Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography (P1)

As the icon of innovation and applied imagination, Steve Jobs revolutionized six industries and made Apple the most valuable company in the world.

But what principles made him one of the greatest inventors and product visionaries of the 21st century?

Biographer Walter Isaacson raises the curtain on this secret. Based on more than 40 interviews with Jobs, as well as insights from 100 family members, friends, rivals and peers, Isaacson’s book is a comprehensive study of a man who changed history.

TOP 20 INSIGHTS

1. Computers in the 70s were for business use and did not have screens and keyboards. Steve Wozniak and Jobs started Apple to market a personal computer that came with a keyboard and screen. Apple II was a commercial success and launched the Personal Computing revolution. In 1980 Apple was valued at $1.79 billion, and Jobs was worth $256 million at only 25.
2. The Apple Marketing Philosophy, written by Mike Markkula, shaped Jobs’s approach to product design and branding. It had three principles: empathy, focus and impute. Empathy meant to deeply understand customer feelings. Focus was to eliminate unimportant opportunities and excel in a few things. Impute meant that people judge a product or company by its cover.
3. Jobs recruited people with a passion for product. He would show them the Macintosh prototype, and if they got excited and started to use it, he would hire them.
4. Jobs ruthlessly fired B players. “The Macintosh experience taught me that A players like to work only with other A players, which means you can’t indulge B players,” he used to say.
5. During his second stint, Jobs became a manager. He displayed a pragmatic, detail-oriented approach. This was visible in his decision to completely outsource his passion, hardware manufacturing. As Board Member Ed Wollard said, “He became a manager, which is different from being an executive or visionary.”
6. Jobs’ famous “Reality Distortion Field” was the ability to convince anyone of practically anything. His team achieved the impossible because he convinced them that it was possible.
7. Jobs made the team see their work as art and was obsessed with the design of invisible components like circuit boards. Craftsmanship had to be end-to-end. When the Macintosh was complete, he had the signatures of every team member engraved inside the Macintosh.
8. Most companies would ask designers to design cases according to engineering specifications. At Apple, Jobs ensured that design drove engineering. Jonathan Ive, the Chief Design Officer, was virtually second-in-command. Every day, Jobs would tour the design studio. This would give him a big-picture view of Apple’s strategy and its roadmap for the next three years.
9. There were three elements to Jobs’s dazzling product launches. The first was great advertising like Apple’s iconic 1984 and Think Different campaigns. The second was to stoke excitement and leverage journalists’ competitive instincts to create blasts of favorable media coverage. The final element was a flawlessly choreographed product launch that made it look like a moment in history.
10. Jobs learned from Markkula that companies that endure know how to reinvent themselves. HP started as an instrument company, became a calculator company and ended up as a computer company. Microsoft had thoroughly beaten Apple in the Personal Computer business, so Apple needed an HP-like metamorphosis.
11. Jobs believed in focus. For companies and products, to know what not to do is as important as to know what to do. So Jobs ruthlessly shut down dozens of product lines and drew a simple four-square chart with “consumer” and “pro” on the columns and “Desktop” and “Portable” on the rows. Apple’s product strategy was to make one great product for each quadrant.
12. Every year, Jobs took his 100 most valuable employees on a retreat to brainstorm ten things Apple should do next. Employees would compete to get their ideas on the list and rank the ideas by priority. At the end, Jobs would slash the bottom seven ideas and announce that “[they could] only do three.”
13. Oracle founder, Larry Ellison, once said that “Steve created the only lifestyle brand in the tech industry.” Every Wednesday, Jobs held a three-hour meeting with his marketing and communications people. He would take his advertising team to the design studio to show them prototypes. He shared his passion for products with the marketing team and infused every ad with Apple’s unique emotion.
14. Jobs realized that to sell Macs with other brands meant to make them look like a commodity. He came up with Apple Stores to completely control the end-user experience and convey the essence of Apple’s products. By July 2011, the average revenue per store was $34 million. The Apple Stores catapulted Apple from a tech commodity to a luxury brand.
15. To position Apple for a post-PC future, Jobs pioneered the Digital Hub strategy. The Macintosh became a hub to sync “lifestyle devices” from music players to mobile phones. The computer handled complex applications and allowed devices to become simpler and more intuitive. The Digital Hub strategy birthed three iconic products: iPod, iPhone and iPad.
16. The iPod was intuitive in use and held 1000 songs when its clunky competitors held just a few dozen songs. Jobs invested $75 million in marketing because he believed the iPod would make Apple look cool and spur Macintosh sales. The bet paid off. By January 2007, the iPod accounted for nearly 50% of Apple’s revenues and beat Macintosh sales.
17. Jobs convinced record companies and artists to sell songs in the iTunes store. Each song would cost only 99 cents and save users fifteen minutes they’d spend to pirate it. The iTunes store sold one million songs in just six days. The iTunes database of 225 million active users positioned Apple for digital commerce powered by the App store.
18. The Digital Hub strategy produced two more groundbreaking devices: the iPhone and the iPad. Within three years, Apple cornered more than 50% of global cell phone profits. Jobs said: “The reason Apple can create products like the iPad is that we’ve always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts.”
19. Jobs initially did not allow outside developers to build apps for Apple products. Then he discovered a middle ground with the iTunes Store. Developers had to meet strict quality standards and sell only through the iTunes store. Apps became an overnight industry, extended the iPhone and iPad’s functionalities and powered the success of Apple products.
20. Jobs had a theory about why companies decline. According to him, innovative companies reach near-monopoly positions and begin to prioritize salespeople over product designers and developers. When salespeople run the company, it results in mediocre products and eventual decline.