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Steve Jobs was an unconventional leader. His management style wasn't the stuff of university textbooks - he wasn't known for his consultative or consensus building approach.
He was a "high-maintenance co-worker" who demanded excellence from his staff and was known for his blunt delivery of criticism.
But it was his sheer genius combined with his ability to articulate his vision and bring staff, investors and customers along on the journey - plus the lessons learned in a major career setback - that made it work. The results: indisputable.
A 'visionary' is how he is most often described in relation to Apple, the company he founded with high school buddy Steve Wozniak in1976, was effectively fired from in1985, and then returned to in1997 with a renewed sense of purpose.
And what a triumphant return it was. According the LA Times, the market value of Apple's shares has grown from about $US5 billion in2000 to $US351 billion today making it one of the biggest publicly listed companies in the US, up there with the likes of Exxon Mobil.
Dr Brent Coker from the University of Melbourne's management and marketing faculty describes Jobs as “one of the greatest business strategists of all times”.
“There are a lot of people out there claiming to be futurists,” Dr Coker said.
“Most of them are keynote speakers or public speakers - it is rare to have a futurist that demonstrated his ability to almost predict the future in a real live business setting.”
But Jobs's rise to the top was hardly textbook perfect. A university dropout, he worked at Atari and travelled through India before seeing a commercial opportunity in the computer (the original Apple I) Wozniak had built to impress some friends.
They started the company with an investment of $US1300 of their own money, making it into the Fortune500 list by1983. That year Jobs recruited former Pepsi executive John Sculley to take the chief executive position, only to be stripped of all his power by him in1985. According to author Steven Levy, this was prompted by the Macintosh computer not selling as well as expected, as well as Jobs's demanding management style.
As Harry McCracken writes in Time magazine: “Jobs may have been inspiring, but he was also a high-maintenance co-worker” who labelled people who didn't impress him as “bozos”.
“We have an environment where excellence is really expected,” Jobs told Levy in an interview in1983.
“What's really great is to be open when [the work] is not great. My best contribution is not settling for anything but really good stuff, in all the details. That's my job, to make sure everything is great.”
By overworking them. Steve Jobs is accused of child labor, long hours, pennies on a dollar pay, etc.
"One way to keep techies inspired is to make sure their brilliance is not only recognized but actually makes a difference. In Jobs' case, not every engineer liked him but they respected his ability to envision and enhance technology's role in society."
Taken from a paragraph in Forbes magazine on Jobs.
My personal view is that Steve Jobs did what we common people do not - never considering what he was doing as a "job".
The moment we have the attitude of doing a "job" as a means of livelihood we put ourselves into a situation where we need someone over us to supervise and manage us. Of course what we do need is guidance, expertise, advice, and appreciation from time to time.
A conscientious worker always follows his own rules for excellence which makes him/her a leader.
Steve Jobs, a great personality was always concentrated on the basic human values of the employees rather than their skills and talents. He insisted this thing to his employees.
Good values builds and makes humans strong
i don no who is steve ? : cant point it
I prefer to generalize the question and not restrict to Steve Jobs or any other person by name. Different people may have different impressions and perceptions towards these names The question then becomes "How can a "design team leader"inspire his team to give ultimate care to each and every product detail ?"and my answer ... this is NOT necessarily the case. Product specs is a well-established process where inspiration plays a very limited role. I can talk about this in detail if anyone is interested
personal connection to attain senergy, lead by example in possible ways and trust
Perfection, Excellence and Eye to Details is some of the late Steve Jobs had and though his management style doesn't pleases101% of his engineering team...most of them are highly motivated because the product they created surely makes the difference!
I think that the main reason the engineers cared so much about the product wasn't as much BECAUSE of Jobs as it was in spite of him. Basically, you had to make kickass stuff, or you better believe someone would tell you that whatever it was you just did sucked. This culture led to the engineers all being people that cared about every minute detail of the product because, simply put, those who didn't wouldn't be able to put up with that all day!Jobs had an uncanny ability to inspire people to work harder, but the reality is that the people he had working under him were already the types of people willing to do just about whatever it took to get the job done. They would put up with the constant abuse from Jobs because, at the end of the day, they cared so much more about the product they were building than whatever venom he spewed.
Nevertheless, don't for a second think that more than a few engineers over the years didn't say "screw this, I don't feel like putting up with him" and quit on the spot. They did, but the people that stuck around got to make the iPhone.
i AGREE WITH THE ANSWER OF MR. VINOD
