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David Levy
Principal - Consult Levy
The Corporate Digest
January 2017
 Dear David,

Happy 2017 to you!

I previously shared Part I of leadership lessons from Steve Jobs.  Here is Part II that I hope you will enjoy.
Steve Jobs
The Real Leadership Lessons - Part II 
Here are some additional thoughts of Isaacson on Jobs’ keys to success.

Push For Perfection

Jobs was known to halt development of a product so that the whole process could be rethought to see if it was done the best.

He even did this with the Pixar team after the movie Toy Story was in production. They rewrote the story to make it friendlier.

When the Apple Stores were ready to launch he delayed everything a few months so that they could change the layout based on the activities and not the products.

He and Jonathan Ives were known to have agreed on improving the minutiae of a product.  They held up the iPhone by several months because the case competed with the display and it needed to be redesigned.  He even offered to supply the guns to the team to shoot the two of them for the thought.  The team’s reaction to the thought of a redesign? They agreed.  Jobs said that it was one his proudest moments at Apple.

Some of these opinions went back to his father. When he was a young boy he helped his father build a fence around their backyard and was told to use the same amount of care on the back of the fence as on the front. ‘Nobody will ever know’, said Jobs.  He father responded ‘But you will know.’

Tolerate Only ‘A’ Players

Jobs was impatient, petulant and tough with people.  But people stuck around. Steve Wozniak said that he believed in being more patient and not having as many conflicts.  Then he said ‘If the Macintosh project had been run my way, things probably would have been a mess.’

He did not want to land up with people who were mediocre.

CEOs who study Jobs and want to emulate him have difficulty integrating into their plan how his rudeness and roughness were accompanied by an ability to be inspirational.

The outcome speaks for itself.  He inspired people and had top players stay with Apple longer than they would have stayed in other more friendly environments. His Apple family stuck together.

Debi Coleman, a member of the original Mac team who once won an award for being the employee who best stood up to Jobs, said that with all  of the screaming that went on in team meetings, she regarded herself as the luckiest person in the world to have worked with Jobs.

Engage Face-to-Face

Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings.

He designed the Pixar building so that people would run into people that they would otherwise not see.

He hated formal presentations and much preferred freewheeling meetings.

He believed that people who knew what they were talking about did not need PowerPoint.

Know Both The Big Picture And The Details

Job’s passion allowed him to be that rare individual who was able to deal with the large and the tiny.

For example, while he designed and had the vision for managing photos, videos, music and content in the iPod and then iPad and was able to come up with the successor strategy of moving it all to the cloud, he was equally fixated on the shape and color of the screws in the iMac.

Combine The Humanities With The Sciences

He was particularly impacted by a statement from one of his heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, who wrote about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and science.

There were certainly better technologists such as Wozniak and Gates and certainly better designers.  But no one in his era could match him better in how he combined the two.

He always thought about disrupting industries.

Many of his product launches ended with a slide showing a sign at the intersection of Liberal Arts and Technology Streets.


People may disagree on some of his methods but most would agree that Jobs was truly a remarkable man!
David Levy works with companies utilizing his business improvement strategies to improve their effectiveness and maximize their profitability. He works with owners and helps with the tough decisions and helps businesses, and their people, grow. 

He can be reached at 858-453-3778.

Contact Information
David Levy
8230 Caminito Sonoma, Suite 102
La Jolla, CA 92037 USA
Phone: 858-453-3778                         Fax: 763-322-2505
E-mail: dlevy@consultlevy.com           Website: www.consultlevy.com
For more information on this topic - or to discuss any of your business needs, contact David Levy or call 858-453-3778
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8230 Caminito Sonoma, Suite 102
La Jolla, CA 92037-1601
858.453.3778 763.322.2505 dlevy@ConsultLevy.com

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