Steve Jobs: Redefining The CEO 224
conq writes "BusinessWeek has a nice piece on how Steve Jobs is redefining the job of being a CEO. From the story: 'Just over a decade ago, Steve Jobs was considered washed-up, a has-been whose singular achievement was co-founding Apple Computer back in the 1970s. Now, given the astounding success of Apple and Pixar, he's setting a new bar for how to manage a Digital Age corporation.'"
Who is going to top him? (Score:4, Interesting)
Behind the Cover podcast (Score:5, Interesting)
NeXT did reach a level of stardom. (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed, if you went into nearly any modern engineering firm or research lab around 1991 or so, you'd often hear about how many of the employees there wanted even just access to a NeXT system, if they couldn't have one for themselves. Often times the price of such a system was quite prohibitive, but those who did have access were often far more productive than their peers.
Disney (Score:4, Interesting)
Steve Jobs (Score:4, Interesting)
What would you ask Steve? (Score:4, Interesting)
Will Jobs stay with Apple? (Score:2, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Is Steve Jobs really the best CEO? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Will Jobs stay with Apple? (Score:2, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Losers. . . (Score:5, Interesting)
He's a bigger loser than he was a decade ago.
Loser? When you're not in the game to 'win', losing only means not being able to continue playing.
One of my favorite personality types is the one which pisses off guys like you by not caring about winning or losing in the boring conventional terms so many people think hold validity. Creativity is everything. Greed is a disease. --This, I believe, is a Universal truth which shapes our reality, and once you figure it out, you can fly.
There's a reason why a fellow who has only 'conquered' 3% of the computer market is such a recognized name. It's because he's learned one of the key secrets of life; how to have fun while everybody else is agonizing over which way the ball is being kicked.
Who would you enjoy meeting more at a party? --A boring conservative money-getter, or a 'loser' who isn't scared to dream and get excited about it? All my friends are technically 'losers', but they live happily, without fear or want, and they light up the world. All the money-getters I've met, by contrast, are like pre-fab appliances with 2-dimensional social skills. These are the 'winners'. Hmm.
-FL
Is this the digital age? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Being a knowledgable CEO is "redefining"? (Score:4, Interesting)
Another shining example of where solid, technical management has proven to be spectacularly successful: Admiral Hyman G. Rickover. He is single-handedly responsible for building the United States Nuclear Navy, and he did it by getting his hands dirty, looking for and finding the devil in the details, and sweating the small stuff. (okay, I admit, there was a strong cadre of very smart engineers and scientists behind him, but they would never have been so successful without him) In 1982, he gave a great speech [govleaders.org] about how to do a job right, and how to manage it properly.
He eschewed fancy management techiniques, deriding them as smoke and mirrors. Simply requiring his subordinates to understand their jobs and holding them responsible, for everything.
Rickover could never make it today; he was too much of an irascible fellow. I don't think anyone enjoyed working for him WHILE they were working for him. But, then again, couldn't the same be said of Steve Jobs 1? By that I mean the head of Apple Computer from 1976 to 1984. What of those stories where people would get on an elevator with him and be fired by the time the elevator stopped? Or throwing engineers against the wall for falling asleep in front of their computers at 11 pm?
Teh Jobs has come a long way, and has found another management "front" that allows him to be head of a successful company again. Kudos to him.
Also keep in mind that Steve Jobs *almost died* from some form of pancreatic cancer a year ago.
Re:Who is going to top him? (Score:1, Interesting)
I think memories of Steve Ballmer will live on as more as jokes than for anything he's achieved. He could easily star in one of those frat-party-house movies. He'd make a good raging drunk. Like really... doesn't he seem like someone ya could sit down, eat pizza, drink beer, and fart with? Some of the video of him dripping wet even conveys smell. Not many CEOs can communicate that in video. What an image. Business attributes? He seems more like a highly driven used car salesman than someone that could be behind creating anything.
I don't think I'd want his company for beer. He seems like the kinda guy that would spill my beer over and scare off the babes. Ballmer would fit in on one of those weight-loss reality shows, followed by a makeover by the gay team. And then he can go on to do informercials for anti-virus software or something. Or better yet, make Soylent bars for cats, and really be immersed in his product.
Steve Jobs... what can one say but WOW? Why can't we find someone like him for president? Apply some of that insight to our problems, and tame the terrorists with that Reality Distortion Field.
Actually I think the Reality Distortion Field is misunderstood. He doesn't take something bad and distort reality, he seems to be able to change reality. He seems to have the ability to throw away what I call "the best car in the junkyard" mentality. That's where people have a frame of reference comparing something mediocre against other things that are more mediocre, and believe they're onto something good. If Windows were the hot dogs of operating systems, a new release would have all the excitement of "Now contains 27% fewer mouse droppings and roaches!". It's like the products from some other companies are so bad, they've got to have a really fucked up frame of reference to see them as good. It's like saying dog shit smells good... compared to cat shit it does. But it's still shit! The recent Q&A with the Microsoft security guy comes to mind. It's amazing what seemed normal and acceptable to him.
To me it seems it's actually the other managers that have reality distortion. They can't even see when they're wading in shit. It's like the mindset of Windows was bent by being sucked into some blackhole vortex of DOS and it's never crawled out. If they'd kept some mechanism for running DOS programs while COMPLETELY abandoning use of it in Windows, things could have been sooooo much better. So many times since then they could have started with a fresh vision, but it still hasn't happened.
What company but Apple would have replaced the relatively new iPod Mini with a completely new model (Nano) while the Mini sales were climbing fast and it was the most popular player?
Steve is so much more in touch with people, and obviously cares about every little detail. Sometimes it seems like Apple put more thought into the packaging (as in cardboard boxes etc) than other manufacturers put into their products.
There's this popular excuse that goes around, saying that because Apple charges more only Apple can afford good R&D. If what I heard on a weekly PBS business show recently is true, that spending line is a total myth.
They reported that Apple spends about 5% of revenues on R&D, the industry average is 7.5%!
The industry problem isn't money. It's lack of vision. I'm sure among the huge staff at Microsoft there must be a number of really brilliant people. It must frustrate and embarrass the hell out of many of them to work there. With such large resources MS should have been able to come up with a dozen brilliantly designed operating systems. Look at Explorer.... MS sued successfully for 500 million dollars for stolen code, and even with that they STILL couldn't make a decent product.
Compared to Steve Jobs, it seems most of the other guys haven't got a fucking clue. Worse yet, some have behaved as criminals. Intelligence is part of his success story, but attitude,
Re:Who is going to top him? (Score:2, Interesting)
Jobs on the other hand was going to keep his company whatever size it ended up being, as long as he could keep both the hardware and the software closed. However much he could make, that's how many were to be for sale. It turned out to be less than 5% of the market.
One was a born religious leader who happened to end up in business and ran it like a religion. The other was a born businessman who ended up in business and ran it like a business.
Gates is in the tradition of Carnegie, right down to his philanthropy. Jobs is in the tradition of....?
Micromanagers (Score:3, Interesting)
For instance, Carter was famously a micro-managing president. Look how that worked out. The Soviet economy was micro-managed from the top (and they even started out as a culture with some very good designers). Results? Nada.
The two examples of which you spoke aren't very fair, to say the least. Carter didn't fail as a president because he tried to micromanage (in fact, that's one thing I really appreciate about him), he failed because he did not find his legs in Washington, and couldn't communicate with politicians to save his life (not neccessarilly a bad thing, but a bad thing if you are one). The USSR was never designed to be micromanaged, in fact, the original philosophy was completely opposite. But one person changed all that, Stalin, of which all the original revolutionaries hated and advised the party not to trust. Unfortunately, the politician most suited for the job, Trotsky, was hunted down and killed by Stalin, who basically took over the country by force. There is little doubt that if Trotsky had become the rightful leader, as Lenin had suggested, there would have been no cold war. Fear of communism only started AFTER Stalin entered the picture. Fascists have to micromanage to stay in power. But that's not to say that micromanaging can't be used for a possitive outcome.
Re:Steve Jobs (Score:3, Interesting)
Steve Jobs is not Bill Gates or Michael Dell. If the battle is about price he loses.
focus, focus, focus (Score:2, Interesting)
For some reason, that always seems to disappoint people. They wanted some sort of magic, focusing on any bright shiny slogan or technology associated with the current project. People expect CEO's to put on a great show, it is practically a job definition (no pun intended) these days.
Most CEO's are chosen because they look and act like CEOs. Jobs sets a high bar simply by adding the ability to concentrate on the job to that short list.
Take a look at other CEO's in this class, such as Mark Hurd when he was at NCR. Same thing; FOCUS.
No matter how knowlegable, how micro managing a CEO is, he or she cannot have a significant effect on a corporation directly; there is only 24 hours in a day, and only so much they can do.
But CEO's set the tone for a company. What they value, the company values. And if a company values focus, then the efforts of members of the company are all directed towards the same goal, and thats where success comes from.
Not a magic slogan of "saving the world", not some high fashion techtoy, not some secret mastery of arcane knowledge. Jobs could have as easily been a complete dummy running a company producing coathangers in Nebraska, whose motto was "grab it all, control it all, squeeze it till it bleeds", and he still would have suceeded, because a small army of people, focusing on a goal, will always win against a much larger, unorganized mob.
People forget that CEO's are, first and foremost, leaders, and the job description for a leader is pretty simple... LEAD!(i.e. get everyone going in the same direction.) Every other definition is just smoke and mirrors, no matter how much everyone would like to believe that it is more than that.