HBR: The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs

Walter Isaacson follows up his biography of Steve Jobs with an “insanely great” piece in the April HBR.   He drills down on the factors that helped to catapult the legendary entrepreneur into an elite league of American business leaders, including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Walt Disney.

The 14 factors listed below continue at Apple as part Jobs’ legacy, which is helping drive the stock on an epic run,  now up 67 percent since November 25th and adding $240 billion to the company’s market capitalization.  That’s a lot wealth creation — equivalent to 1.6 percent of U.S. GDP.  No wonder the animal spirits are running again.

1)    Focus;
2)   Simplify;
3)   Take Responsibility End to End;
4)   When Behind, Leapfrog;
5)   Put Products Before Profits;
6)   Don’t Be a Slave To Focus Groups;
7)   Bend Reality;
8)   Impute;
9)   Push for Perfection;
10) Tolerate Only “A” Players;
11)  Engage Face-to-Face;
12)  Know Both the Big Picture and the Details;
13)  Combine the Humanities with the Sciences;
14)  Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.

Below are the first few paragraphs of the article with a link to the full article.   This is a must read, folks!

His saga is the entrepreneurial creation myth writ large: Steve Jobs cofounded Apple in his parents’ garage in 1976, was ousted in 1985, returned to rescue it from near bankruptcy in 1997, and by the time he died, in October 2011, had built it into the world’s most valuable company. Along the way he helped to transform seven industries: personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, retail stores, and digital publishing. He thus belongs in the pantheon of America’s great innovators, along with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Walt Disney. None of these men was a saint, but long after their personalities are forgotten, history will remember how they applied imagination to technology and business.

In the months since my biography of Jobs came out, countless commentators have tried to draw management lessons from it. Some of those readers have been insightful, but I think that many of them (especially those with no experience in entrepreneurship) fixate too much on the rough edges of his personality. The essence of Jobs, I think, is that his personality was integral to his way of doing business. He acted as if the normal rules didn’t apply to him, and the passion, intensity, and extreme emotionalism he brought to everyday life were things he also poured into the products he made. His petulance and impatience were part and parcel of his perfectionism.

One of the last times I saw him, after I had finished writing most of the book, I asked him again about his tendency to be rough on people. “Look at the results,” he replied. “These are all smart people I work with, and any of them could get a top job at another place if they were truly feeling brutalized. But they don’t.” Then he paused for a few moments and said, almost wistfully, “And we got some amazing things done.” Indeed, he and Apple had had a string of hits over the past dozen years that was greater than that of any other innovative company in modern times: iMac, iPod, iPod nano, iTunes Store, Apple Stores, MacBook, iPhone, iPad, App Store, OS X Lion—not to mention every Pixar film. And as he battled his final illness, Jobs was surrounded by an intensely loyal cadre of colleagues who had been inspired by him for years and a very loving wife, sister, and four children.

So I think the real lessons from Steve Jobs have to be drawn from looking at what he actually accomplished. I once asked him what he thought was his most important creation, thinking he would answer the iPad or the Macintosh. Instead he said it was Apple the company. Making an enduring company, he said, was both far harder and more important than making a great product. How did he do it? Business schools will be studying that question a century from now. Here are what I consider the keys to his success.

(click here for full article)

Hat tip to David Jones (not the Aussie retailer)!