A reflection on the success of Steve Jobs based on the book "Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson

My goal for reading the book ‘Steve Jobs’ by Walter Isaacson was to extract clues and maybe even advice that could help to repeat the kind of spectacular success that the founder of Apple achieved. Years later I found this essay and thought it was interesting enough to publish. You can find its content below.

Introduction

Even before reading the book, my plan for this work was very different. What I expected was that I would be analysing Steve Jobs’ success, trying to extract advice and tips for running a business from his biography. I had never been interested in the private life of the Apple founder before, but I was aware of the success he achieved. After reading the book ‘Steve Jobs’, which goes into great detail about the behind-the-scenes work of building the huge company that is Apple today, I began to question whether I still envied Jobs’ success in the form he had achieved. I reflected on where I thought the boundaries of sacrifice for company and career growth were. The result of my thoughts is this reflection. I already know that Steve Jobs’ ideology is different from mine in many respects. In this paper, I would like to quote selected passages from Jobs’ life that influenced what he achieved and enrich them with my own insights based on my own system of values.

Studies

The first difficult, in my opinion, decision Jobs made on his way to a career was to drop out of university after his first semester. Encouraged to return by professors he knew, he could not be convinced. Right from the start, he felt that becoming an engineer was not enough for his ambitions. He himself said from the beginning that he “wanted to change the world”. This is a very impressive approach to life and business, especially at such a young age. Steve Jobs was younger than me when he decided to leave university and start his first business. Courage wasn’t all Jobs prided himself on at the time. He believed very strongly and sincerely in the success of his plans. At times, this was akin to fanaticism, with everyone around doubting the success that Jobs seemed more than sure of. For me, such attributes are distinctly lacking, although I know they are crucial to successful business development. No one will sell their solutions and products if they themselves do not believe in their performance and usefulness. So this is an attitude worth following.

Another interesting aspect of the young Steve Jobs’ life was his attitude to clothing. Although his plans reached very high, he did not feel the need to wear elegant clothes and shoes. This is a characteristic seen in other professionally successful celebrities, including Mark Zuckerberg, who fancies a grey T-shirt as much as Steve Jobs a black jumper at a presentation. This is due to their value system, in which the appearance of one’s person is of marginal importance. What matters are the ideas, the concepts and the products presented at the moment. Having this kind of distance from oneself is another thing I could learn from Jobs. However, a line must be drawn. At one time in his life, Steve lived in his home in almost spartan conditions, with no furniture that was of little importance to him. In my opinion, a commitment to business development should go hand in hand with improving the quality of life for yourself and your family. Otherwise, our work would be work for ideas, not profit. Business, after all, is about making as much profit as possible. This is my opinion based on my value system. After reading Steve Jobs’ biography, it is easy to conclude that the book’s protagonist was driven by other principles.

The garage

Jobs’ empire began under the name ‘Apple Computer’ in his home garage in Los Altos. Even then, he was already working with Steve Wozniak on the first personal computer, the Apple I. Another character trait shown by Jobs and which I will discuss here was perfectionism. It often drove Jobs’ co-workers crazy. During the production of the first motherboards, he pointed out to Wozniak the asymmetrical arrangement of resistors on the board. A discussion broke out between the two, as the appearance of the board had no impact on its functioning. It was not obvious to me which side of the conflict to take in this case. However, the following fact can be stated with certainty: perfectionism costs a lot. At the time, young designers had neither the time nor the money. Despite this, the Apple I was a success and this allowed work to begin on the next version, the Apple II. It is therefore important to consider whether perfectionism is good for business. In the beginning, when a company is not known in the market, it needs to stand out from the crowd somehow. This differentiator could be the quality of the product. Putting everything to the last button can therefore be healthy in the early stages of a company’s development. However, the more complex the product, the more things need to be fine-tuned… Steve Jobs found this out while working on the first version of the Macintosh.

Steve Jobs’ ambitions reached far beyond his company’s financial and technological capabilities. This is a very interesting philosophy. Although his workshop was located in a small garage, Jobs dreamed of conquering the world with his products. His plans did not stop at making a certain amount of money. They were more visionary than realistic. Perhaps this is the right way to think when running a business. Low bars to jump over or trivial goals to achieve can stifle the potential of a business that we ourselves no longer believe is capable of being competitive in larger markets.

The development of the garage business was also the moment when Jobs found out that his then girlfriend Chrisann Brennan was pregnant. Preoccupied with running the business, he completely disallowed the idea that he might be a father. He felt no parental responsibility. This says a lot about his character and the pride he carried. It is a part of Jobs’ life that prevented me from identifying with him. The price Steve had to pay, i.e. the rejection of his family, was too high and his professional success did not compensate for this lack in any way. He found this out many years later. One of the computers Apple produced was called the ‘Apple Lisa’, and although Jobs’ daughter’s name was Lisa, he claimed it was an acronym for ‘Local Integrated Software Architecture’. Pride prevented him from admitting this, which he only confessed to Isaac Walter in one of his interviews. In the book we can read: “obviously, it was named for my daughter”. I am not of the opinion that Apple’s success depended more on his indifferent attitude towards his own child. However, it was necessary to draw attention to this darker side of his life. Jobs himself asked Isaancson to do so before the interviews. He did not want the story of his life to be whitewashed in any aspect.

A business angel

After the success of the Apple I computer, it was time to seek capital for another, more ambitious project. My attention was drawn to the method of negotiation that Steve Jobs practised. Apple Computer needed tens of thousands of dollars for development. Many days passed, countless phone calls were made. Finally, the first potential investor turned up - a business angel, Mark Markkula. During the first conversation, he offered almost twice as much as Jobs had initially expected. However, Jobs did not succumb to his emotions and replied without hesitation that this was not enough. What we have here is a very interesting psychological approach. Although a barrier had been set, which was the amount needed to realise the new computer project, crossing it did not result in a sudden burst of euphoria. On the contrary. Steve Jobs raised the bar even higher by trying to gain as much as possible from the opportunity. This is an obvious reference to the philosophy described a few paragraphs earlier. We should not let the goals we set limit us to only achieving them. We should seize every opportunity to gain more than we initially set out to do.

The board

A few years later, Apple gained a strong position in the market, went public and had a board of directors representing investors. This was one of the most difficult moments in Steve Jobs’ career. As might be expected, the company’s board of directors, focused on the highest possible profits, did not appreciate or understand the innovations that Jobs wanted to bring to the emerging products. There were many conflicts between him and the board members during this period. It is difficult to find further golden advice and tips for dealing with such problems in the biography. Numerous disputes eventually led to Jobs leaving Apple. What is important is what followed. Dedication, commitment and a tenacious belief in his own ideas about innovation brought Jobs back as a director of this company. This is, of course, a very laconic description of the work Steve did in founding Apple competitor NeXT, but the motivational value is immense. Is it possible to fall from such a high place and pick yourself up afterwards? Steve Jobs set an example of how to do just that. One failure can teach more than a string of successes.

The internal conflicts at Apple have another side to the coin, and the company’s board itself, although it has held back Jobs’ inclinations, should not just be demonised. I would regard him as a kind of voice of common sense throughout this dispute. It is common knowledge, however, that this is sometimes illusory. Not long before Steve Jobs left Apple, the company was in less than ideal financial shape. We do not know what would have happened if Jobs had been given free rein to pursue his ideas. The fact was that by then he had already scored several commercial failures, including the first version of the Macintosh, which did not sell as much as its creator had anticipated. Investors were sceptical of Jobs’ increasingly ambitious ideas. It was not the first time that everyone around doubted except Steve. He had a different approach to the products he created. Instead of listening to people’s needs, he wanted to create them. He repeatedly said that people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.

Employees

According to Steve Jobs, the most important criterion in evaluating an engineer was not only his technical knowledge, but also his creative approach to solving problems. His attitude towards the rest of the employees was sometimes controversial. The perfectionism present in him added huge amounts of work for a team that did not understand the relevance of the changes being made. His ability to lead the design of new personal computers is very impressive to me due to the fact that he did not have as much technical knowledge as most of his engineers. He himself was the initiator of many ideas, although he was not aware of how much work had to be done to bring them to life. You cannot require every manager to have the knowledge to understand all the technical aspects of a project. That would simply not be enough. The well-known comparison to musicians and the conductor of an orchestra will be very apt here. The whole team is like an orchestra, the engineer is the musician playing the instrument and they have to be the best at what they do. Steve Jobs, on the other hand, is in this comparison a conductor who does not play an instrument but the whole orchestra. The pool of skills needed to efficiently manage a team and an entire company is therefore as large or even larger than the responsibilities of the average engineer.

Sacrifice

Sacrificing his private life, family and friends to pursue his vision of changing the world is a pretty accurate description with which I could subjectively sum up Steve Jobs’ career. At times I could see him as a fanatic for his own ideas, but with a philosophical approach to implementing them. His professional success was the result of many sacrifices. Not all of them I would be able or willing to accept. I am not convinced that, having read Steve Jobs’ biography, I want to envy him the path to his achievements. Everyone has certain ambitions that drive them. I definitely don’t have such sophisticated ambitions as Jobs, which is why many of the decisions he made seemed irrational to me.

Reflection

Can success only be work-related? I believe that the story presented in the Steve Jobs biography describes the most amazing career success I have read about in such detail. However, it will not be a victory for everyone. The purpose of running a business is for most people to make money. Everyone has a parallel private life right alongside their professional life, which from my perspective Jobs sorely lacked in the early days of the company. The story of Steve Jobs’ career offers many general advices for today’s entrepreneurs. However, I believe that the success he achieved is incomplete. I have deliberately led this very personal reflection towards a discussion around the question: “Is there more to success than career success?”. The book ‘Steve Jobs’ by Walter Isaacson is an excellent starting point for thinking and reflecting on the answer to this question.

Wrocław, 07.06.2019