Leaders of industries, leaders of decision making, leaders of allocating, all these people are why humanity progresses, all these people are why humanity has not stood its ground in one particular era or setting and in the last decade if any innovator/ leader who comes to mind is, Steve Jobs.
Jobs the co - founder of Apple Inc. one of the most successful companies of the world, one of the few to actually hold it's position year-after-year in the 500 billion dollar fortune club.
However, my intention is not to dwell over the immense successes of Steve Jobs, those have already been dealt with by many. What I do plan to explore is how difficult he was to work with and in what way was he useful.
Firstly let's look at how difficult he was to work with. I don't want to make any claims as I didn't personally know him but just by reading, it can be established that --- he was extremely peculiar about details. Many of his former employees have stated that given the ability they would never want to work with Steve Jobs in the first place. The founder behind the Apple and Apple II was actually more devoted towards his pet projects like the Macintosh, which resulted in many of the people working overtime with very less pay.
In fact, my intention is not to question his morality, I am no one to judge how an employer treats its employees. All I want to concur is that if all of this was a bad or a good thing.
When speaking about results Apple's revenue speaks for itself, it does not require a proxy like me to explain it to anyone but the question arises are the means of getting to a point more important than the point themselves? and of course what did Steve Jobs do?
Beginning with the first question: Are the means more important than the result?
Steve Jobs was really peculiar as I have stated, he once delayed a launch of a product just because it wouldn't say hello on que, that was the Macintosh. He once delayed the production of a product because he wanted it's shape to look uneven, so people viewed it as a perfect shape, that was the Next Cube.
He also made a technician present to him 50 sharks before he would select the one he liked, that was the iMac.
Hearing the amount of specificity Job's tried to present in his work, it may seem that he constantly overworked his employees and with the Macintosh, Next Cube failing at the market it became a hypothesis that it was because the people were always hell bent on work.
The iMac succeeded and it was because of the specificity he put into the project, Moreover, he took the closed system from the Macintosh,
the next generation operating software from the Next Cube and made a product which sold a million in the first 90 days of it's release. so, the question comes into play if the result was still what was desired was his method important? The answer is yes, because of the ingenuity of each of his failed products was important to bring together a product like the iMac which turned out to be one of the most successful products in the history of personal computing.
What did Steve Jobs do?
A man who dropped out of college, didn't write code, never knew how the products he wanted were made. How was this man considered a genius. A genius, in the sense that he was accredited with the entire success of Apple. But yet didn't do any substantive work for it. So, Why was he a Genius?
He was a genius of consumer demand, he was a designer, a marketer and an expert in solution. He never knew the technical aspect of anything he was selling, but he knew what the consumer would feel if he/she ever held the product in their hand. Where do you put the charging ports, he decides that, when should the product release? He decides that and at what cost he decides that. Steve Job's job was not to focus on one aspect but focus on the bigger picture, picture which rules any market --- the consumer.
Outlook on Leadership
So Jobs wasn't the typical leader, who focused on making the product and relied on someone else to do the business part of it. Instead he found/hired the people for the technical work and excelled at design, consumers and marketing. He may not be the ideal exampler of a leader but he is the one which brings effective results. He was also a master plotter and egoistic ut perhaps a story for another time.
-Abhirup Thakur 23/7/2018
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