Authors: Peter Sander
Steve repeatedly demonstrated that he could see just a little bit farther than everybody else, and could create products that exceeded customer expectations and defined customer experiences that the customers themselves didn’t even know they desired. This “guru” capability is one of the greatest—and most difficult to emulate—sources of respect. As we’ll explore later in the book, if you stay close enough to the customer and keep an innovation mindset, that won’t automatically guarantee a winning vision or a winning execution, but it will make it more likely to happen.
Workers generally love a leader who understands what they are doing and who can get into the trenches with
them. They feel that the leader can empathize with them and with their struggles to get a job done. They trust the leader, and the leader trusts them, so long as they stay on task. And if they get stuck, the leader can provide meaningful direction to solve their problems.
Even John Sculley later recognized one of the qualities of visionary leaders that Steve clearly had: “to be so in touch with the internal details that when something isn’t working, they have the leadership talent to adjust in flight.”
This one almost goes without explanation. Steve was right so many times about the product and its market, and he built, well, the world’s most valuable publicly traded company, so it’s pretty hard not to respect him for that.
When a leader is so “all-in” behind and into a product, and a company, that he is willing to be its public presence, its public face, and part of its brand, that’s a compelling add-on to the aura of leadership and respect that’s already out there. We’ve seen it before with the
likes of Lee Iacocca and to a lesser extent with Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines, Dave Thomas of Wendy’s, and others. They live, breathe, evangelize, and are totally connected to their product and its experience.
Leaders like Iacocca are probably involved in all phases of product development (as Iacocca was with the Chrysler K-Car platform) and follow by being the chief spokesman. These kinds of connections and efforts go above and beyond the normal call of duty. They show connections to the product, not personal grandeur, which go a long way toward building respect from the troops, not to mention the customer.
Steve Jobs was left-handed. That may not surprise most of you who typically associate left-handed people with alternative or contrarian thinking. But that’s not the point here.
The point is that even Steve Jobs recognized his limitations. While Steve had a mind for detail to the extreme when it came to customers and products, he didn’t align well with the administrative details of running a big company. Although evidence suggests that he often knew the financials better than the financial people, and that he demanded financial perfection just as he demanded product perfection, the financials weren’t really his bag.
So throughout Steve’s career, he always had a strong “right-hand” person taking care of the details of running a large, publicly held company and doing all that “other stuff” beyond product development and marketing. Mike Markkula, Mike Scott, and John Sculley were all brought on board as CEOs in the early days (remember, Steve was only 28 when Sculley was recruited). Jay Elliot served as a senior vice president and right-hand man well into the second phase of Apple’s success after Jobs’s return.
A good leader hires a good sidekick and places a lot of trust in that sidekick. They become “joined at the hip”—although they must be strategically aligned, something that obviously changed or was overlooked during the John Sculley years. A good visionary hires or partners with a strategically aligned nuts-and-bolts person to help him execute (Abraham Lincoln/Edwin Stanton, Bush/Cheney, and many others of far lower profile). This seems pretty simple, but it’s amazing how many leaders (HP’s Carly Fiorina comes to mind) think they can do everything, and fail when they try.
It’s pretty hard to structure a visionary. Visionaries, Steve Jobs included, defy structure. They act on instinct and experience, and what they do is hard to fit into a definitive model.
But we all need to learn from Steve; that’s why this book came to be. So I will try to put a structure around what he did to help you grasp the essence of what made him great. Now, mind you, this isn’t a “scouting manual” step-by-step leadership approach; rather, it is more of a thought process, a Zenlike state of being that you leaders out there can emulate, whether you are running a small work group or a Fortune 500 company.
Although Steve Jobs’s leadership style defied conventional wisdom, I do see six critical elements, which can be loosely organized into steps that made him different, and that I believe he followed instinctively.
At the core of Steve’s style and success was an unwavering focus on the customer and on the product. That in itself set Steve apart from many corporate leaders, who are more focused on organization and numbers stuff. Steve’s focus on product is worth a book in and of itself, and indeed, several have been written on the history and style of Apple’s innovation.
I do think Steve’s customer and product focus are both unique and extraordinary. But what is equally extraordinary is the “connective tissue” he added in to get the product
done
and then
to market
.
As such, I see “Customer” (an intense scrutiny of the customer and the customer experience) as one unique piece of Steve’s leadership, and I see “Product” as another and perhaps more obvious and transparent step. But what lies between Customer and Product?
It is in this gap where, in my view, many companies fail. They may know their customers pretty well (although I believe that most don’t), and they may have good machines to produce products. But something gets lost in the translation. Interestingly, look at the successes and failures of the Japanese. As Steve was, the Japanese are very close to their customers and their customers’ needs, and can produce excellent products. But the absence of the connective tissue between the two—the lack of creativity, the ability to see a holistic outcome, and a cultural reluctance to think differently—all together get in the way of the Japanese.
Where I believe Steve excelled—and what really made the Jobs difference—are the two steps between knowing the customer and producing a perfect, breakthrough product. Those steps are “Vision” (the translation of customer experience and needs into a product need and concept) and “Culture” (the creating and nurturing of an organizational innovation culture that actually can get things done and exceed everyone’s expectations).
So now we have four “steps”: Customer, Vision, Culture, and Product.
But products don’t sell themselves, and Steve didn’t stop there. He was an expert at launching and creating the buzz around his products—more so than anyone else in American corporate history. So there’s another step, “Message,” that included not only his message to the consuming public, but also the messages to his internal teams that kept them so motivated and on task and eager to tackle the next iProduct.
These five steps define the right product and get it to the right market, and normally I’d stop there, but I see one more thing that isn’t really a “step” but more of a Steve Jobs protocol. It’s a bit more abstract. I think Steve thought about, and continually perfected, his own personal brand (as well as the Apple brand; they went hand in hand). Good leaders get stuff done, but most of them don’t seem to have the right approach to marketing themselves, their organizations, and their successes. Doing so builds and solidifies respect in the process, enabling them to go out and do it all over again. The building of the personal “Brand” perpetuates the success.
So now we have six “steps,” or elements, of the Steve Jobs Leadership Model.
1.
Customer
2.
Vision
3.
Culture
4.
Product
5.
Message
6.
Brand
•
Customer
. Steve had a unique way of getting to what customers need by understanding what causes them pain today. Most organizations take the wrong approach (if they take any approach at all) to understanding what is really going on with their customers.
Chapter 4
shows how Steve viewed the customer and the customer experience.
•
Vision
. Visionaries all have visions, of course. Steve Jobs had a unique way of tying customer needs and experiences to complete and holistic product and customer experience visions.
Chapter 5
covers how Steve’s “seeing over the horizon” visioning really worked, and how he spread his visions through his organization.
•
Culture
. Where the rubber really fails to meet the road in many organizations is in culture. Innovation is often set off in some ivory-tower R&D lab far from any other element of the company. It isn’t part of everyday life for the company. Or, people are not rewarded for, or are even discouraged from, thinking outside the box.
Chapter 6
shows how Steve built his organization through
recruiting and he irrigated an innovation mindset within it.
•
Product
. Once we have the vision and the culture, we can start producing products. But are these products incremental tweaks or little white boxes that stop where they are plugged into an electric outlet? Nope.
Chapter 7
describes how Steve and Apple conceived and developed holistic products that have been so successful that they define markets—and leave customers waiting for the next breakthrough.
•
Message
. Now that we have a product, we have to put the right message around it to get attention and convey its value. Steve’s leadership didn’t stop with creating a product; he brought it to market personally. He created more product excitement than any other business leader in history, and
Chapter 8
gets to how that worked.
•
Brand
. Finally, in
Chapter 9
we get to the more abstract notion of building your own
personal
brand and reputation, which creates the aura of respect and credibility that makes it easier for you to go out and do it, whatever “it” is, over and over again.
This six-step model becomes the framework for the remaining chapters of
What Would Steve Jobs Do?
I will
take apart each of these steps and offer the “What Would Steve Jobs Do?” message in each, the idea being that someday they will also answer the question: “What Would
You
Do?”
If I asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have told me, “a faster horse.”
—Henry Ford
The room was dark. The candy dish was full of M&Ms, and there was a dish of mixed nuts alongside it. In the back of the room was a tray of mini deli sandwiches, cheeses, and assorted vegetables—finger foods all ready for the taking. And of course, there was plenty of coffee, tea, juices, sodas, and water to go around.
The only light in the room came from the larger conference room in front of the glass. The glass was a large plate window of almost bulletproof thickness, a thickness so complete that hardly a sound passed other than what was miked into the room.
The fluorescence washed the room in bright white with a pale yellow-green cast. There was a large table with six people sitting around it. On the table was another plateful of snacks (not as nice as the ones on the “dark side” of the glass) and a couple of copies of the company’s latest product.
The people in front of the glass, supposedly chosen at random from all walks of life, were asked how they use the company’s product, in this case, a Windows PC. When the question came around to the lady in the salmon-colored dress at the far corner, with glasses and curly dishwater-blond hair, she smiled. “I have a dog who loves to run. When someone opens the front door, he’s outa here. So I use my PC mainly to make ‘lost dog’ signs.”
The dimly lit faces of the product marketing team behind the glass and the candy dishes were all smiles. A collective chuckle rang out. “That’s a good one” was heard from one of the product managers in the corner. The chuckle died down quickly, and the questioning moved on to the next player. “I use my PC to run my household finances, and my kids use it to do their homework.”
On and on the evening went. The group learned how their customers use the machine, and they took in a few frustrations with it—it doesn’t boot up fast enough, it crashes occasionally while on the Internet, something about the software. On and on it went—along a road really to nowhere.
Did the people on the product marketing team really learn anything? Did they get any real and actionable insight into the customer experience? Did they get the feedstock for any epiphanies about how customers use these products and what they
really
want?