Steve jobs way-part-2

Shah Tarun (Student) (800 Points)

10 September 2011

Hello Friends,

Yesterday we have read Author's note & Prologue of this Book.Those, who have missed it,don't worry just click on the link below.

Steve Jobs Way-ileadership for New Generation..

/forum/details.asp?mod_id=166846&offset=1

Now Let's Moove Ahead With The First Chapter

PART 1 -Product CZAR

PASSION FOR THE PRODUCT

Some people choose their path in life. Some people have it
thrust on them. And then there are some who discover their
calling almost by accident, never having looked for it.
Steven Paul Jobs didn’t set out to be a Product Czar. If I had
called him that in the early days, I’m not sure he would have
known what I was talking about. He might even have laughed
at me.

Okay, I’m not going to claim I recognized it at the time. No
one did. Certainly not Paul and Clara Jobs, the devoted couple
who had suff ered through his early school years when he was
so unruly and hard to handle that, as he says himself, he could
well have been headed for jail.

So to see him become the world’s foremost CEO and
product creator is all the more unlikely and impressive. Yet the
man I saw when I fi rst went to work with him certainly was
determined and driven. And like all the great leaders I’d met
and worked with, he had his own personal, nearly irrational
focus—but it’s one that has made the world a better place.
His obsession is a passion for the product . . . a passion for product
perfection.

What shape does that obsession take? Easy. Steve is the world’s greatest consumer. I saw it from the day I joined Apple. He
breathed life into the Macintosh as “the computer for the rest
of us.” He stirred the iTunes Store and the iPod into being out
of his love for music and the desire to take music everywhere
with him. He loved the convenience of the cell phone but hated
the heavy, clumsy, ugly, hard-to-use phones on the market, and
that dissatisfaction led to his giving himself and the rest of us
the iPhone.
Steve Jobs survives, thrives, and changes society by following
his own passions.
I got my fi rst whiff of his passions on that visit to PARC. The
rest of that weekend, I kept reliving the experience. Every
detail of those two hours kept running through my mind, and
I recognized that what I had seen was something extraordinary.
Steve had been full of excitement, off the scale with unbounded
enthusiasm. This was passion in its most raw form, the passion
for an idea. For Steve, it was already shaping into a passion for
a specifi c product.
From everything he had said to me while we were there and
on the way home, two things were obvious: Steve was a man
who even then had a vision about the power of the computer
to change people’s lives. And he knew that he had come face to
face with the concepts that were going to make that possible. In
particular he had been blown away by the notion of an icon on
the screen—a cursor—that was controlled by the movement of
your hand. Steve saw that in a nanosecond, capturing a vision
of the future of computing.
It wasn’t just the technology at PARC that had so impressed
Steve, it was the people as well. And the admiration fl owed
in both directions. PARC scientist Larry Tessler several yearslater would tell journalist and author Jeffrey Young about
his recollection of Steve’s visit with the team from Apple.
“What impressed me was that their questions were better
than any I had heard in the seven years I had been at Xerox.
From anybody—Xerox employee, visitor, university professor,
student. Their questions showed that they understood all the
implications, and they understood the subtleties, too. Nobody
else who had ever seen the demo cared as much about the
subtleties. Why the patterns were there in the title of the
window. Why the pop-up menus looked the way they did.”
Tessler was so impressed that he would soon leave PARC
to join Apple, with the title of vice president, at the same time
becoming Apple’s fi rst chief scientist.
In my ten years at IBM, I had rubbed shoulders with too
many brilliant PhD scientists who were doing exceptional work
yet were frustrated because so few of their contributions were
adopted and made into products. At PARC, I had smelled the
rancid odor of frustration in the air, so it wasn’t surprising
to learn that they had a 25 percent turnover rate, one of the
highest in the industry.

At the time I joined Apple, the heat at the company was being
generated by a development group working on what was
supposed to be a boundary-shattering product, a computer
that would come to be called the Lisa. It was meant to serve
as a complete break from Apple II technology and launch the
company in a completely new direction, using some of the
same innovations the Apple engineers had seen at PARC. Steve
told me the Lisa would be such a breakthrough that “it will
make a dent in the universe.” You couldn’t help but be in awe
of talk like that; the line has been an inspiration for me eversince, a reminder that you won’t get people working for you
fi red up with enthusiasm unless you’re fi red up yourself . . . and
you let everyone know it.
The Lisa had been in development for two years, but
no matter. The technology Steve had seen at PARC was
going to change the world, and the Lisa would have to be
completely rethought along the new lines. He tried to get the
Lisa team turned on about what he had seen at PARC. “You’ve
gotta change direction,” he kept insisting. The engineers and
programmers of the Lisa were Woz worshippers and not about
to be redirected by Steve Jobs.
Apple in those days was something of a runaway ship,
plowing through the water at full speed with lots of people on
the bridge but no one really in command. The company, though
barely four years old, was enjoying annual net sales of around
$300 million. Steve was cofounder but no longer had the clout
of the early days when it was just the two Steves, with Woz
tending to the technology and SJ taking care of everything else.
The CEO had left, start-up-investor Mike Markkula was acting
as interim CEO, with Michael Scott (“Scotty”) as president,
both of them more than competent but neither qualifi ed to
run a bustling technology company. Mike, the second-largest
shareholder was more interested, I thought, in retiring than in
the daily hassles of a rapidly growing technology business. The
two decision-makers didn’t want the delays in getting the Lisa
to market that Steve’s changes would mean. The project was
behind schedule already, and the idea of throwing out what
had been done and starting down a new path simply wasn’t
acceptable.

To ram his demands down the throats of the Lisa team or
the guys running the company, Steve had a scenario laid out in his head: He would be slotted as vice president of new product
development, which would make him supreme commander
over the Lisa team with the muscle to command the change in
direction he had been trying to press on them.
Instead, in an organizational reshuffl ing, Markkula and Scott
had given Steve the title of board chairman, explaining that this
would make him the company’s front man for the upcoming
initial public off ering of Apple stock; to have the charismatic
twenty-fi ve-year-old as the Apple spokesman would help boost
the stock price and make him all the richer, they argued.
Steve was really hurt. He was unhappy about the way Scotty
had pulled this stunt without informing or consulting him—it
was his company, after all! And he was really upset about losing
direct involvement with the Lisa. He was just really bent out of
shape.
The sting was even worse. The new head of the Lisa group,
John Couch, told Steve to stop coming around and harassing
his engineers; he was to stay away and leave them alone.
Steve Jobs doesn’t hear the word “no” and is deaf to “We
can’t” or “You may not.”
What do you do if you have in your head a continent-shifting
product but your company doesn’t take any interest? I saw Steve
become very focused at that point. Instead of acting like a child
whose toys had been snatched away, he became disciplined and
determined.
He had never found himself in a position like this before,
being told “Hands off ” within his own company; few people
ever have. On one hand, he took me along to board meetings
where I saw him running those sessions as a board chairman
more knowledgeable than the older, wiser, vastly more experienced CEOs who were sitting around the table. He had
in his head volumes of current data about Apple’s fi nancial
position, margins, cash fl ow, the Apple II sales in various market
segments and sales regions, and other business minutiae. Today
everybody thinks of him as an incredible technologist, a
product creator extraordinaire, but he’s much more, and has
been from the very beginning.
Yet on the other hand, his role as an idea-person and shaper
of new products had just been snatched away from him. Steve
had a clear vision of the future of computing sledgehammering
his brain, but nowhere to go with it. The doors to the Lisa
group had been slammed in his face and locked tight against
him.