Windsor Training: Apple

Showing posts with label Apple. Show all posts

Friday, 7 November 2014

Steve Wozniak: Apple's Other Steve

With an upcoming Hollywood biopic and the record-breaking recent sale of an Apple-1 computer, Steve Wozniak's indispensable contribution to the success of Apple and to Steve Jobs himself, is often overlooked in stories of the latter. But what can we learn from the Jobs-Wozniak relationship and are there lessons for start-ups as well as some insight for success in life?

Steve Jobs stares wistfully into the camera and strikes a pose, whereas Steve Wozniak is lost in thought and concentrating on solving the technical problem at hand. To my mind, this picture seems to neatly encapsulate the complex and symbiotic relationship between Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the two co-founders of Apple. There is no question that they needed each other: Jobs, the showman, marketer, and public face of Apple; Wozniak, the technical genius and problem-solver. There is also little doubt that we probably wouldn't have heard about Jobs without ‘Woz’, as he is affectionately known, and vice-versa.

A Tale of Two Steves

The relationship between Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak is often characterized in the media as almost the perfect metaphor for two extremes of personality: exuberant extrovertism, personified by Jobs on the one hand, and introverted diligence and application on the other, summed up in Wozniak. There is no doubt that Wozniak had a great deal of admiration and affection for Jobs, but he wasn't blind to his faults and the friction that Jobs's style of management brought, particularly in the early days. His confrontational style alienated as many people as it succeeded in winning over and Wozniak said of the younger Jobs in a recent interview:

"Steve Jobs had a lot of these questionable things, like some of my very best friends in Apple... almost all of them said they would never, ever work for Steve Jobs again. It was that bad."

From Homebrew to Garage Startup

The two Steves met in high school, where they were both members of the Homebrew Computer Club. Despite a difference of five years in age between the older Wozniak and the younger jobs, they collaborated on building a device that could be used to enable free phone calls worldwide. It was Wozniak’s early homemade computer, however, that switched Jobs onto the potential for computing for the masses.

Apple Computer Inc. was founded in the garage of Steve Jobs’ parents’ house in 1976, with the name inspired by a visit to an apple orchard, according to Jobs. Recently one of the first Apple-1 computers made by Wozniak and Jobs fetched an incredible$905,000 at Bonhams auction house in New York, with the winning bid coming from the Henry Ford organization. The original machine had a price tag of $666.66, apparently because of Wozniak’s penchant for repeating number sequences, but it was basically a printed circuit board and very little else.

Woz and Apple-1

In creating that first Apple-1, Wozniak’s expertise and technical input was significant and the foundation of Apple’s subsequent success was in no small part due to the innovation of that earlier machine and the ones that followed. The Henry Ford organization is proposing to display the computer in its museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Commenting upon the significance of the Apple-1, the president of the museum, Patricia Mooradien, described it as ‘a key artefact of the digital revolution,’ and she also added:

“Similar to what Henry Ford did with the Model T, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs put technology directly in the hands of the people with the creation of the Apple-1, completely altering the way we work and live.”

Both men left Apple in 1985. In the latter years Wozniak and Jobs were not as close as they had been in the early days, with a suggestion that Jobs allegedly refused to write a forward for his autobiography, iWoz. Wozniak, however, remained loyal to Jobs and determined to defend his legacy, particularly in interviews following his friend’s untimely death from pancreatic cancer in 2011. In one interview, Wozniak said that Jobs had revealed to him when they were very much younger, a belief that he would not live past 40 and this was something that Wozniak felt gave such an urgency to Jobs and his mission. Nevertheless, Wozniak believed that he developed as a person and the earlier confrontational Jobs gave way to a more thoughtful person in latter years:

"Steve Jobs was a very different personality over the time frame I knew him. I met him when he was in high school. And, back then, we played jokes and pranks on each other. […] Once we started Apple, he sort of had something he wanted in life: to find the formula to be an important person."

There have been a number of big and small screen portrayals of Wozniak. In a forthcoming movie about Jobs, the role of Wozniak is set to be played by Hollywood funny man, Seth Rogen, in what will be a high profile biopic of Jobs and directed by Danny Boyle. But however Woz is depicted in that film, there is no doubt that Wozniak played a pivotal role in the early success of Apple and that Jobs might not be the household name that he is without that symbiotic early partnership. Maybe the real lesson of the ‘tale of two Steves’, is that the secret of a successful high tech start up is that you need the diligent and technically-minded engineer, in the shape of Wozniak, who is prepared to occupy the back-room away from the distractions of the limelight, so that the front man can get on with promoting the business.

Perhaps the secret to success for us all is that we all need to be a little bit Woz and a little bit Jobs to get on in life: the technical skills of the engineer, combined with the showmanship of the front man able to promote our ideas to the wider audience.

Will Trevor is the Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training. Please click 'Follow' if you would like to hear more from Will in the future. Feel free to also connect via his Linkedin page, or via Twitter and Facebook or email: will.trevor@windsortraining.net

Sunday, 26 October 2014

Bill Gates or Steve Jobs? Who will we remember in 50 years?

I’d like to get a debate going and I’d like to have your views.

Two of the greatest technological and entrepreneurial leaders of this age are Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, but how will we remember them in terms of their legacy of leadership and entrepreneurship? Who will we remember in years to come for their legacy to future generations?

Gates has the advantage of still having time to shape his legacy, whereas Jobs’s deeds are now cast in stone and open to interpretation. Maybe it’s a little unfair to set this up as a boxing match between two entrepreneurial heavyweights, but my question was inspired by the comments of best-selling Canadian author and speaker, Malcolm Gladwell.

Jobs: The 'Tweaker'

In an article in the New Yorker, Gladwell said that Jobs was more of a ‘tweaker’, rather than a true innovator and visionary. He argues that Jobs didn’t invent the graphical user interface (GUI) and the mouse, instead he took the ideas from the Xerox research center at Palo Alto (PARC). He also didn’t invent the iPod, he waited until early MP3 technology had been tested and developed elsewhere and then launched his own device. Gladwell says of Jobs:

"Every single idea he ever had, came from somebody else. And he would be the first to say this. He would also take credit for things. He was shameless. He was an extraordinarily brilliant businessman and entrepreneur. He was also a self-promoter on a level that we have rarely seen.

Gates: The Philanthropist

Gates, on the other hand, would be remembered for his charitable work and the fact that he has established the Gates Foundation with billions of his own money, claiming that there would be statues of him across the Third World, not for his entrepreneurship or leadership, but because his money is likely to fund a cure for malaria.

In Defence of Jobs

Defending Jobs, the Forbes columnist, Frederick Allen, argues that Gladwell gets the nature of invention and Job’s achievements wrong. According to Allen, if you use Gladwell’s definition, then all of greatest inventions are tweaks: Ford didn’t invent the automobile; the Wright brothers didn’t invent flying; and there were a number of light bulbs before Edison’s.

What Jobs did was to build a better device for the storing and retrieval of music and he also built an ecosystem to support it, with the iTunes platform. As for the mouse and the GUI, Steve Jobs biographer, Walter Isaacson, points out how limited the developments were that PARC had made and that the Apple team brought the whole desktop dream to reality, enabling things to be dragged, dropped, resized and manipulated, like never before.

So what do you think: will we remember Gates for his charitable work and Jobs as an innovator and visionary? What do you think will be their legacy in 50 years’ time?

Friday, 1 August 2014

"Riding the Sh*thead-Hero Rollercoaster"

“Riding the Sh*thead-Hero Rollercoaster”

Six inspiring insights from the management style and personal philosophy of Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs at the launch of the MacBook Air

Steve Jobs defied the typical style of management espoused in textbooks and taught in business schools throughout the world: he was known to rant and throw tantrums, plus he was egotistical and drove people hard in an uncompromising and confrontational way. He was not afraid to give a public dressing down to a manager who he felt had failed to deliver and, sometimes - as his biography makes clear - he would also openly weep about something that he cared passionately about.

If either you or I ever behaved in that way, or we had adopted a style of management similar to that of Jobs, you can guarantee that our tenure in the role would not last long before we were shown the door by both an exasperated employer and some delighted colleagues. Jobs, however, had a particular vision and he once said that those people who are just crazy enough to believe that they can change the world, are usually the ones that actually do. It was his ‘crazy’ vision that turned Apple into one of the world’s most valuable corporations, by pursuing his passion for what he did and expecting the same level of drive and commitment from those around him. When he died he was hailed as a genius and visionary, and there was a genuine outpouring of grief at his early demise. He was, nevertheless, a controversial figure and working with him was described by colleagues as ‘riding the shithead-hero rollercoaster’: signifying the daily perils of either being in Steve’s good books, or out of favour and at risk of being the target for one of his legendary tantrums.

There is a lot that could be written about Jobs in terms of both his management style and his personal philosophy, but I want to pick just three for each.

Management Style

1) A belief in teamwork. Jobs once said in interview that his model for business was the Beatles. He believed that the four band members balanced each other out and that together the total was greater than the sum of the parts. They were a collection of egos and individual talents, but together they kept each other’s negative tendencies in check. That’s how he saw business and he believed that great things in business are never done by one person, they are done by a team of people. Probably the time in his life that this held most true was in the development of the Mac. Jobs was not unaware that he could be difficult to live with, which is why he relied on the talents of a good team around him in order to challenge him and help drive the success of the business forward.

2) Manage the ‘top line’. Jobs declared that what was important was to manage the ‘top line’ - by which he meant the business strategy, the people, and your products - and the bottom line will follow. By focussing on what the business does best and doing it well, then the organisation should be able to deliver the expected profits. Rather than on focusing too much on the bottom line, at the expense of the fundamental and core activities of the business. This is a sobering lesson for many businesses overly obsessed by the need to show the City or Wall Street consistent quarterly returns, rather than focusing on strategy, people and products.

3) Trusting your team to deliver. Despite Jobs’ own egotism he was a firm believer in the need for selecting a strong team and this is why he gathered around him such stellar talents as his chief designer, Johnathan Ives. For Jobs, teamwork was about trusting the other members to deliver, without watching them all the time, but believing that they are going to come through with their parts, when needed. The lesson here is to ensure that you gather around you a team that you can trust to share your mission and who do not need to be supervised and overseen on a regular basis.

Personal Philosophy

Finally, three insights from his personal philosophy:

1) Find what you love. When Jobs delivered the commencement speech to the students of Stanford University, he famously exhorted them to find what they love, declaring it to be ‘as true for work as it is for your lovers’. He urged them not to settle for anything less and implored them that they would know when they find it. He went on to say that he remembered a quote that had inspired him, ““If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "no" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”[i] Jobs urged an uncompromising focus on what you love the most and not to settle for anything less than what you love to do.

2) Passion. People who are crazy enough to believe they can change the world, are the ones that actually do. This point naturally stems from the previous one. Whilst Jobs might have been many things, he certainly didn't lack passion for what he did, in the products that he delivered and for the various successful businesses that he built. Both Apple and Pixar were built upon his passion and commitment.

3) “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” In giving this quote from the artist Pablo Picasso, Jobs was acknowledging that there is nothing new under the Sun and that many of the things that you do, may have been done by someone else at some time before you. This goes for business, just as much as your personal life – the iPod was not new, instead it applied design flair to existing MP3 player technology. To achieve this end, he declared the need to ‘expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then bring those things into what you are doing’ – something that he certainly achieved, bringing artistic influences into his styling and design.

Finally, the words he used to bring his commencement speech to a close to the assembled Stanford graduates, are probably the most succinct encapsulation of his personal philosophy:

“Stay hungry, stay foolish.”

Written by Will Trevor, Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training

Email: will.trevor@windsortraining.net

Picture Credit: "SteveJobsMacbookAir" by Matthew YoheOriginal uploader was Matt Yohe at en.wikipedia - Transferred from en.wikipedia; transferred to Commons by User:Sfan00_IMG using CommonsHelper.(Original text : self-made). Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SteveJobsMacbookAir.JPG#mediaviewer/File:SteveJobsMacbookAir.JPG

[i] Quote from Steve Jobs commencement speech to Stanford University students in 2005. Available online at: http://www.forbes.com/pictures/eimh45ehjl/steve-jobs-live-each-day-as-if-it-was-your-last/. Accessed, August 1^st, 2014