Leadership Lessons from Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs revolutionized several industries and was a leader who accomplished amazing things.  It is natural that many want to study him to glean lessons and, while some elements of his personal style couldn’t (and shouldn’t) be imitated by most aspiring leaders, his biographer, Walter Isaacson, recently published a piece that I’ve been thinking about all week.  There are several leadership insights in the article that apply across organizational types.  The entire article is worth a look and can be found here. 

Focus and Simplicity

Apple’s products are noted for their beauty and simplicity of design.  This was a direct result of Jobs’ Zen training and his strong belief in focusing on what really matters.  Isaacson relates a story of Jobs coming back to Apple after being ousted and sitting through weeks of meetings about the dozens of products Apple was making.  One day he stopped the meeting, went to a white board, and drew a two by two grid.  He told the team that they would be making four great products, one each for consumer and pro, desktop and portable.  All other products were eliminated.  He also pushed his designers to make everything as simple as possible, even famously eliminating the on/off button on the iPod.  That stringent focus and simple design aesthetic birthed a revolution.

Everyone knows they should be the best they can be but that is impossible if you are running in fifty directions.  Focus on the unique thing your organization provides to your community and do it extremely well.

Empathy and Accountability

Jobs was not famous for his empathy with his staff.  His empathy with the people buying Apple’s products, however, was immense and he used it to fuel his demand that his teams create the best products and experiences possible.  He didn’t rely on focus groups but he cared deeply about what people needed and wanted from Apple products.  He understood their frustrations with competitors’ products and remedied those frustrations in Apple’s.  If you work for a company, the lesson is obvious, but what if you work at a non-profit or in education?  The lesson is the same:  Use empathy to understand your constituency – students, parents, beneficiaries – and their needs on an intimate level and understand how those needs aren’t being met well enough by others in your field.   Become so in tune with them that you can, as Jobs would say, “read what’s not on the page.”

Empathy is a key skill but should not, in Jobs’ belief system, be misplaced.  Jobs held others to very high standards and was direct in how he communicated that.  He believed that mediocre people stuck around in an organization when their managers were too timid to address performance problems – he called this “the bozo explosion” -- and this emphasis on excellence was a key to Apple’s success.  The details of Jobs’ particular style would not work in most organizations but direct communication, timely feedback and holding teams (including yourself) to high standards are critical to success and can be practiced without Jobs’ abrasive stylistic specifics. 

Priorities

A final lesson is priorities.  Apple went downhill after Jobs was ousted in the 1980s because more traditional, sales-oriented approaches were adopted at the cost of the innovative, intuitive products Jobs had initiated.  When Jobs returned, he put the focus relentlessly back on what was truly important – the product and the experience of users – and the profits followed.  All organizations are subject to this problem. Budgets will always be important.  They, after all, make the good work we are doing possible.  But a singular focus on profits, or prestige, or other less important factors takes the focus away from the group you serve, and will always lead to mediocrity.

What could be simplified in your own work?  How well do you really know your constituency or customers?  What is your vision for creating new ways to engage or serve them?  What is really important about what you do and how can you focus on it more clearly?