Business Lessons I Learned from Steve Jobs

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Business Lessons I
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by Thomas Murcko, CEO of BusinessDictionary.com

One of the best techniques for success in business and in life is intelligent selection of
role models. They can serve as sources of wisdom and inspiration, as bright lights
illuminating the path to the person you want to become. In Steve Jobs I found much
that was worthy of emulation, so I decided to put together a list of business and life
lessons I learned from biographies and interviews of him. Here they are:

Be bold.
When Steve was just 12, he called the co-founder of electronics giant
Hewlett-Packard to get spare parts for a hobby project. Hewlett was so
impressed in that one conversation that he gave Steve a job that summer
that started him on his career in technology.

Question everything.
Always ask, why do we do it that way? Often the answer is just inertia: its
done that way today because it was done that way yesterday, not
because its the best way. By questioning the way things were, he
became an expert at seeing how things could be better. He envisioned
desktop publishing, the networked office, and the pervasive,
transformative power of the internet long before most others.

Image courtesy of Matthew Yohe

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Make your own rules.

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At college he skipped the required classes and instead just took whatever
interested him. (This included a calligraphy class, which contributed to
Apples leadership on fonts and desktop publishing.) After a while he
decided that school was too expensive for his parents to pay for, so he

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stopped paying his tuition, but he was so charismatic that the dean
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going to college for free.

Live with intensity.

Life is short. Dont spend it living someone elses life, and dont spend it on
small matters. If something isnt worth doing with intensity, then its not
worth doing at all.

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Steve wanted to innovate, so he studied the leading innovators. In Apples

early days, this was Xerox Parc, so he visited their research labs and saw
demonstrations on cutting-edge technologies that changed the trajectory
of his company, including graphical user interfaces, object oriented
programming, and networked computing.

Innovation

Let everything be your teacher.

Apple took the best ideas from all fields. The early Macintosh team
included people with backgrounds in music, poetry, art, history and other
liberal arts, who also happened to be among the best programmers in the

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Business Lessons I Learned from Steve Jobs

world. If not for computer science, they wouldve done amazing things in
these other fields. Bringing together diverse expertise made the products
better in countless ways.

Think for yourself.

At Apple, Steve didnt use focus groups and did little or no market
research. To be innovative, you cant rely on customers to tell you what to
do, because they dont know they want and need things that dont exist
yet. You have to think for yourself, in product innovation and all other
areas of business.

Learn to program.
Even if you dont intend to pursue a career in programming, Jobs thought it
was worthwhile to learn to program, as it helps you learn to think clearly
(and provides you with immediate feedback when youre not). He felt a
business school degree was unnecessary for entrepreneurs, since
business isnt rocket science, and can be learned on the job.

Passion is essential to success.

When hiring, Steve looked for some of the same traits others do, including
intelligence and creativity. But his primary recruiting criterion was a
passion for the product that person would be working on. In fact, his
passion was so contagious that he was careful to first gauge the passion
of the recruiting candidate before expressing his. Also, he emphasized
that passion matters much more than money. When Apple came up with
the Macintosh, IBM was spending at least a hundred times more than
Apple on R&D, but it didnt matter.

10

Mission counts.
Microsofts Zune music player failed. Why? Because it was worse than the
iPod. But why was it worse? Because mission matters. The Apple team
loved music and art and their mission was to make a device they
themselves wanted to use. Also, they were inventing something
completely new, the first of its kind, which is a powerful motivating
mission. The Zune was neither innovative nor driven by a passionate
mission, so its no surprise that it failed. Really, Sony shouldve owned the
MP3 player market, but it also lacked mission; it feared cannibalization of
its walkman, and its company divisions had separate P&L and didnt work
well together, so there was no room for a shared mission.

11

Make something for yourself.

Jobs and Wozniak built the first Apple for themselves because computers
at the time were too expensive for them to afford. When their friends saw
it, they wanted them too, so the Steves built a kit which enabled their
friends to build their computers quickly. Then a local store wanted several
dozen pre-built computers, and they realized the retail market was a much
bigger opportunity than the do-it-yourself hobbyist market. Thats how
Apple got started. Many other successful companies were also born from
entrepreneurs creating something that they wanted for themselves, or
something that removed a pain point from their lives. By starting a
company that makes a product or service you want to use, youll be able
to better judge its quality, and youll also be more passionate about it.

12

The execution matters more than the idea.

The idea is the easy part. Getting from a great idea to a great product
requires genius, craftsmanship and toil to navigate the problems,
opportunities, interconnections, subtleties and trade-offs. This is under-

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Business Lessons I Learned from Steve Jobs

appreciated by most people because when its done right, the products
users dont know about these complexities; the product just works the way
it should.

13

Hire the best people you can.

For most things in life, the difference in magnitude between ideal and
average is two to one, or less. This isnt the case in some fields, such as
innovative technology product development. Here, sometimes the
difference is ten to one. Sometimes its a difference not of magnitude but
of kind, in that one person or team can do something that another couldnt
do, even given infinite time. In these fields, A players are much, much
more valuable than B players. A company should be prepared to pay a lot
for these stars, but only if theyre capable of differentiating quality;
otherwise they might be paying A money for B players. The additional
benefit of hiring A players is that its self-reinforcing: A players like working
with other A players, so having A players makes it easier to hire and
retain other A players.

14

If it matters, do whatever it takes.

In the early days, when Jobs couldnt directly persuade Wozniak to quit his
day job to work on the Apple full time, Jobs persuaded Wozniaks friends
and family, and then they persuaded Wozniak to do it. Later, when Jobs
was building the worlds first automated computer factory (which he
described as machines building machines), he went to Japan and visited
not five or ten but eighty automated factories. These are just two
examples of how extraordinary results require extraordinary effort.

15

Master the art of persuasion.

John Sculley had spent fifteen years climbing the ranks at Pepsi, and
seemed destined to spend his life there. Jobs wanted him to join Apple,
so he shattered those plans with a single question: do you want to sell
sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?
On another occasion, a Mac developer told Jobs he couldnt cut ten
seconds off the startup time. Jobs said, what if you could save a life by
doing it? The developer said yes, if it was a matter of life or death he
could. Jobs replied by saying that 10 seconds per day for 10 million users
is the equivalent of 100 lifetimes a year saved. The developer made it
happen.

16

Build a toolbox of techniques for getting what you

want.
If logic was on his side, Steve would use that first. If not, he would use
charisma, persuasion, or sheer force of will. Often it was a combination of
all these. A lot of the tactics mentioned in this article were also used in
service of getting what he wanted: being bold, thinking for himself,
questioning everything, and making his own rules.

17

Leverage what already exists.

As kids, Jobs and Wozniak heard about a guy who had found a way to
make free long distance phone calls, so they scoured libraries and found
an obscure technical journal at a university with the satellite codes
necessary to send instructions through AT&Ts system as if coming from
AT&T itself. After three weeks of work they had built a device that enabled
free long distance calls. The lesson they learned was that they
themselves could build something that could control billions of dollars of
existing infrastructure, that they could leverage the world.

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Business Lessons I Learned from Steve Jobs

18

Believe in the power of technology to change the

world.
As a kid, Steve was affected by a Scientific American article he saw that
listed the efficiency of locomotion of different species. The condor was
first, and the human was closer to the middle than the top of the list. But a
human on bicycle was the clear winner. With this simple comparison he
saw how humans as tool builders can amplify our abilities and change
whats possible. Later he even used this idea in an ad, calling Apple
Computer the bicycle of the mind.

19

Put a dent in the universe.

Act like what you do matters, because it does. You will have some impact
on the world, so let it be a positive impact, in the service of something
bigger than yourself.

20

Bend reality to your will.

Steve was able to convince people of almost anything, and sometimes
even to make false things true. He could create self-fulfilling prophesies
through charisma and sheer mental force. Those around him called it his
reality distortion field, and it worked even when people were aware of it
and anticipated it. They eventually accepted it as a force of nature, like
gravity.

21

First impressions matter.

If one characteristic of your product, your service, or yourself is high
quality, people are likely to assume the others are too. But if they see one
feature or trait thats low quality, theyll lower their overall impression and
expectations. So impute greatness by making sure the most prominent
features, the ones people will see first, are as high quality as possible.

22

Make something beautiful.

Everyone creates things. You can create beautiful things or ugly things, so
why not create beautiful things? Life isnt just about function; aesthetics
matter, so let everything you do be a work of art. What is beautiful? You
get to define it for yourself. For Steve, beauty was elegant, simple,
intuitive, and powerful.

23

When looking for role models, admire the trait, but

dont worship the person.
Dont expect to find perfect role models. People are complex creatures,
each with much thats worth emulating and much thats not. Steve Jobs
was no different in this regard. He had much to teach about how to
succeed in business, but he also had many personality traits that I
wouldnt advise modeling yourself after. With any role model, focus on the
traits they have that you think will help you move in the direction of the
career and life that you want.

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Ralph Imanyara Heriot-Watt University

Found something great today
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1 August 16, 2014 at 4:28am

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Thabiso KaKhetho Rammille Zuma UKZN Howard College

good points and fact are present
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1 August 2, 2014 at 10:47am

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Tanjila Haque University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB)

Nice article
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August 6, 2014 at 8:17pm

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Abdurehim Mohamed Fasiledes Gonder

it is real and real needs me
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June 22, 2014 at 10:58pm

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Yihunie Mulaw Bishoftu preparatory school

fasnating!!!!!! its time we change our way of thing
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June 18, 2014 at 9:04am

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Bamigboye Paul Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria

Highly inspiring!!!
About Thomas Murcko

Tom Murcko is an entrepreneur, connoisseur and raconteur. His companys websites focus on
education and empowerment and collectively reach about four million people per month. He
graduated magna cum laude from Dartmouth College and lives in Washington, D.C. His goal is
to fill his life with happiness, pleasure and meaning, while helping others to do the same. Follow
Tom on Google+.

View all posts by Thomas Murcko

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Business Lessons I Learned from Steve Jobs

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