs. He was diligent to control what was available on the Macs, iPhone, iPad, etc. He was no stranger to criticism of this stance, but he continued with his solid and proven SMaC (Specific, Methodical, and Consistent) despite the criticism. There are still those who are critical of Apple’s strategy and tactics, but who is laughing all the way to the bank? Apple is! If Jobs was still around, he would continue down the same course of customer-focused, or better yer customer experience obsessed innovation. I hope the next generation of leaders at Apple learned this lesson thoroughly.
I think Steve Jobs has this tremendous talent of association and observing as part of discovery skills. Whether it be a GUI or a Mouse or a dial on the iPod. They were all associations brought by Steve. I don’t know if that talent can be learnable. I think its a natural gift. I’m pretty sure there is tremendos innovation talent in the Apple today and we may certainly see new products from Apple going forward. But I’m pretty sure we are going to miss what Apple were to “really” give to the world.