I love Steve Jobs.
You’re the second group of people I have said that to this week. The first was my staff. I am sure they could have lived without the details.
Seems like Fortune loves Steve Jobs as well, based on the fact they named him CEO of the Decade in their last issue.
For me, Jobs has been “the” CEO for the last three decades, since he and Steve Wozniak and another chap named Ronald Wayne launched Apple in 1976. Truthfully I had never heard of Wayne until I wanted to check some facts for this blog. Don’t know where he is now, but he did shrewdly sell his 1/3 stake in Apple for $800.00 in 1977. So I assume he is living the high life off the interest!!! Perhaps Ronnie might have wanted to hold say until today, when the market cap hit $176 billion.
Okay enough bad jokes. Maybe he can’t count. Oh, that would make him a Saskatchewan Roughrider football coach. Definitely time to move on!
Back to Jobs. Three decades of Jobs.
The reason for my love is he is the consummate perfectionist, who has also met many failures in his career. Fired by his own company at age 27. He flopped with his subsequent business venture called NeXT. He launched the Newton, which was a PDA before its time, another huge failure.
Yet despite all these failures he has more triumphs than you could imagine. iPhones. IPod. iMac. MacBook. Lisa. 1984. Apple II. Pixar. On and On. This man is a genius among geniuses.
He has even proven recently that he can cheat death, battling health concerns that would slay an army.
Jobs perfectionist pursuits are always about product. He is relentless on creating products that delight consumers. That fill needs they didn’t even know existed. That redefine industries in ways that many thought impossible.
Today Jobs is the largest single shareholder in Disney. In many ways Steve Jobs is the rightful heir to the man who perfected many of the forms of entertainment in the last decade.
Both of them have boundless imaginations. And a stunning ability to energize extremely large workforces to have the same creativity.
Both of them endured bankruptcies, personal challenges, and legions of skeptics.
Both of them took industries that had broken models and created magic.
