Steve Jobs was constantly evolving to get to San Diego
Leadership is an inside job. (must constantly be working on ourselves)
As leaders, we are the throttle or the bottleneck for the business.
It’s no coincidence that one of the best entrepreneurs of all time was also one of the most reflective and relentless at working on himself. He LITERALLY TRANSFORMED during his career. He went from THROTTLE->BOTTLENECK->ICONIC INDUSTRY TITAN
There is a gift of a book that allows us to study directly from Steve Jobs on how he transformed. Jobs did not allow the bottleneck era to define his career. This book is literally Steve Job’s own words, Make Something Wonderful. It’s his internal emails, speeches, and interviews.
Jobs was FIRED from his own company, Apple, at the age of 30. Jobs reflecting on the situation:
“I was basically fired from Apple. And that was really hard. So I’m sure I learned a lot from that. I did. I did learn a lot from that. And as a matter of fact, there would have been no Pixar if that hadn’t happened. Life’s funny in this way… Sometimes your greatest adversities, you learn the most from.”
Jobs took the adversity of being booted from HIS company, Apple, and started a journey to become Steve Jobs 2.0.
If Jobs did not do the hard work of evolving in his 30s we would not have had the privilege of benefitting from his vision of the iPhone, Ipad, Pixar, and much more!
So what changed in his leadership approach?
Jobs, in his own words, spells out his playbook explicitly in a speech at Standford Graduate School of Business in 2003: [100% Gold below]
“When I was younger, it was management by objective. It’s all a crock. They’re all after-the-fact management techniques…
The way I describe it is, let’s say we’re all going to take a trip together. The first thing is to figure out where we all want to go. The worst thing is if we all decide we want to go to different places. You can never manage it. [Pointing] You want to go to New Orleans. You want to go somewhere else. I want to go to San Francisco. You want to go to San Diego. It doesn’t work. Right? But if we all want to go to San Diego, that’s the key. Then we can argue about how to get there. [Pointing] You think it’s better to walk. You think it’s better to take a plane. You think it’s better to take a train. We’ll figure that [part] out. Because if I say, “I want to take a train to San Diego,” and somebody goes, “That’s really stupid! It will take three days! We can fly and be there in an hour,” I’ll go, “Oh. OK.” Because, actually, I want to go to San Diego. So if I can get there in an hour [flying], I’ll ditch my idea about the train. That’s what management by values is… so if you want to preserve something, what you want to do is have a good enough place to go, that’s got a long enough focal length that it will survive over time, that everybody agrees on – and not codify how you’re going to get there.”
For us at Century, San Diego is the Vision & Values we have articulated and will continue to repeat. Again. And again. And again.
I am beyond excited for the conversations to articulate the how. We’re going to San Diego. I look forward to finding the best way there TOGETHER!
Onward,
Matt