Read Online What Would Steve Jobs Do? How the Steve Jobs Way Can Inspire Anyone to Think Differently and Win by Peter Sander - Free Book Online
Authors: Peter Sander
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affairs of other individuals or companies. Except for his product presentations, Steve kept a fairly low profile and lived more like the rest of us than most people with his elevated stature.
This was in clear contrast to most executives and CEOs these days, who seem to favor money and power over plain old achievement.
For Steve Jobs, achievement was the goal. Money and power were the result. That was true both for him personally, and for the company he led.
Are you achievement-motivated? Or are you power-motivated? Think about it.
T HE Z EN OF R ESPECT
For most effective leaders, what it comes down to at the end of the day is
respect
. Plain old R-E-S-P-E-C-T, as Aretha Franklin sang out so clearly. Leaders who have earned the respect of their followers are far more likely to be willingly followed. Their goals are more likely to be assumed to be important. The means to accomplish these goals are more likely to be put in place. Most of all, the team will be more willing to contribute. Respect breeds trust, trust breeds respect, and the cycle continues.
Respected leaders get chances to fail, because they know that most of their efforts will result in success. They get people to follow them even if those followers don’t 100 percent understand the vision. They get the benefit of the doubt, and the benefit of the doubt can be a huge tailwind when someone is leading a large organization through uncertain waters. Respected leaders also tend to respect and trust their followers. When leaders respect their followers and followers respect and trust their leaders, the gates are open for success.
Steve Jobs was a follower of Zen, and Zen is all about attaining enlightenment, and feeling whole, through the wisdom of experience. Respect is also gained through the wisdom of experience, and Steve Jobs deployed the political capital of respect to its fullest extent.
But as we all know, respect is difficult to achieve, and it is usually not achieved through deliberate efforts, which are typically rebuffed by others as being transparent and self-serving. Respect must come naturally and organically with time.
Here are four of the principal ways in which Steve Jobs obtained the respect of his employees, the tech industry, and the consuming public.
R ESPECT THROUGH V ISION
Steve repeatedly demonstrated that he could see just a little bit farther than everybody else, and could create products that exceeded customer expectations and defined customer experiences that the customers themselves didn’t even know they desired. This “guru” capability is one of the greatest—and most difficult to emulate—sources of respect. As we’ll explore later in the book, if you stay close enough to the customer and keep an innovation mindset, that won’t automatically guarantee a winning vision or a winning execution, but it will make it more likely to happen.
R ESPECT THROUGH D ETAIL
Workers generally love a leader who understands what they are doing and who can get into the trenches withthem. They feel that the leader can empathize with them and with their struggles to get a job done. They trust the leader, and the leader trusts them, so long as they stay on task. And if they get stuck, the leader can provide meaningful direction to solve their problems.
Even John Sculley later recognized one of the qualities of visionary leaders that Steve clearly had: “to be so in touch with the internal details that when something isn’t working, they have the leadership talent to adjust in flight.”
R ESPECT THROUGH A CCOMPLISHMENTS
This one almost goes without explanation. Steve was right so many times about the product and its market, and he built, well, the world’s most valuable publicly traded company, so it’s pretty hard not to respect him for that.
R ESPECT THROUGH B EING THE F ACE OF THE P RODUCT
When a leader is so “all-in” behind and into a product, and a company, that he is willing to be its public presence, its
This was in clear contrast to most executives and CEOs these days, who seem to favor money and power over plain old achievement.
For Steve Jobs, achievement was the goal. Money and power were the result. That was true both for him personally, and for the company he led.
Are you achievement-motivated? Or are you power-motivated? Think about it.
T HE Z EN OF R ESPECT
For most effective leaders, what it comes down to at the end of the day is
respect
. Plain old R-E-S-P-E-C-T, as Aretha Franklin sang out so clearly. Leaders who have earned the respect of their followers are far more likely to be willingly followed. Their goals are more likely to be assumed to be important. The means to accomplish these goals are more likely to be put in place. Most of all, the team will be more willing to contribute. Respect breeds trust, trust breeds respect, and the cycle continues.
Respected leaders get chances to fail, because they know that most of their efforts will result in success. They get people to follow them even if those followers don’t 100 percent understand the vision. They get the benefit of the doubt, and the benefit of the doubt can be a huge tailwind when someone is leading a large organization through uncertain waters. Respected leaders also tend to respect and trust their followers. When leaders respect their followers and followers respect and trust their leaders, the gates are open for success.
Steve Jobs was a follower of Zen, and Zen is all about attaining enlightenment, and feeling whole, through the wisdom of experience. Respect is also gained through the wisdom of experience, and Steve Jobs deployed the political capital of respect to its fullest extent.
But as we all know, respect is difficult to achieve, and it is usually not achieved through deliberate efforts, which are typically rebuffed by others as being transparent and self-serving. Respect must come naturally and organically with time.
Here are four of the principal ways in which Steve Jobs obtained the respect of his employees, the tech industry, and the consuming public.
R ESPECT THROUGH V ISION
Steve repeatedly demonstrated that he could see just a little bit farther than everybody else, and could create products that exceeded customer expectations and defined customer experiences that the customers themselves didn’t even know they desired. This “guru” capability is one of the greatest—and most difficult to emulate—sources of respect. As we’ll explore later in the book, if you stay close enough to the customer and keep an innovation mindset, that won’t automatically guarantee a winning vision or a winning execution, but it will make it more likely to happen.
R ESPECT THROUGH D ETAIL
Workers generally love a leader who understands what they are doing and who can get into the trenches withthem. They feel that the leader can empathize with them and with their struggles to get a job done. They trust the leader, and the leader trusts them, so long as they stay on task. And if they get stuck, the leader can provide meaningful direction to solve their problems.
Even John Sculley later recognized one of the qualities of visionary leaders that Steve clearly had: “to be so in touch with the internal details that when something isn’t working, they have the leadership talent to adjust in flight.”
R ESPECT THROUGH A CCOMPLISHMENTS
This one almost goes without explanation. Steve was right so many times about the product and its market, and he built, well, the world’s most valuable publicly traded company, so it’s pretty hard not to respect him for that.
R ESPECT THROUGH B EING THE F ACE OF THE P RODUCT
When a leader is so “all-in” behind and into a product, and a company, that he is willing to be its public presence, its
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