Business Lessons I Learned from Steve Jobs

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Business Lessons I Learned from Steve Jobs
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:
1
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.
2
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.
3
Make your own rules.
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 stopped paying his tuition, but
he was so charismatic that the dean allowed him to audit
classes and stay in a dorm with friends, effectively going
to college for free.
4
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.
5
Learn from the best.

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.
6
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
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.
7
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.
8

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.
9
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 walk-man, 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-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 start-up 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.
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 modelling 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.