“That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.”Īfter he righted the company, Jobs began taking his “top 100” people on a retreat each year. “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,” he told me. But by getting Apple to focus on making just four computers, he saved the company. Atop the two columns, he wrote “Consumer” and “Pro.” He labeled the two rows “Desktop” and “Portable.” Their job, he told his team members, was to focus on four great products, one for each quadrant. “This is crazy.” He grabbed a Magic Marker, padded in his bare feet to a whiteboard, and drew a two-by-two grid. After a few weeks of product review sessions, he’d finally had enough. When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, it was producing a random array of computers and peripherals, including a dozen different versions of the Macintosh. Here are what I consider the keys to his success. How did he do it? Business schools will be studying that question a century from now. Making an enduring company, he said, was both far harder and more important than making a great product. Instead he said it was Apple the company. I once asked him what he thought was his most important creation, thinking he would answer the iPad or the Macintosh.

So I think the real lessons from Steve Jobs have to be drawn from looking at what he actually accomplished. And as he battled his final illness, Jobs was surrounded by an intensely loyal cadre of colleagues who had been inspired by him for years and a very loving wife, sister, and four children. But they don’t.” Then he paused for a few moments and said, almost wistfully, “And we got some amazing things done.” Indeed, he and Apple had had a string of hits over the past dozen years that was greater than that of any other innovative company in modern times: iMac, iPod, iPod nano, iTunes Store, Apple Stores, MacBook, iPhone, iPad, App Store, OS X Lion-not to mention every Pixar film. “These are all smart people I work with, and any of them could get a top job at another place if they were truly feeling brutalized. One of the last times I saw him, after I had finished writing most of the book, I asked him again about his tendency to be rough on people. His petulance and impatience were part and parcel of his perfectionism. He acted as if the normal rules didn’t apply to him, and the passion, intensity, and extreme emotionalism he brought to everyday life were things he also poured into the products he made. The essence of Jobs, I think, is that his personality was integral to his way of doing business. Some of those readers have been insightful, but I think that many of them (especially those with no experience in entrepreneurship) fixate too much on the rough edges of his personality. In the months since my biography of Jobs came out, countless commentators have tried to draw management lessons from it. Apple’s “Think Different” commercial, 1997 In this essay Isaacson describes the 14 imperatives behind Jobs’s approach: focus simplify take responsibility end to end when behind, leapfrog put products before profits don’t be a slave to focus groups bend reality impute push for perfection know both the big picture and the details tolerate only “A” players engage face-to-face combine the humanities with the sciences and “stay hungry, stay foolish.” He built the world’s most valuable company, and along the way he helped to transform a number of industries: personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, retail stores, and digital publishing. That personality was integral to his way of doing business, Isaacson writes, but the real lessons from Steve Jobs come from what he actually accomplished. The author, whose biography of Steve Jobs was an instant best seller after the Apple CEO’s death in October 2011, sets out here to correct what he perceives as an undue fixation by many commentators on the rough edges of Jobs’s personality.

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