With all that has been written in the days following the death of one of America's greatest corporate leaders, it would not be of the Apple kind of creativity if we just repeated what is already out there. In honor of Steve Jobs, we'll try to "think different."
Though his body proved vulnerable in the end, the mindset of Mr. Jobs was truly an unstoppable force. Those business professionals out there who have experienced entreQuest trainings know that we often discuss the Pareto Principle – or “the 80/20 rule” – where 20% of the workforce is generally responsible for 80% of the revenue. With Apple valued at $350 billion at the time of his death, we speculate that the S. Jobs Principle could amount to a “99/1 rule” – where 1% of the visionaries accounted for 99% of the innovation. Jobs was one leader in technology but he revolutionized almost every corner of its market.
For all of his success however, Steve Jobs met face-to-face with failure over and over and over again. It could almost be speculated that his secret to winning was losing. He dropped out of college. He started-up an office in his parents’ garage. After making $117 million with his first commercial commuter designed for the masses called Apple II, he missed the mark with the following models named Apple III and Lisa. His leadership then slumped so much that the board ended up firing him. He was hired back for an annual salary of $1.00. He posted a quarterly loss after the cube-shaped Macintosh fell short. And his body developed cancer.
By our society’s standards, that’s a fair amount of disappointments. But by Steve’s standards, that’s just fair game. He was a winner who didn’t dwell upon setbacks but rather constantly reset himself and his team for comebacks. Not the kind of comebacks that required Apple to alter its story or its ambitions but the simpler kind of comebacks that showed a lesson had been learned and a new approach was being tried. These were the experiments that resulted more often than not in big peaks of economic glory for Jobs (and everyone holding jobs under him). For example there was NeXT Inc., Pixar Animation Studios, iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, and iPad.
Steve Jobs had a vision for advancing technology to standards in design, aesthetics, ease, functionality, entertainment, and cool-factor. Even more, he believed he could make this vision a reality and that made him maintain a mindset that he would wind up a winner. And he did – even before Apple grew to become the most valuable company in the world as it remains at present.
Though Jobs has died, we now hold the living versions of his longtime vision. With this technology in our hands, all we who remain here in the marketplace need is to adopt his mindset to turn our own career stories from fantasies to facts.
For more information on how you yourself can “Choose to Win,” read the entreQuest article published in SmartCEO Magazine at this link: http://www.entrequest.com/wp-content/pdf/entrequest_Mindset_12.03.pdf?phpMyAdmin=d2c4aa6766ft5760658.
Joe Mechlinski is the President of entreQuest and has partnered with countless leaders to effectively improve their team’s performance, their clients’ experience, and their company’s profits.
(*Information Sources: "Steven Paul Jobs, 1955 - 2011" by Yukari Iwatani Kane and Geoffrey A. Fowler. The Wall Street Journal. Thursday 6 October 2011.)