Steve Jobs: how did he do it?

By Alexis Dormandy

I met Steve Jobs a couple of times in 2005, to talk about mobile phones. This was two years before the iPhone was launched. At the time it was rumoured it would be within three months. He wouldn’t launch the iPhone until it met his standards. The experience changed the way I look at businesses and leadership.

What was it about Steve Jobs that meant he managed to transform four industries? The personal computer (Mac), music (iPod), mobile phones (iPhone) and computing as lifestyle (iPad) will never be the same again – and that's before we mention his creation of another $7bn company in Pixar, which has won more than 20 Academy Awards. If he’d achieved just one of those feats, he would be one of the greatest business people of this era. To have achieved all of them is more than just talent and luck – it’s doing things differently.

Steve Jobs had an almost entirely unique combination of creative talents. Some people are brilliant at technology – they are problem solvers with a deep understanding of technology. Some people have an empathetic understanding of the customer – they can see what they really want, and can combine form with function. Some people who can work out new ways of making money out of things. Virtually no one can do all of these.

People who are brilliant at just one of these can change the world. Technologists like Sergey Brin launch businesses like Google. Consumerists like Richard Branson create businesses like Virgin. Commercial people like Jack Welch make businesses like GE dominate their markets. Steve Jobs could do all of these, brilliantly.

There were plenty of MP3 players before the iPod. But Steve Jobs invented an MP3 player with one button. A three-year-old could use it.

OS X as an operating system (which emerged from NeXT which he launched during the gap between his two periods at Apple) was simpler, slimmer and fundamentally more usable than the Windows alternative.

When Steve launched the iPhone, he didn’t do what everyone else would do, which would be sell it to everyone. He got the mobile carriers to compete for it – only one carrier per country got it. That got him a great financial deal, and unique access to the mobile networks. Once his position in the market was secure, he sold it to everyone. It has made Apple billions.

But above all else, what Steve had, that no one else had, was a totally different way of running the building of a product.

Most large companies have a CEO who sets overall direction. He or she then gets people to work out the detailed plans. They get some people to work out the product, others to work out how to sell it, others to do the marketing, others to do the numbers. Each of these people then chops up their task and delegates in down to the people who work for them. So a bunch of 20-30 year olds do most of the creative work, and teams of project managers try to keep everyone running in the same direction.

This takes forever, so then the CEO forces it to be done by a date, and it eventually the wonderful idea emerges looking decidedly average.

Steve Jobs didn’t delegate. He had the vision in his head and got other people to execute it for him. He cared about the details. He cared about the typeface, the iconography. He had a belligerent commitment to things being simple to use.

Because he had a holistic vision, and he made sure everything was done the way he wanted it, everything worked with everything else. iTunes works with your iPod. Addresses synched between the Mail on your Mac and your iPhone. You plug a camera into your MacBook at iPhoto automatically launches and sucks in the photos. These weren’t five products in Steve’s mind, they were one product. That only happened because there was one man with a vision of the whole, who got people to do it his way.

Steve Jobs has left this world a better place. He has created businesses that employ tens of thousands of people. He has made frustrating, unintelligible tasks simple. He has given us new services that we enjoy and which bring us closer together. And he has entertained us.

He has also made many of us endure the “we should do it like Apple” comment in more business meetings than I care to remember. But to do it like Apple we have to do it like Steve. Our leaders should be distinctly talented. And they shouldn’t delegate, they should drive the important things to happen. Our leaders should care about the details. Most of all they should have a personal quality standard that they put on everything they do.

Thank you, Steve, for setting the bar higher.