I recently finished reading Steve Jobs biography for the third time. I really love Walter Isaacson's book, he shows the real Steve Jobs. The man who went from being a smelly, vegan, drug taking hippy to being a technology tycoon.
The biography doesn't paint Jobs as an all knowing genius or an emotionally intelligent leader. While the book show Jobs was a genius in the area of design and had great ideas, it also showed a man who could be cruel, immature and eccentric. He was a man who saw the world in extremes. Things were either brilliant or shit. He was a man who would take credit for other people's ideas and overlook practical reality using his reality distortion field.
What the book demonstrates better than any other business book I've read is what it takes to be great. In the main, focus. Jobs had the ability to focus and be completely obsessed by a problem or design issue. In the book he is quoted saying that on every major product Apple produced their was a moment where he needed to hit the stop button and rewind. A moment when the team realised they had got something fundamentally wrong and would need to start again.
During his time at Pixar there was a moment when they needed to re-write Toy Story. With the Mac there were many times when Jobs wouldn't accept good enough. With Apple's famous Apple Stores a last minute decision about layout caused the stores opening to be delayed by months.
How many of us really have what it takes to do that. To realise that we have fundamentally missed the point on the essay and it will need to be rewritten. Do we do that? No, most of the time we accept good enough or even something that is lousy. Why? Because to redo something is hard. To find a second wind and start all over is next to impossible. But is this what separates genius from average.
As a society we like to believe the myth of the genius. We don't want to acknowledge the truth that we were just too lazy to produce really good work. We like to believe average is our lot in life rather then the reality that looked at the opportunity cost and settled for second best.
When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 he brought a laser focus. He simplified their product lines and clarified what Apple did. Gone were the printers and PDAs. Apple made computers for creative types that focus redefined the brand and stopped them competing in markets they couldn't win and got them in markets where they could. Jobs wasn't the perfect man which the business literature tells us we need to be, instead he was a flawed human being he did great things because he focused and was able to get other people to focus. As someone who can some time offend others and can have poor emotional intelligence I find Jobs life story reassuring.
Disclaimer: I am not an apple fan boi, though their products are starting to grow on me. I love my ipad and miss my iphone but I find my Macbook Pro limited when compared to a PC. (The Macbook is a work computer, my personal computer runs Windows 8). Office 2011 is total crap compared to 2010 on Windows. One would think Microsoft dropping the ball on office would have open the Mac market up for some good alternatives. The lack of a serious Office suite on the Mac leads me to believe that no one does serious work on apple products. Also my blog is based on the Microsoft philosophy of releasing faulty products and fixing them with patches. Spelling and gramatical errors will be patched as required.
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