thoughts

Tuesday, February 5, 2019

Leadership lessons of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson:


·         Focus; “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”

·         Simplify; “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

·         Take responsibility end to end.

·         When behind, leap frog; “If we don’t cannibalize ourselves, someone else will.

·        Put products before profits; “Don’t compromise, focus on making the product great and the profits will follow”

·         Don’t be a slave to focus groups; “Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”

·       Intuition is a very powerful thing – more powerful than intellect; “The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do; they use their intuition instead.’

·         Bend reality; “Don’t be afraid, get your mind around it, you can do it.”

·         Impute; “People do judge a book by its cover”.

·      Push for perfection: “A great carpenter isn’t going to use a lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody’s going to see it.”

·        Tolerate only ‘A’ players; “When you have really good people, you don’t have to baby them; by expecting them to do great things , you can get them to do great things.

·       Engage face to face; “I hate the way people use the slide presentation instead of thinking, people would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I want them to engage, to hash things out at a table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they are talking about don’t need PowerPoint.’

·      Know both the big picture and the details; “Some Ceo’s are great at vision, others are managers who know that God is in the details.”

·         Combine the humanities and the sciences; Connect humanities to the sciences; creativity to technology; arts to engineering.

·    Stay hungry and stay foolish; in every aspect of life Jobs behavior reflected the contradictions, confluence and eventual synthesis of all the varying strands. “Think different” “While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”


Source:  HBR South Asia 1 January, 2012

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