Reading Walter Isaacson's excellent HBR piece on 'The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs,' I was struck by the following nugget, which took all of 50 words to sum up the amazing accomplishments of the 'Edison, Ford and Disney' of our age:
"Jobs helped to transform seven industries: personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, retail stores, and digital publishing. The output of this transformation was the following hits: iMac, iPod, iPod nano, iTunes Store, Apple Stores, MacBook, iPhone, iPad, App Store, OS X Lion—not to mention every Pixar film."
If we are to judge one's accomplishments by the outcomes that they delivered, that is a pretty amazing set, with no arm-waving superlatives necessary.
A couple of other nuggets from the piece:
- SIMPLICITY: “To be truly simple, you have to go really deep,” Jony Ive
- DISRUPTION: In looking for industries or categories ripe for disruption, Jobs always asked who was making products more complicated than they should be.
- IMPUTING VIA PACKAGING: “Mike Markkula taught me that people DO judge a book by its cover.”
- MANAGING PEOPLE: “I’ve learned over the years that when you have really good people, you don’t have to baby them. By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things."
Related:
- The price of greatness: Three takeaways from the biography of Steve Jobs (O'Reilly)
