Lessons Learned From Steve Jobs

Recently, Walter Isaacson, the author of Steve Jobs’ official biography, wrote an article for Harvard Business Review talking about what we as entrepreneurs and CEO’s can learn from Jobs.

Here is my take on 5 of the lessons Isaacson highlights:

Impute: The moral behind this first lesson is that people do judge a book by it’s cover. I would say that more than any other company, Apple frets over the customer experience from start to finish.

In fact, there is a small group of people at Apple who’s job it is just to open Apple product packages. Before a product goes out this group works with literally hundreds of box prototypes to insure the customer experience is stellar.

For me, the lesson here is that we have the ability to impact our customer experience in so many ways, not only by “what’s in the box”.

Think about your product or service and see where you can impute more value.

Push for perfection: There’s no question that Steve Jobs was a perfectionist. In the biography, Isaacson recounts several times when Jobs would completely scrap a product or project if he didn’t feel it was perfect. Jobs even wanted the parts of the product you didn’t see to be perfect.

My biggest take-away from his “push for perfection” was a concept I’m now calling “evolving perfection”.

You see I believe that Steve Jobs believed that every product he launched was perfect from the start. But of course we know that ALL his products were improved on in later versions. This is what I call “evolving perfection” – make it the best you can (perfect) then improve it!

Tolerate only “A” players: 
I certainly don’t agree with much of Steve’s management style. After reading his biography I felt he was unjustly harsh on practically everyone he dealt with.

I do agree that as CEO’s and entrepreneurs we should strive to work ONLY with A players. Said another way, we should not tolerate less than A players!

Jobs believed (and I do too) that A players want to work with A players and if you have some B’s (and God forbid, less than B’s) they will drag your entire operation down.

Hire the best, and fire the rest!

Engage face-to-face:
 E-mail and texting are great in many ways, but be careful. In some cases face to face works best. Jobs believed in creating work environments that almost forced people to personally interact with each other.

Now, you might not have the funds or the need to design your own office building for your company, but you certainly can encourage your employees, vendors, and outsource providers to communicate face to face or at least voice to voice as much as possible.

Know both the big picture and the details: Steve Jobs had the ability to think big and small at the same time. Like laboring over the exact color of a product, while simultaneously figuring out all the pieces needed to completely change the music industry.

The point I want to suggest you take to heart is that IT ALL MATTERS! If your strength is in the details then you need to find a big picture person for your team, and vice versa.

I’d like to sum it all up with a Steve Jobs quote that I believe embodies everything we’ve talked about here…

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”