What Would Steve Jobs Do? How the Steve Jobs Way Can Inspire Anyone to Think Differently and Win (6 page)

Steve was pretty sure he wanted to do this, but he didn’t want to make the same mistakes that Gateway had. He also recognized that he was no expert at retail, and so—for the first and only time at Apple—he hired consultants to help show him the way. He also recruited two of the more visionary retail experts at the time: former Target executive Ron Johnson, who had previously brought designer Michael Graves in to add a differentiating elegance to Target products, and former Gap CEO Mickey Drexler. Drexler joined the board of directors; Johnson became the manager of the retail operations.

Johnson, Jobs, and the retail team worked hard to design a differentiating elegance into the Apple Store format. They went for a clean, well-lighted, uncluttered look, with some of the same material and design touches found on Apple products: bright white surfaces; touches of metal in the right places; elegant, simple lines. They wanted customers to be able to experience the product, so all floor samples were up and running and connected to the Internet (compare that to your typical retail experience today!). Famously, Steve got very involved in the design and function of these stores, being particular about every element from floor to ceiling (literally).

Products were grouped by function, which at the time was the four-quadrant grid that Jobs had laid out upon his 1997 return: Desktop or Portable, Consumer or Professional. When the first Apple Stores opened in May 2001, the iPod wasn’t even out yet, so the Apple Store had only the computer lines, most eye-catchingly the colorful iMac, to display.

A nice touch came in the form of the “Genius Bar,” the concierge-style desk at the back of the store patterned after a similar feature found in the luxury chain Four Seasons hotel lobbies. Another nice touch was dispensing with the traditional cash registers and checkout lines found in most retail stores in favor of portable wireless devices carried by floor personnel. These personnel could deliver a personal shopping and consultation experience
throughout the entire store visit. The obvious point was to give customers a complete and holistic pre-sale and postsale product experience.

To make a longer story short, no other computer experience has even come close to the success of the Apple Store. The 357 stores open worldwide (as of July 2011) have become hubs of activity and destination locations in many shopping malls around the country. They have required crowd-control measures when new products, such as the iPad, were introduced. The resulting expansion of the Apple brand and customers’ willingness to pay a higher price has produced incalculable value for Apple Inc.

The Apple Stores are a pure example of Steve’s innovative spirit and his vision and passion for the customer experience. They represent a pure example of his leadership style.

Steve Jobs passed away peacefully on October 5, 2011, of respiratory failure related to the spread of pancreatic cancer.

Just prior to that, on August 24, 2011, Steve had announced his resignation as CEO, although he stayed on as board chairman. In his words: “Unfortunately, that
day has come where I can no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO.”

Steve Jobs’s declining health and the events leading up to his resignation and passing are widely known and documented. In mid-2004, he announced that he had been diagnosed with a rare but unusually treatable form of pancreatic cancer, and after undergoing alternative diet-based treatments for nine months, underwent a complex tumor-removal operation known as the Whipple procedure in July 2004.

The initial results were positive, and although he lost some weight and had a gaunt appearance at times, he delivered the famous 2005 Stanford commencement address in style and hung in as an active CEO for the next three years, giving the various keynote addresses and other presentations he had become so well known for. Speculation about his health continued through the end of 2008, when Steve announced that the January 2009 Macworld keynote address would be delivered by marketing VP Phil Schiller.

During that January, Steve disclosed that “[his] health issues were more complex than [he] originally thought.” He took a six-month medical leave, during which he underwent a liver transplant. He returned from the leave with an excellent health prognosis, and while the speculation continued, he carried out his normal duties as Apple CEO.

In January 2011, he announced another medical leave without giving specific reasons. Despite this, he returned to launch the iPad 2 and give the keynote at the Worldwide Developer’s Conference. He even gave a short talk and did a question-and-answer session with the Cupertino City Council in June 2011 to review plans for an enormous new headquarters facility (called a “spaceship” because of its circular form) to be built on property acquired from Hewlett-Packard in Cupertino, where that company had operated one of its largest sites. He looked underweight but otherwise appeared normal.

The rest is history. Apparently Steve knew his destiny, for he had authorized (and, some reports say, commissioned) journalist and former CNN CEO Walter Isaacson to do a 650-page biography. According to Isaacson, Jobs explained why he had authorized the work in a final interview shortly before his death. “I wanted my kids to know me,” said Jobs. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and understand why I did what I did.”

He probably knew his destiny in the following often-quoted passage from the 2005 Stanford commencement address:

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all
external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

If nothing else, Steve Jobs followed his heart.

As leaders, we will all be well served to follow Steve Jobs.

Democracies don’t make great products—you need a competent tyrant.

—Jean-Louis Gassée, former Apple VP,
Product Development

The Steve Jobs Leadership Model is above and beyond. The results make this clear. Its veneration and idolatry by the financial press, innovation specialists, tech gurus, and most of the consumer world make it abundantly clear.

So what’s the difference between it and the same-old same-old that seems to be practiced all across corporate America (or the world, for that matter)? What’s the special secret sauce that makes the Jobs model work, and work so much better than what so many have learned in business school, and what so many have learned on the job? How does “good” become “great”? How did Jobs lead 40,000 people to do the right thing, time after time, and be so happy about it and ready to do it again? Why is it that no other product-creating organization of 40,000 or more has been able to create and produce so much shareholder value?

Did Jobs put a dent in the traditional leadership model? If so, how?

The questions just posed are what we, as students of Steve Jobs’s leadership, really need to get to. And the Jean-Louis Gassée quote cited at the beginning of the chapter goes a long way toward getting there. It goes a
long way toward defining what the Jobs leadership style is all about, why it works, and how it’s different.

Would the Apple “democracy” have succeeded without Jobs? Chances are, it would not have. We don’t really have to speculate on that; we saw it clearly in Apple’s dwindling fortunes, declining brand, and bland product offerings during his 11-year absence between 1985 and 1996.

And the “product”? That can be a small “p” (the product itself, the thing that comes in a box and is plugged into a wall by its purchaser), or it can be a large “P,” representing a line of products, or, for all intents and purposes, a business. Either way, the history of commerce is littered with products designed by democracies (“camels designed by committees”) that don’t work.

Now, let’s consider the second part of the quote.

I’ll blurt this out:
all leaders are tyrants
. Some are just more competent than others.

For some leaders, tyranny is a daily occurrence. For others, it’s more of a backup style, a fallback posture that is invoked when the going gets tough. But all leaders are tyrants. The difference is intent. The difference is really
why
they’re being tyrannical. Is it about money and power? Is it about controlling other people, staying on top, and taking all the credit? Or is it about achievement and accomplishment and drive to realize a vision? It makes a huge difference.

And about that competence thing—we’ve all seen how competence and success can meet and override other unpleasant matters. There’s the leader who knows what he is doing and inspires confidence. And then there’s the leader who doesn’t know what he is doing, is in over his head, and grabs on to the power of his position as an excuse to belittle the troops. While both may get immediate results, we know which one will win in the long term.

Competence wins. And as we’ve learned with Steve Jobs, competence with a bit of tyranny thrown in actually gains respect, rallies the troops, and gets it all done faster.

The business schools and most business books on leadership all have variations on a fairly simple formula for leadership. Of course, they’re a bit dry, and (not surprisingly) as we’ll see, Steve Jobs took a different tack.

These models and manuals are crafted for current and aspiring managers, and they typically include both the
social
aspects of influencing others to get things done and the
structural
aspects of getting things done in an organization.

Business definitions of leadership usually center on the transactional and the transformational aspects of leadership.
The
transactional
aspects of getting a task done with a group include planning, organizing, measuring, communicating, course correcting, and rewarding the team, all of which might be called task influence. The
transformational
aspects concern setting visions, generating ideas, motivating the team, stimulating creative thinking, and representing and “branding” the team to the outside world, all of which might be called social influence.

There are dozens of variations, but much of what is taught boils down to a sequence of actions designed to define a group, define a goal for that group, communicate the goal to the group, empower and motivate the group to get it done, and communicate the group’s success inward and outward:

•  
Planning
. The first thing to do is to decide what the goal is and how to get it done, usually as a combined individual and team effort. The goal should be specific, understandable, and measurable. Whether it is a business project or a hike in the forest, a leader maps out the task and the time frame, determines the steps along the way, and gets buy-in from the troops.

•  
Organizing
. Once you have the goal, you organize your team effectively to get there. This includes recruiting, training, delegating, and communicating the goals, objectives, tasks, and timeline. Everybody
is given, or agrees to, a specific task and time frame, and resources are provided to accomplish the goal. A project is staffed correctly. Those hikers all know what they’re supposed to bring on the trip.

•  
Motivating
. Here the leader clarifies the benefits of accomplishing the group task, and any individual benefits that might go along with them. The leader works both one-on-one and with the group to remove roadblocks, empower the group, and get the team to think about the group success and
want
to put effort into it. Everyone is enthusiastic about the project and knows what’s in it for her and for the business; the hikers are excited about getting to their destination and consider it worth the sweat and mosquito encounters involved.

•  
Controlling
. While this term sounds more like an onerous and heavy-handed personality trait, it is really about staying on top of the situation, measuring results, making course corrections, communicating those corrections, and reinforcing the motivation where necessary to keep the project (or the hike) on track.

•  
Communicating
. Once the project or task is completed, the results are communicated to the team and outside the team. This is where the marketing and evangelism usually come in, but they can be sprinkled throughout the process.

Along the way, a good leader should adopt and use personality traits to help smooth the task and social processes, including being authentic, empathetic, sensitive, and considerate. The effective leader puts himself in the shoes of those who are being led, rather than exercising position power and staying aloof, above, and beyond.

You might think this all sounds pretty “corporate,” and it does. It looks like a process, not a culture. In fact, many corporate cultures speak of the process of management and the process of leadership. Steve Jobs, and other visionary leaders, did not look at leadership as a process. That’s probably where the biggest difference lies—and where the most important lessons lie.