Book Review of “The Steve Jobs way, iLeadership for the new
generation"
You can download the presentation from the following link
http://www.slideshare.net/dinwin/book-review-the-steve-jobs-way-by-dinesh-chandrasekar
You can download the presentation from the following link
http://www.slideshare.net/dinwin/book-review-the-steve-jobs-way-by-dinesh-chandrasekar
Steve Jobs is as much
an icon of the information age as the iMacs, iPods, iPads and iPhones that his company
has been launching ever so frequently in recent years. He is also a controversial
entrepreneur
and both authorized and unauthorized
biographies of the Buddhist business magnate and inventor are aplenty. But Jay Elliot, author of The Steve Jobs
Way: iLeadership for a new generation, is perhaps one of the
closest associates of the founder and CEO of one of the most outstanding
companies in history to have written a book on him. Mr. Elliot, who worked with
Mr. Jobs as senior vice-president of Apple, leverages his ‘deep insider
perspective’ of his boss’s ‘singular iLeadership style', encompassing four
major principles: product, talent, organisation and marketing.
The author first met his future
boss, ‘the hippie-looking, twenty something in jeans and sneakers’ in the
waiting area of a restaurant, days after chucking his job with Intel. “But we
quickly discovered a shared passion for computers,” says Mr. Elliot. “The guy
was a fire-eater, bursting with energy, lighting up at the idea that I had held
key positions in technology but had left IBM when I found them slow to accept
new ideas.” The book is full of interesting anecdotes relating to Mr. Jobs, his
interactions with his colleagues, the big fights he had with some top executives,
including John Sculley, the former PepsiCo president, who replaced him as the
CEO following a painful power struggle in the mid- 1980s. But the ‘Sculley era’
saw the decline of Apple, leading one international magazine to label Mr.
Sculley as “the 14th worst American CEO of all time”.
Mr. Elliot recalls an Apple
worldwide sales meet at a hotel on Waikiki beach in Hawaii after the Macintosh
launch. “The event was a stunning success, but it didn’t go unnoticed that John
and Steve seemed to have spent almost their entire time at the conference
without speaking to each other,” he writes. Mr. Jobs, according to the author,
was frustrated that he could not convince Mr. Sculley that his plans — of, for
instance, hiring a new in-house sales force of 2,500 people to sell the
Macintosh to businesses —were taking Apple in the wrong direction. “At the
dinner the first night in Hawaii, the two had a big blow-up; it was like a
public announcement that they were no longer the joined-at-the-hip buddies they
had been in the early months after John’s arrival.” For the fans of this
innovative entrepreneur, the book has a lot of interesting details about the
man who continues to remain an enigma. Days before the launch of the Mac, Mr.
Jobs walked in one day for a demo and wasn’t happy with the noise that the fan
generated. Personal computers, in those early days, had fans which made a
lot of noise. But the Apple boss
wanted the Macintosh to be completely silent. The entire organisation,
including engineers and technologists disagreed with him, but Mr. Jobs insisted
the Mac would not be launched if it was noisy. The launch was delayed by five
months, as the engineers went back and redesigned the Mac, ensuring that it was
silent. Mr. Jobs had been right in principle, but he learnt a valuable lesson:
Details matter, it’s worth waiting to get it right, but there are times when
you have to weigh the benefit of getting it right against the cost of being
late to the market. Mr. Elliot notes that Mr. Jobs is one of those people who
keep reinventing themselves. It is not that the Apple CEO himself changed, but
his vision had changed over the years. For instance, while the Mac was ‘first-generation
Steve’, and other products that followed before the iPhone and the iPad also
reflected Mr. Jobs as the creator of products that caught the public
imagination, today his focus is on content. The Apple CEO has envisioned a
world in which content is king and the Apple of the future will become a
company that puts devices that deliver content in the hands of consumers. For a
man who has been described as “Harvard’s most successful dropout,” Mr. Jobs has
remade three industries and transformed the way we create, consume and
communicate with each other. The author shares the lessons that come out of Mr.
Jobs’ intuitive approach to show how the creative and technological brilliance
of iLeadership can be utilized
to drive breakthroughs in any
organisation, irrespective of size.
One such instance is the way
Steve Jobs always believes in hiring the best or the ‘A’ people, as he calls them.
For the Apple boss, an employee’s true worth is his talent and passion, not
necessarily the educational and technical qualifications. Not surprising for someone
who dropped out of college in pursuit of his passion. The fast-paced book
reveals the ‘real’ Steve Jobs, who has over the past three decades transformed technology.