Being an unabashed fan and supporter of all things Apple and Macintosh, I joined the rest of the world in mourning the all-too-young death of technology entrepreneur and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs two months ago. I’ve never met the guy and I rarely gave him a second thought, even while using an iPad, an iPod and a Macbook Pro on a daily basis.
But in the last two months I’ve learned a lot about him.
Turns out he was quite a layered character, at times both mercurial and deliberate, churlish and kind. Complex, as we all are.
Blunt and sometimes plainspoken, Jobs was had an interesting and often unconventional approach to both business and life. He was highly quotable. Arguably his most popular quotation is probably the advertising slogan “Think Different.”
These two words – though technically grammatically incorrect – can be applied to our changing and challenging life today. The past several years and the worldwide economic crisis have changed our lives, at least temporarily while we weather the storm. Our expectations may need to be adjusted; to meet whatever challenges face us, we need to think different, be more creative, try new strategies.
Sometimes our focus needs to be narrowed, our mission honed in on, in order to achieve success. Jobs understood this and when he retook the helm of a weakened Apple in the late 1990s, reportedly cutting back on the many items Apple was then producing, to concentrate on doing a few things well.
Early in life, I was exposed to this approach. My father, who was in the restaurant business, one told me to beware of restaurants with menus that went on forever. “The smaller the menu, the higher the quality,” he told me.
Sometimes – but not always – it is best to focus on what your company does best, and resist the urge to diversify. To do this takes a thorough understanding of your company’s product or service, its values and its customer needs. Listening to your customers is key.
(That wasn’t necessarily Jobs’ approach, I should point out. He eschewed focus groups, and considered himself and his company as tastemakers. “We’ll tell them what they should like,” was his philosophy.)
Jobs, a Beatles fan, once pointed out how the Fab Four worked as a team, complementing each other and working together to produce a great product: Music people of all ages know and love.
The Beatles were successful because they worked as a unit, Jobs noted.
“Great things in business are never done by one person, they are done by a team of people,” he said.
One more thing: A few years back, Jobs said, “There's an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. ‘I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.' And we've always tried to do that at Apple.”
Think different, work together and skate where the puck is going to be.
-Mary Johns, IOM, Executive Director and CEO
(Reprinted from Memo, the chamber's quarterly newsletter.)
No comments:
Post a Comment