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How Steve Jobs Solved the Innovator's Dilemma
hype7 writes "With yesterday's release of the Steve Jobs biography, a raft of interesting information has come to light — including Jobs' favorite books. There's one book there listed as 'profoundly moving' to Jobs — The Innovator's Dilemma by innovation professor Clayton Christensen. The book explains how in the pursuit of profit, good managers leave their companies open to disruption. There's an interesting article over at the Harvard Business Review that explains how disruption works, and how Jobs managed to solve the dilemma by focusing Apple on products rather than profit."
...will the Apple fanboys bother us with their dead guru ?
What will determine Jobs' perceived success going forward is if Apple continues to innovate, or that it falls apart without his guidance.
A great leader creates success around them. Does Apple in 10 years look the same or worse than it does now? If worse, why? Cook is a capable performer, but was Jobs the lynchpin that kept things moving or did he create his 'legacy' in a stable enough fashion that Apple continues as if he never left.
"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested." (LT 2004)
not to mention, Jobs was only able to take total control because Apple was very close to death.
If Scully and the other bean counters didn't screw up as much as they did - and Apple was still a somewhat decent and profitable company - there's no way Job's would've been invited back, let alone go nuts the way he did.
I think all of us in the tech industry know of or have experienced decisions which make sense only when viewed from the light of "near term profit is the most important."
You know:
- Downsizing skilled engineering teams to cut costs in order to hit profit numbers
- Terminating new products before they've been completed, because some number cruncher couldn't foresee profitability
- Failure to endorse refactoring of software modules engineering states are fragile/non-maintainable because it requires dedication of resources to something that doesn't drive current revenues
- The list goes on
Here we have evidence, finally, that profit at all costs isn't how you run a company.
I think this speaks more to how pathetic the leadership of a lot of US companies have become more than it does on Jobs. Love Jobs or hate him, one thing that you cannot deny is that he was one of the few US CEOs that actually gave a shit about what his company makes and sells. Compare Jobs to people like Fiorna or Bob Nardelli whose sole purpose was to get inside a company, didn't' even matter which industry it was, and play games with numbers while gutting the company and enriching themselves in the process. Fiorna didn't give 2 shits about servers, or calculators, or Unix etc. To her they were all just "product", an annoyance that she had to tolerate on her way to stealing from the HP shareholders, employees, and customers.
Now compare that to Jobs, people talk about the reality distortion field, but the only way Jobs could actually create that field was if he actually cared about what he was talking about. He gave such good presentations because in a lot of ways he was like a kid who had just been given a neat toy and was showing it off at show and tell, there was genuine passion there. If companies want to emulate Apple's success the first thing they have to do is hire executives that actually are genuinely interested in what they make and sell.
Monstar L
It drove more than their share price.
If you're arguing that he made bad business decisions, I think you need to rework your argument.
It's the most misunderstood thing in business - do good work, make the customers happy, create good value and profit becomes a side effect.
Most of the stuff on
Sculley saved the company from Jobs. The share price rose after Jobs ouster because some semblance of sane management was introduced. It started failing in the mid-nineties because it had a crap OS which was useless to people in the real world and no plan to replace it with something useful. In fact Apple only joined the 20th Century in having a pre-emptive multi-tasking OS in the 21st Century.
If Apple are focussed on their Products rather than their Profit - why are they suing Samsung to protect their profit? Samsung aren't making iPads - so they aren't suing to protect their product... People (Fanboi's) will still buy iPads regardless of whether or not the Galaxy is available...
dnuof eruc rof aixelsid
That's one piece of the puzzle.
Two of a few examples that come to mind...
How did he get some of the best talent to work for Apple; especially in the late 90s when engineers knew it was nearing bankruptcy and the dot.com boom was paying top dollar for talent in a variety of interesting projects?
How did he get a good number of the consumer populous to think of Apple as being "THE" computer worth having; especially when it offered similar or only slightly better performance and features to what established big dogs (i.e., Dell, Compaq, and HP) were offering?
I grew up idolizing engineers like Woz & Carmack for their engineering skills; it wasn't until years of participating in group projects, and taking leadership positions on teams of 6 - 12 people have I realized how underrated amongst the technically proficient are the humanistic contributions that go into any project of a significant size. The larger the project, the more likely it will fail without stellar leadership. (e.g., Take a look at what Longhorn claimed and what it became when released as Windows Vista.)
I truly believe Steve cared about his products beyond the profit; he knew a great product, marketed the right way, would bring the profits. I wish more companies used this mentality.
I hope whatever qualities Steve possessed, that allowed Apple to be successful during his oversight, are able to persist amongst his successors.
Sculley traded Apple's good reputation for short term profits.
I wouldn't exactly call that saving Apple, it's typical MBA idiocy.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Steve Jobs was a bit of an unusual case, because the man had a brand unlike almost any other corporate executive in the United States. Think about how he took most of Apple's engineering staff off of MacBook upgrades and OS X development to create the iPhone. It worked, and created Apple its most profitable product line ever. But what other person, at what other large company, has the political capital to sacrifice development of an existing profitable product line for an unknown?
Jobs did that back when Apple had less resources too. He pretty much completely killed the Apple II team to make the Macintosh team. He just got his best people, and put them to work on what he thought was the future product. Take this story for example. Eventually, the people who remained on the Apple II team were only the engineers he didn't have much confidence on (and by "eventually" I mean before the Macintosh got released, not after the user base for the Mac surpassed the Apple II). Relevant quote:
"No, you're just wasting your time with that! Who cares about the Apple II? The Apple II will be dead in a few years. Your OS will be obsolete before it's finished. The Macintosh is the future of Apple, and you're going to start on it now!".
With that, he walked over to my desk, found the power cord to my Apple II, and gave it a sharp tug, pulling it out of the socket, causing my machine to lose power and the code I was working on to vanish. He unplugged my monitor and put it on top of the computer, and then picked both of them up and started walking away. "Come with me. I'm going to take you to your new desk."
Jobs was an asshole in a lot of ways, but it's undeniable that his driven attitude was responsible for his successes. He didn't play it safe, he put his faith in the next product and went ahead full steam. If it doesn't work out, drop the project without a second thought and move on.
making products people want to buy so that you can make money isn't really earth shattering.
Making things people want to buy isn't earth shattering. Finding out what people want before they know *is*. People didn't want the iPhone before it was out there. People have wanted printers since Gutenberg. So HP making a printer to make money isn't earth shattering. But making a phone in a crowded phone market that people wanted, really wanted, *is* earth shattering. Why didn't anyone else do it first? Why have phones been around for 20 years before that happened. It's not just the "find a need and fill it" marketing you are referring to, it was "find a desire and make a product that generates a "need" when none existed before. It's unlike the CEO training classes that are almost exclusively common sense.
Learn to love Alaska
I like how he still thought he was an innovator, when he admitted in his own book that another guy came up with the idea for products like the iPhone. That same guy received an award for it. That guy still works for Apple.
Steve Jobs was just the business man who could sell it. This has not only been blatantly obvious from the beginning, but now his own words back it up. So why are we still describing him as an innovator and visionary?
I can however credit him for being a good business man. And that's how he should be remembered. You know, the honest way.
I truly believe Steve cared about his products beyond the profit
If this were true, Apple wouldn't be suing Samsung over who owns the rectangle.
Pixar, a company run by SJ
http://www.geekosystem.com/how-pixar-bosses-saved-their-employees-from-layoffs/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/10/14/no_layoffs_at_apple_steve/
And if by "stagnate" you mean year over year growth that vastly outpaces the industry you're right....
Why not? Caring more about products than profits does not mean you don't care about profits. It means that your first priority is to create great products, and then you minimize the costs of fabricating them, you maximize your profit margin, and you obstruct competition as much as possible.
Getting parts built in sweatshops and suing others on spurious grounds is perfectly consistent with prioritizing product quality. What it isn't consistent with is being a decent human being.
Except that if anything, Apple is a marketing machine. They could have sold shit on a cracker.
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
What has always surprised me about Jobs is the amount of risk he was willing to take on. People forget what a huge leap it was to ditch everything that came before (including several up-and-coming products) and focus on OSX. The iPhone also represented a huge effort - a radical departure for Apple and radically different from other cell phones, if it hadn't been an immediate success Apple would only be a fraction of what it is today.
History is littered with the wreckage of companies that decided to change direction, diverting resources from existing customers to look for fresh fields. Apple somehow managed to do it several times to great success.
Another thing that strikes me about Apple is how old-fashioned the corporate culture seems to be (from the outside). They do business by figuring out what people want, and then selling it directly to the public with a minimum of fuss at a price that both parties can live with. Contrast this with their competitors in the computer and cell phone markets, who sell pretty much the same devices encumbered with "special offers", "free malware detection (for 30 days)", or annoying contracts, none of which customers actually desire. I can't see why other manufacturers haven't gotten the hint yet.
Um, no, it's not a surprise.
When your company is circling the drain, and all your previous products don't cut it, then yes, you bet everything on something new, because if you don't, your out of the race anyways. This is what jobs did with OSX, and led to his other stuff.
You people talk Jobs up like he was the messiah or something, but he was just a businessman that truely, got lucky. He got lucky by being able to take a company that was dead, give it a new purpose, and then capitalize on it. Now he's dead. Guess that's life for ya.
And if i'm wrong, and Jobs wasn't lucky, then apple will continue it's domiance in everything it puts out. Which in a small amount of time, we will know for sure.
Be seeing you...
That's the real miracle of Steve Jobs.
It's not that Steve Jobs is particularly exceptional. What's exceptional is that someone like Steve Jobs got into a position of power and authority.
If Steve Jobs was Steve Jobs the designer he would have probably been fired for not playing politics and that would have been the end of it... hell it even happened once! The only reason Steve Jobs was able to be Steve Jobs was because Apple failed miserably and they were desperate. With nothing to lose someone with above average creativity and common sense was able to purge the Excel Jockeys.
A lot of modern capitalists seem to misunderstand Adam Smith. Yes, he said that individual ambition serves the common good, but he never said that "profits come first." In fact, Smith defined "wealth" not as money, but in a more holistic way: "the annual produce of the land and labour of the society."
Also, those who argue for lower taxes on the rich and on corporations are certainly not following Smith's advice:
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC