Steve Jobs free essay sample

One of the biggest focuses of Apple Inc is its team work. In its mission statement, Apple says that its main desire is to work together and improve the environment by working together with its employees and the rest of the world. Teamwork is essential to Apples success, for the job is too big to be done by one person. Individuals are encouraged to interact with all levels of management, sharing ideas and suggestions to improve Apples effectiveness and quality of life. It takes all of employees to win. We support each other and share the victories and rewards together. We are enthusiastic about what we do. Steve Jobs, as CEO of the worlds largest tech company, was often identified as the singular face of Apple. It was considered that he was the man who is the energy and creative spirit behind the company, but Apple is much more than just Steve Jobs. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didnt interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting. It wasnt all romantic. I didnt have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5? deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. (Source: Stanford Commencement Address, 12 June 2005) So, after six months, he dropped out and started to immerse himself in the studies of Eastern mysticism. He even traveled around India in search of spiritual enlightenment. Then, at age 19, he got his first job at video-game manufacturer Atari. Steve showed a growing interest in electronics as he was lured by the amazing design of a compact personal computer created by his friend Steve Wozniak, an older boy who had already distinguished himself as an electronics wiz kid. Once again, Steve seized the potential of selling the computer his friend had built to other hobbyists. It was at this point of time that Apple Computer came into being officially, on April 1st 1976. Steve at work Apples first sales came from a local computer retailer, The Byte Shop. The first computers were assembled in the garage of Steves parents in Los Altos, with the assistance of a few willing friends. After Apple Computers first public appearance at the Personal Computer Festival in 1976, Steve Jobs envisioned the companys image. He took this opportunity to promote his fledgling company and turned to PR adviser Regis McKenna for the same. With the help of McKenna, he also found his first investor ever in the person of Mike Markkula, a millionaire former Intel executive who was stunned by Wozs prototype for a new computer, the Apple II. The Apple II, made its successful debut a year later at the West Coast Computer Faire in April 1977. Wozs new compact and high performance design featuring disk drives proved to be a technological breakthrough. Its success entailed thousands of software programmers writing Apple-II software. In addition to being a sell-out computer, the Apple II set a revolution in personal computing. The advent of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program ever, was released in late 1979 made apple lead the competition since it was compatible only with Apples system. After the success of Apple II, Steve took up work on the next great project for Lisa-the Cupertino-based company. Lisas main feature was its Graphical User Interface (GUI) coupled with the first affordable mouse ever. He wanted to be directly involved in the development of Apples future products. In a bid to get involved directly he took over a small RD team working on a computer called Macintosh. The project, instigated by Apple employee #31 Jef Raskin, called for a $300 dollar easily operated computer. Steve liked the idea of simplicity, but he insisted that Macintosh become a smaller and cheaper Lisa, including all its breakthrough graphical features. Raskin was evicted from the program, which quickly evolved into Steves very own pet project. The Mac team was composed of a small group of iconoclastic yet brilliant engineers with zeal and an enthusiastic spirit that was encouraged by Steve himself. He was able to shield the division from the increasing bureaucracy of the rest of the company which gave the team a sense of autonomy and enabled it to deliver its best. With the release of personal computer of IBM, apple faced immense competition since just the logo of IBM, a trusted name in the world of technology, was sufficient to drive the product into market. Although it was inferior to Apple II in all respects, it started corroding the sales of Apple II. The Cupertino firm responded by launching both the Apple III and Lisa in the competitive market. However both the computers failed in groping up profitable sales. The Lisa failed despite its revolutionary GUI, because, it was way too costly for many running business enterprises. So the entire companys hopes were turned to Steve and his renegade Mac team. Macintosh was finally introduced in great fanfare on January 24, 1984 which brought maximum publicity to Steve. However, Steve was excluded from the Lisa project due to his tyranous managerial style together with his souring relations with Apples President Mike Scott. Instead Steve was named Chairman of the Board. He took this opportunity and judiciously made use of his prestigious position to promote Apples image in the national media, before Apple went public on December 12, 1980. On that day, Steves market value jumped from $7. 5 million to $217. 5 million. He became the youngest self-made millionaire in America, and a rising business tycoon. This was Steve’s reaction after 25 years about his dismissal from Apple: â€Å"At 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didnt know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down — that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the Valley. ( ) I didnt see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. ) Im pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadnt been fired from Apple. It awful tasted medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. † (Stanford Commencement Address, 12 June 2005) After getting fired from Apple Jobs created NeXT, a computer company aimed exclusively at the higher education market, by hiring five people from Apple. The company was enormou sly attractive to young talents, and Steve’s fame and charisma were an allure to the best people in Silicon Valley. Two years after its inception, on October 12th 1988, NeXT released its first product â€Å"the NeXT Cube†. It was strikingly elegant and featured revolutionary technologies such as its magneto-optical drive and its Digital Signal Processor, but it was way too expensive to the average education buyer. Because of its slow market movement, Steve released a cheaper version of NeXT Cube on September 1990. Even with the new product and global expansion, NeXT had a poor market share and they were losing their money hence Steve was forced to close his hardware section in 1993. In 1986, he had bought the computer division of George Lucas’ Industrial Lights Magic for $10 million, and had integrated it as Pixar Animation Studios. Pixar was a small group of brilliant college dropouts who believed in the dream of computer animation. They were led by engineers Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith, along with former Disney animator John Lasseter. Even Pixar was not running well and it was too expensive to maintain the company so Steve was planning for closing down Pixar. However, what really prevented him from shutting down Pixar was its nomination at the Academy Awards in 1986 for Best Animated Short Film, with Luxo Jr. — the little lamp eventually became Pixar’s logo — and its 1989 Oscar for Tin Toy. In 1995 Pixar released its â€Å"phenomenal† first full length animated feature film in association with Disney – â€Å"Toy Story†. Without Steve Jobs Apple left with a 5% market share and it was running under successive loss for years with a stagnant product line . On December 20th 1996, Apple had chosen to buy NeXT Software Inc. and had welcomed back the companys founder as â€Å"informal adviser†. In early 1998 Apple achieved profitability for the first time in years. Since then there was an uninterrupted growth in their profit curve. They released iMac (1998), iPhone (2007). He stunned the music business with Apples iPod music player (2001) and iTunes online store (2005). Steve’s experience of Life and Death On Aug 2004 he was diagnosed and confirmed that he had pancreatic cancer. But then he was operated. That was the time he saw death very close and he experienced a very unusual strange feeling which he never felt before: â€Å"That was one of the things that came out of this whole experience [with cancer]. I realized that I love my life. I love [being with] my family, and I love [running] Apple and Pixar. I am very lucky. † Steve Jobs as a Person Internal Locus of control Steve Jobs has a high internal locus of control which is very much obvious as whatever has happened to him, he never blamed it on anybody as well as he does not give much credit to anybody other than himself for his success. He was born in a middle class family where his parents were not highly educated. He is a college dropout who once backpacked around India looking for spiritual enlightenment and now he dictate our tastes in computers, mobile phones and music. He is an admirer of other self-made men and inventors such as Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, or Edwin Land (inventor of the Polaroid), which once again strongly proves his belief that he is the master of his own fate. Apprehensive and confidentiality Steve Jobs is very suspicious of journalists as he was once betrayed by a TIME reporter. Therefore he speaks only very rarely to the media. This secrecy has led journalists and admirers to fantasize about his character, especially about his hot temper. Like the founder Apple also operates with a level of secrecy. Apple creates must-have products the old-fashioned way: by locking the doors and sweating and bleeding until something emerges perfectly formed. At times, Apple’s secrecy approaches paranoia. Talking to outsiders is forbidden; employees are warned against telling their families what they are working on. But Apple’s radical opacity hasn’t hurt the company — rather, the approach has been critical to its success, allowing the company to attack new product categories and grab market share before competitors wake up. It took Apple nearly three years to develop the iPhone in secret; that was a three-year head start on rivals. Secrecy has also served Apple’s marketing efforts well, building up feverish anticipation for every announcement. Visionary There is no doubt that Steve Jobs is a great visionary. While the power of computing formerly had been available only to techies, through Apple PCs it was suddenly delivered to classrooms, dens, and offices. He saw that computers could be much more than drab productivity tools. Instead, they could help unleash human creativity and sheer enjoyment. He vision led Apple where it is now, with revolutionary iMac, iPod, iPhones, iTunes. He rocked the music business with Apple’s iPod music player and iTunes online store. He revolutionized the animation movie industry through Pixar, His Pixar Animation Studios was the first to show that computer animation could be used to tell imaginative, touching stories. He was the first person to introduce a full length animated movie through â€Å"Toy Story†. Apple is the only company who gives their customers what they want before they know they want it. Undoubtedly, this is due to Jobs’ unique creative vision. Here was a visionary combined with a hard driving management style. Innovative Steve has an exceptional design sense and creative thinking which is dazzling in his every movement. He thinks innovation doesn’t come from coddling employees and collecting whatever froth rises to the surface; it is the product of an intense, hard-fought process, where people’s feelings are irrelevant. This made him sometimes tyrannical focusing on creating â€Å"Insanely great† products Perfectionist Jobs is a perfectionist and extremely demanding boss. His youthful perfectionism nearly killed his career. Little details obsessed him. It often led him to be ignorant to other people’s ideas. His strive for perfection is so strong that employees who did not faced with his blistering verbal attacks that can eventually burn out even the most motivated of his people. Enthusiastic From his school days Steve Jobs was marked as an over enthusiastic student. Once, Mrs Hill, his fourth grade teacher, watched Steve’s enthusiasm in vicious things for about two weeks and then approached me saying â€Å"Steven, I’ll tell you what. I’ll make you a deal. I have this math workbook and if you take it home and finish on your own without any help and you bring it back to me, if you get it 80% right, I will give you five dollars† and she gave a giant size book to him. Nobody’s ever done this before and of course he did it. When Steve was losing his interest in studies and was involved in all sort of mischievous activities his teacher bribed him back into learning with candy and money. His incredible respect sort of re-ignited his desire to learn. He is mature enough with an youthful enthusiasm. The flip side of Jobs’ enthusiasm is arrogance and an autocratic management style. Aggressive Steve Jobs is widely reputed to be one of the most aggressive egotists in Silicon Valley. He come across as brash, abrasive, and rough edged. He does not mind to call his subordinate’s work as a â€Å"piece of shit† and throwing it back at them in an angry rage. Productive Steve’s father Paul Jobs was a mechanist, many a times he used to section off a little piece of his workbench and said â€Å"Steve, this is your workbench now. †, and he gave him some of his smaller tools and showed him how to use a hammer and saw and how to build things. He spent a lot of time with Steve teaching him how to build things, how to take things apart, and put things back together. From childhood he had a normal curiosity towards electronic gazettes and electronic instruments and once he found these things are the results of human creation, it gave him a tremendous level of self-confidence. He is an extremely thoughtful person always engaged by deep issues and that reflects in his work. He always wants to absorb a vast amount of information before taking any action. Optimistic When the 85% population does not have a telephone connection he is talking about technological reform ! Even when he was fired from Apple he did not lose his objective of life, so soon after a short vacation at Europe he got the idea of creating computers only for higher education requirements and research works and he founded NeXT. Confidence Steve has a very high confidence on himself as well as Apple that no one else in the world can do such kind of stuff they are doing. He got a strong gut feeling and courage which keeps him going and presenting innovative stuffs which nobody can think of. Opportunistic He believes in living each day as if it would be his last and he grabs all the opportunities that come in his way. He had big dreams and worked his heart out in shaping his dreams coming out with products that gives a glimpse of a bright and exciting future. Passion His workaholic nature shows how passionate he was towards his work. He clearly loves what he is doing. Jobs have a passion for excellence, a strong drive, a calling for something higher than money which gives him the inspiration to climb higher and higher. Narcissism Steve always wants to be centre of attention. He has a pompous sense of self importance, requires excessive admiration and a sense of entitlement. He is arrogant and at times has an exploitive attitude towards Apple employees. Jobs pushed his workers to heights of unethical work conditions. MBTI Personality profile According to Mayers – Briggs type indicator Steve Job is an ENTJ personality that is Extraverted iNtuitive Thinking Judging. The functional analysis of this category is as given below: ENTJs have a natural tendency to organize and direct. This may be expressed with the charm and finesse of a world leader or with the insensitivity of a cult leader. The ENTJ requires little encouragement to make any plan. While â€Å"compelled† may not describe ENTJs as a group, nevertheless they bent to plan creatively and to make those plans reality is a common theme for NJ types. ENTJs are often â€Å"larger than life† in describing their projects or proposals. ENTJs are decisive. They see what needs to be done, and frequently assign roles to their fellows. Few other types can equal their ability to remain firm in conflicts, sending the brave into the mouth of hell. When challenged, the ENTJ may by reflex become argumentative. Reference – Joe Butt. Extraverted. iNtuitiveThinking. Judging. http://typelogic. om/entj. html Steve Jobs on the job Over the past 100 years, management theory has followed a smooth path, from enslavement to empowerment. The 20th century began with Taylorism —workers are interchangeable cogs — but with every decade came a new philosophy, each promoting that more power be passed down the chain of command to division managers, group leaders, a nd workers themselves. In the 1940s, Bill Hewlett and David Packard pioneered what business author Tom Peters named â€Å"managing by walking around,† an approach that encouraged executives to communicate informally with their employees. Jobs, by contrast, is a notorious micromanager. Perfectionist No product can escape without meeting Jobs’ exacting standards, which are said to cover such obscure details as the number of screws on the bottom of a laptop and the curve of a monitor’s corners. â€Å"He would scrutinize everything, down to the pixel level,† says Cordell Ratzlaff, a former manager charged with creating the OS X interface. Motivator Most of the IT industry may motivate employees with carrots, Jobs is known as an inveterate stick man. Even the most favored employee could find themselves on the receiving end of an outburst. Insiders have a term for it: the â€Å"hero-shithead roller coaster†. Many of his colleagues described Jobs as a brilliant man who can be a great motivator and positively charming. Charisma Most of Jobs’ employees remain devoted because his autocracy is balanced by his famous charisma — he can make the task of designing a power supply feel like a mission from God. Andy Hertzfeld, lead designer of the original Macintosh OS, says Jobs imbued him and his coworkers with â€Å"messianic zeal. And because Jobs’ approval is so hard to win, Apple workers labor determinedly to please him. â€Å"He has the ability to pull the best out of people,† says Ratzlaff, who worked closely with Jobs on OS X for 18 months. Innovator Steve Jobs innovative mind has changed the worlds of computing, computer animation, music, and communications forever. In Cupertino, innovation does n ot come from pampering employees and collecting whatever bubbles rises to the surface; it is the product of an intense, hard-fought process, where people’s emotions are irrelevant. Innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem. Steve himself had always been a part of this innovation process: â€Å"So when a good idea comes, you know, part of my job is to move it around, just see what different people think, get people talking about it, argue with people about it, get ideas moving among that group of 100 people, get different people together to explore different aspects of it quietly, and, you know – just explore things. Visionary Since Jobs’ return Apple got an entirely new dimension and success undoubtedly — iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone. This suggests an alternate vision to the worker-is-always-right school of management. Due to Jobs’ unique creative vision Apple is the only company which gives their customers, products, before even they could realize that they want it. In a consumer focused IT industry, the products are what matter and Steve Jobs exerts an unrelenting control over his products and how they are used. Recruiting Policies He hires people who want to make the best things in the world. While hiring somebody really senior, competence is the stake. They have to be really smart. But the main issue to him is whether they will fall in love with Apple because if they fall in love with Apple, everything else will take care of itself and they will want to do what’s best for Apple, not what’s best for them. Dealing with employees Steve’s view on people is something like this: â€Å"The most important thing is a person. A person who incites your curiosity and feeds your curiosity; and machines cannot do that in the same way that people can. † People at Apple work nights and weekends, sometimes not seeing their families for a while. Sometimes people work through Christmas to make sure the tooling is just right at some factory in some corner of the world so our product comes out the best it can be. He always considers part of his job was to keep the quality level of people in the organizations and he always tries to get rid of the people who are not â€Å"The Best†. Steve Jobs has an uncompromising management style and people who work with him need to be strong enough to justify their decisions when Jobs challenges them. Jobs often would have a look at something and say it sucks. Those who took this personally had problems but those who come back and explain why they did, what they did or stuck to their guns, usually won out or bettered their work. Jobs often pushed his workers to heights of unethical work conditions. Some management theorists are appreciating Apples way of thinking. A certain type of forcefulness and perseverance is sometimes helpful when tackling large, intractable problems, says Roderick Kramer, a social psychologist at Stanford who wrote an appreciation of great intimidators — including Steve Jobs — for the February 2006 Harvard Business Review. Marketing genius Steve Wozniak was the technical genius behind the first Apple computer; Jobs saw the marketability. Steve Jobs is the marketing mastermind behind Apple’s rapid success. He conceived of elegant products that captured consumers imaginations. He knows how to sell product. Jobs strategy was to focus on his most profitable customers and coming up with new things to sell them. From the time he was a kid, Steve thought his products could change the world, says Lee Clow, chairman of TBWA/Chiat/Day and Jobs longtime ad man. Decision making Steve’s attitude was not confrontational. He wanted to absorb a vast amount of information before he took any action. Still there was always an undercurrent of tension and Steve would occasionally rebuke people if they didn’t seem to realize the urgency of the situation. Steve has the ability to buffer too much of information in his head. After saving Apple at 1998, Jobs performance had clearly not been simply one of product innovation or entrepreneurship. He had refocused Apple both strategically and organizationally. How this bundle of conflicting behaviors can coexist, to spectacular effect, in a single human being remains a puzzle. Good Steve/Bad Steve This term was coined by biographist Alan Deutshman to reflect the dual character of Steve Jobs The charisma that the world is mad about and his supposedly tyrannical behavior with his employees. It is said that in order to get the best out of his employees Steve will alternate praises and humiliations in public. If Steve Jobs says that the work done by the employee is not up to the mark, the employee will do whatever s/he can to improve and get the praises from him. The Bad: Steve Job is blunt blunt to the point that he can bring tears in the eyes of his employees. He can abuse them, humiliate them, and throw their work in the trash. When he wants something, he will want it to be perfect or nothing else. There have been times when he has called his employees a bozo or brain dead stupid. The problem with this attitude is that there are times when he has called the works of the employee’s trash without even looking at them properly. If a gadget or a device is presented to him, he will check them to their smallest details. He is snappy, short tempered and can do things that no manager or top level executive will do in today’s management era. It can be said that today when today’s managers are giving ‘carrots’ to their employees, Steve is the inveterate â€Å"stick man†. If we talk in Organizational Behavior terms, Steve uses negative reinforcements to the fullest extent. Steve Jobs has been criticized for his micro-management also. No gadget goes out of the company without it being presented to Jobs and till he has seen it to the minutest possible detail. There are also rumors which say that Steve has fired a group of people just because he did not like their work. This has led to a kind of fear that has gripped the minds of some employees that if they don’t do their work properly, they will have to leave their job. Also, rumors like the developers present their worst work first, let it be humiliated, and then show him the complete part so that he is satisfied. These kinds of talks have created an image of Steve Jobs that he is not the ‘sugary’ boss that the people expect today. If you want to work with Jobs, you will have to go through hell at Apple. His stubbornness and particularism do create tensions in the work environment. Also, the secrecy policy of Apple give jitters to the employees. Steve Jobs is known as the toughest, roughest and most intimidating boss. He would not care about the damage to the egos of those he hurt, as long as he pushed them to work better. The Good: But that is not all. Behind the intimidating boss, there is also a motivator and a charismatic leader which leads by example. If we look at Apple’s secrecy policy, no one other than Steve Jobs follow it religiously. He brings the gadgets wrapped in a cloth to his home, and works on it in private. He praises and inspires his employees in many creative and imaginative ways. Since Steve’s praise is hard to win, the employees work with maniacal zeal to win his praise. In a recent survey by Glassdoor, a company rating site, Steve Jobs has achieved a whooping 91 percent approval rating from his employees. This, itself, speaks a lot about how loyal his employees are to Jobs. Also, some of the events that people have themselves seen give an idea how the employees are treated in Apple. At every World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC), Steve makes a point to make the audience applause for his engineers and developers. And the numbers are not small. People across the globe see this happening live. What better can boost the morale of the employees! Also, it is to be noted that the jobs at Apple are something that are highly challenging (coming up with new ideas every minute) and that people love the jobs. This, itself, is a kind of self motivation that the employees require and on top of that the charisma of Steve Jobs makes it imperative for the employees to give their best. On the day iPod was released, Jobs had announced to give all his full time and part time employees who were there with Apple for more than a year an 8 GB iPod. This is the kind of motivator Jobs is. He brings in such enthusiasm in the employees that they are ready to work for him the whole day. Steve Jobs is a visionary and an innovative leader. His zeal is contagious. Also, at Apple the organization has no barriers between the employees and their boss. The engineers and workers sometimes have their lunch with Steve himself sitting across the table and eating his food. The perfectionist in him brings the best out of his employees and that’s the reason Apple brings out new and latest technologies on such regular basis. The dedication that he shows to his work even at the age of 52, make his employees do their best! The employees remain committed because along with the autocratic image, there is also the motivator and leader which encourage them to give their best. Recently, there was a lot of criticism when Apple goofed up by releasing a new application along with the iPod even when the application was not fully ready. Steve Jobs sent a ‘personal’ email to all the employees at Apple explaining them the situation and what can be done to reduce the damage. This shows that he does care about the employees’ morale which was down because of the negative criticisms. It seems to be unclear whether this unusual people management style is a conscious effort on Steve’s part to make people work harder, or a matter of instinct. Conscious or instinctive, it seems to work. Jobs is able to get his employees so motivated that they worked maniacally to achieve goals and develop technologies far beyond what they thought was possible.