Читать книгу Gamechangers - Fisk Peter - Страница 17

Steve Jobs provokes and inspires in equal measure. From his early days as a ‘silicon kid', the geek in the garage that loved Bob Dylan, making games for Atari and a gadget to make illegal phone calls, to a visit to Xerox PARC where he was inspired by their graphical interface, set up his Mac team of pirates, and soon got fired.

But entrepreneurs don't give up. From the super computers of NeXT, he was soon in dreamland at Pixar and $1 billion richer. From Toy Story emerged his jelly bean iMacs, iPods and iPhones with the help of iTunes and AppStore, Leerjets and Coldplay, and $400 billion.

Love him, or hate him, he changed the world.. visionary and obsessive, pedantic and dismissive, inspiring and impossible.. distorting reality, disrupting possibility.

Most strategies in business search for absolutes – the perfect vision, defining priorities, setting limits. But markets are dynamic, volatile and unpredictable, and plans are never perfect. Businesses rarely implement the strategy they agonize over. But for Jobs, there were no straight lines, passion and intuition were better guides, making sense of complexity. Keep looking left-field, embracing every experience and seeing the bigger picture.

Innovation processes seek to codify a human, creative experience. Processes improve efficiency, maybe even speed, but they rarely deliver the right answer. Market research delivers average insights. Apple believed different. People don't know what they want, so innovation is a human, intuitive discipline, nurturing creativity and bringing ideas together in new ways. Design is much more than look and feel, it is about how things work – simpler, better, magical.

Brands are the identity systems that make you stand out from the crowd, articulate your difference and superiority. From ads to adwords, social media and relationship marketing, brands seek to build awareness, interest and demand. Steve demanded that Apple's brands should do more. Brands must enchant people – aesthetically, emotionally, and inspirationally. They sell dreams not products, create unconditional desire, enable people to achieve more, and reflect who you want to be.

Leadership is typically about inspiration, but in a positive way – bringing people together, respecting and encouraging, supporting and developing – building teams that are stronger than their parts, empowering them, and sharing rewards. There is no space for compromize in business – for less than the best people, and performance below greatness. Social niceties, and compromize, do not change the world. With really great teams you can be direct, difficult and brilliant.

Steve Jobs was at his most inspiring on 12 June 2005, in a rare public address to graduates at Stanford University, and at a time when unknown to others he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. ‘Stop spending your time living someone else's life, and live your own. Decide how good you really want to be, and commit yourself to absolute excellence. Spend each day, as if it were your last.'

Make the change, but also, be the change.