Steve Jobs – a Few More Lessons Learned
Posted: November 7th, 2011 in Innovation, Senior Management Committment
By Marci Jacobs
It’s pretty tough to google “innovation” these days without “Steve Jobs” flooding your search engine. In fact, as we’ve asked clients over the years to tell us what first comes to mind when they hear the word “innovation,” most hold Steve Jobs top of mind, along with the iPhone and, more recently, the (we’ll assume non-eponymous) word “jobs.”
Jobs will certainly be remembered as one of, if not the, great innovators of our time. Equally certain is that there will be no shortage of analysis aimed at deconstructing the elements of Jobs’ genius and how organizations can go about finding it or replicating it.
But Jobs’ legacy teaches us that successful innovation is about more than identifying the next great visionary out of the crowd.
First, innovation is a discipline. Granted, the innovations that came out under Jobs were so exciting, new, and tremendously successful he seemed almost omniscient in anticipating what consumers would want and would pay for. But Jobs’ devotion to usability, design, and product experience set him apart as a true genius and not just another techy. The magic of the iPod lay not merely in its operating system, but in the work of dissecting user behavior down to the sensory level and molding new-to-the-world technology around user sensation and intuition. Jobs’ innovations were as much products of great vision as great discipline.
Second, innovation won’t drive itself. As a corollary, all the discipline in the world won’t turn just any employee into the next Steve Jobs. Breakthrough innovation is as much an art as a science, and leaders can only emerge in a culture that welcomes innovation and tolerates risk. Jobs had the ability to wield masterpieces out of his understanding of how we use things, how we’d like to use things, and how to build things we’d love. However, Apple was unfriendly to his better-to-be-a-pirate-than-serve-in-the-navy mentality - and the product flops that went with it - when he was fired from his company in 1985. While visionaries like Steve Jobs may just happen and are not made, organizations must cultivate an innovation culture that will recognize that vision when it comes along.
Third, innovation begets innovation. Jobs’ greatest legacy lies perhaps in motivating leaders everywhere to think more expansively about how and why they do business, and in encouraging employees to consider the power of a single idea to shape-shift an organization. Revolutionary ideas are rare and the revolutionaries who create them even rarer; nevertheless, committing to innovation as an ideal instills a mindset that if you shoot for the moon you’re certain to end up among the stars. And it is this mindset that transforms everyday operations into a forward-thinking and inspired pursuit of the bold, excellent, and new.