

The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs - fhoxh
http://hbr.org/2012/04/the-real-leadership-lessons-of-steve-jobs/

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carterac
The top comment is a very interesting counterpoint to Isaacson's post:

Jonathan Rotenberg 1 week ago

Isaacson has a lot of good facts, but misses HOW Steve led, HOW he made
decisions, and HOW he created the products and companies he did. Steve spent
his entire life trying to teach a very different approach to business
leadership. Most people (including Isaacson) weren't able to listen during
Steve's life, because they were so stuck in their own preconceived ideas.

I knew Steve closely for more than 30 years. He introduced me to meditation
and Buddhism when I was 18 and he was 26. Steve struggled mightily to try to
get Westerners to wake up from their half-alseep, wrong ideas about how
business works.

The essence of Steve's approach to leadership are contained in the two-word
tagline with which he relaunched Apple in 1997: THINK DIFFERENT. Isaacson
projects a lot of his own misconceptions onto what Steve meant by "Think
Different." Isaacson mistakenly attributes delusional 'magical' thinking,
perfectionism, reality distortion, and artistic exuberance to how Steve did
what he did.Steve was a deeply dedicated, disciplined Buddhist practitioner.
He followed an Eastern wisdom tradition that is antithetical to many Western
theoretical models about business leadership. Buddhism sees competition, free
markets, asset-management theories, and much of what is inculcated at Harvard
Business School not as first-principles to reify, but as relatively minor,
man-made artifacts.The source of all wisdom in Eastern traditions—and what
Steve meant in the words "Think Different"—is MINDFULNESS. Mindfulness means
paying attention to your present-moment experience as it is received through
your sense doors. Where HBS would have business managers pack their present-
moment experiences with theoretical frameworks and opinions, "Think Different"
means: Drop ALL your theories, concepts & preconceived ideas. PAY ATTENTION
instead to the raw reality coming in through your five senses and your mind.
This is where you will find real insight and wisdom.In trying to understand
how Steve Jobs succeeded as a CEO, Isaacson is like someone who has never
played basketball observing what he see as the elements of Michael Jordan's
success. Michael Jordan sweats, makes serious expressions on his face, leans
as he passes the basketball, etc. This is an outside observer's view who
doesn't see things from Michael Jordan's vantage point or and doesn't gets
what is going on in Michael's mind.In fairness to Isaacson, he would probably
have had to spend several years investigating his own preconceived ideas
before he could truly listen clearly & receptively to Steve Jobs. Isaacson did
a yeoman job of capturing Steve's life story under very stressful, difficult
circumstances. Isaacson has given humanity a tremendous gift in all of his
good work.As far the "Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs," however, I don't
think Isaacson is even close. One could test whether or not Isaacson's
insights work with an empirical experiment. Take two similar portfolios of ten
companies. Ask the senior leadership of the first ten companies to read
Isaacson's article and follow its advice carefully. Ask the senior leadership
of the second NOT to read Isaacson's article. Wait a year and see: Did
Isaacson's article make a difference in the performance and effectiveness of
the first group? I don't think it would, but I could be wrong. I believe the
Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs are still to be written. The true
leadership lessons of Steve Jobs are the lessons born of the first high-
profile business leader to build a global company from a deep foundational
grounding in BOTH Western Capitalism and in Eastern Wisdom traditions. In
other words, Steve Jobs was the first Boddhisatva Warrior in history to become
a Fortune 500 CEO.

Jonathan Rotenberg Founder, The Boston Computer Society

~~~
lani
second the 'be here now' message. is not easy though. old thoughts and static
'knowledge' pile up real fast and silt the stream of thinking...

> Michael Jordan sweats, makes serious expressions

reminds me of malcolm gladwell, somehow ...

~~~
bitdiddle
'Be Here Now' was exactly my thought also - 'The Only Dance There Is'

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TimPC
“It takes a lot of hard work,” he said, “to make something simple, to truly
understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions."

To me this is probably the most important lesson in the document (together
with the implication that this is one of the places where the hard work is
well worth doing).

There are many good ones, and the author is right that many who right about
Jobs portray many wrong lessons to focused on personality.

------
jballanc
This is probably the best summary of Jobs's style and leadership I've read
anywhere.

I find that too many people don't understand a key component of what Jobs and
Apple do. Simplicity is not a goal. I see products all the time that their
creators tout as "beautiful in its simplicity". Most of them are crap and
don't do anything useful. Perfection, likewise, is not a goal. You do,
eventually, have to ship. (Apple was the first place I heard the aphorism
"shoot the engineers and ship the damn thing!")

Simplicity and perfection is the goal. It is simple because being perfect
limits your scope. Your scope is limited, because you want to make the _best_
thing (and it had better be useful!).

Often, when thinking about Apple, and Jobs's style running Apple, I'm reminded
of the quote:

> "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's there
> are few."

...not surprisingly, from the famous zen master Shunryu Suzuki.

~~~
mmj48
> "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's there
> are few."

As someone who likes to read quotes and examine the wisdom within (or at least
I tell myself that), I see no wisdom here.

The only possible interpretation which I find makes sense, is that the
priorities of the expert are much clearer then the beginners. The expert
(through experience and intelligence) knows what matters, and what details are
not critical. The beginner however, places great importance on things which
are near-worthless.

If that is the more correct interpretation, then I find the wording clumsy. If
this isn't then please enlighten me.

~~~
jballanc
I first heard this quote in the context of learning the game of Go. If you're
not familiar, Go has very very few rules, and the game starts off with a 19x19
grid. Two players alternate placing stones on the grid.

A beginner sees 361 positions to chose from at the start, 360 to choose from
after the first move, 359 after the second and so on. An expert has a much,
much narrower view of the board.

To reword the quote, tear it apart a bit more (ruin some of its beauty even):
A beginner sees all possibilities because the beginner does not see past the
first step; an expert sees a path even though the field is wide open because
the expert knows where to step 100 steps from now.

 _Edit_ : I should add, if you find the style of the quote a bit obtuse, it is
in keeping with much of how Zen is taught. A key point in Zen is the idea that
the universe of knowledge can be split 3 ways: that which you know, that which
you don't know, and that which you don't know that you don't know. The goal is
to decrease the size of that third portion, but you cannot simply "show"
someone this knowledge. Each person must discover it on their own.

~~~
niels_olson
> that which you know, that which you don't know, and that which you don't
> know that you don't know.

First time I heard this was in a press conference by Donald Rumsfeld. Love him
or hate him, he was well read and got things done.

~~~
simonh
They were mainly the wrong things to do, of course, but damnit he got them
done!

------
rtoliveira
[http://hbr.org/2012/04/the-real-leadership-lessons-of-
steve-...](http://hbr.org/2012/04/the-real-leadership-lessons-of-steve-
jobs/ar/pr)

------
gruseom
_Combine the Humanities with the Sciences_

This has become a cliché about Steve Jobs. Understandably so, because it's
fundamental and worth repeating. But it makes me wonder: who out there in the
tech world actually takes it seriously? I think the answer is "almost no one".
As far as I can see, pretty much everyone, including pretty much everyone on
Hacker News, thinks something between "Humanities, haha" and "Yeah, yeah."

Whatever Jobs actually meant by this is so far from having any place in normal
tech culture that we all think it's obvious and ignore it.

~~~
phil
What would taking it seriously look like?

~~~
gruseom
I imagine it would involve engagement with the humanities (arts and letters)
on their own terms, finding things of value there, and bringing them into
one's technical work.

What I see in the tech world is ignorance of such things combined with the
contempt that comes from ignorance. It isn't always obvious. For example, we
take for granted that one should measure everything. But that is the
antithesis of how the humanities work.

~~~
phil
Well put. There's certainly a lot of that, and even worse it can often seem
like a competitive advantage.

But there _is_ good work being done, like <http://ourchoicethebook.com/> and
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD8Zrruo6fE> and there will be more in the
future.

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Schwolop
It's worth pointing out (for those who read the HN comments before going to
the link) that this article is by Walter Isaacson, who recently wrote a rather
popular biography of Mr Jobs. It reads a bit like an errata to the biography,
or perhaps an introduction to the 2nd edition. At any rate, if you like
Isaacson's style, it's a worthwhile read.

That said, it's full of the same anecdotes from the book, so a less charitable
reader might construe it as a "buy my book!" pitch...

~~~
Tloewald
It's essentially a partial retraction of the overall "Jobs was a total
asshole" impression the book seems to have generated in many quarters. The
point is that his unpleasantness was part of the package, not a character
flaw.

I think it's a pretty lame article. Nothing new. Really just a tone shift from
the presentation of the same points in the book.

------
aik
This article is great. There are quite a few very good tidbits to keep in mind
as you establish core values for your organization.

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rtoliveira
Print view is best way to read it and save to evernote

------
earl
I love this anecdote:

    
    
       Likewise, when Jobs was shown a cluttered set of proposed navigation
       screens for iDVD, which allowed users to burn video onto a disk, he
       jumped up and drew a simple rectangle on a whiteboard. “Here’s the
       new application,” he said. “It’s got one window. You drag your video
       into the window. Then you click the button that says ‘Burn.’ That’s
       it. That’s what we’re going to make.”
    

It strongly reminds me of Michael Wolfe's answer to why dropbox succeeded [1],
which comes down to:

    
    
       * there would be a folder
       * you'd put your stuff in it
       * it would sync
    

In both cases, huge amounts of complexity, and hence lots of work, where
hidden by the designers and developers to enable people to accomplish what
they wanted with no unnecessary work.

[1] [http://www.quora.com/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-than-
other-...](http://www.quora.com/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-than-other-
programs-with-similar-functionality/answer/Michael-Wolfe)

