The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs. His saga is the entrepreneurial creation myth writ large Steve Jobs cofounded Apple in his parents garage in 1. October 2. 01. 1, had built it into the worlds most valuable company. Along the way he helped to transform seven industries personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, retail stores, and digital publishing. He thus belongs in the pantheon of Americas great innovators, along with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Walt Disney. None of these men was a saint, but long after their personalities are forgotten, history will remember how they applied imagination to technology and business. The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. 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When Jobs returned, he shifted Apples focus back to making innovative products the sprightly iMac, the PowerBook, and then the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. The classic US stereotype of attempted Iranian ideological indoctrination via chants of Death to America and such has been old hat for quite some time. As noted. Apples Think Different commercial, 1. In the months since my biography of Jobs came out, countless commentators have tried to draw management lessons from it. Some of those readers have been insightful, but I think that many of them especially those with no experience in entrepreneurship fixate too much on the rough edges of his personality. The essence of Jobs, I think, is that his personality was integral to his way of doing business. He acted as if the normal rules didnt apply to him, and the passion, intensity, and extreme emotionalism he brought to everyday life were things he also poured into the products he made. His petulance and impatience were part and parcel of his perfectionism. One of the last times I saw him, after I had finished writing most of the book, I asked him again about his tendency to be rough on people. Look at the results, he replied. These are all smart people I work with, and any of them could get a top job at another place if they were truly feeling brutalized. But they dont. Then he paused for a few moments and said, almost wistfully, And we got some amazing things done. Indeed, he and Apple had had a string of hits over the past dozen years that was greater than that of any other innovative company in modern times i. Mac, i. Pod, i. Pod nano, i. Tunes Store, Apple Stores, Mac. Book, i. Phone, i. Pad, App Store, OS X Lionnot to mention every Pixar film. And as he battled his final illness, Jobs was surrounded by an intensely loyal cadre of colleagues who had been inspired by him for years and a very loving wife, sister, and four children. So I think the real lessons from Steve Jobs have to be drawn from looking at what he actually accomplished. I once asked him what he thought was his most important creation, thinking he would answer the i. Pad or the Macintosh. Instead he said it was Apple the company. Making an enduring company, he said, was both far harder and more important than making a great product. How did he do itBusiness schools will be studying that question a century from now. Here are what I consider the keys to his success. Focus. When Jobs returned to Apple in 1. Macintosh. After a few weeks of product review sessions, hed finally had enough. Stop he shouted. This is crazy. He grabbed a Magic Marker, padded in his bare feet to a whiteboard, and drew a two by two grid. Heres what we need, he declared. Atop the two columns, he wrote Consumer and Pro. He labeled the two rows Desktop and Portable. Their job, he told his team members, was to focus on four great products, one for each quadrant. All other products should be canceled. There was a stunned silence. Download Axel: The Biggest Little Hero For Free. But by getting Apple to focus on making just four computers, he saved the company. Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do, he told me. Thats true for companies, and its true for products. After he righted the company, Jobs began taking his top 1. On the last day, he would stand in front of a whiteboard he loved whiteboards, because they gave him complete control of a situation and they engendered focus and ask, What are the 1. People would fight to get their suggestions on the list. Jobs would write them downand then cross off the ones he decreed dumb. After much jockeying, the group would come up with a list of 1. Then Jobs would slash the bottom seven and announce, We can only do three. Focus was ingrained in Jobss personality and had been honed by his Zen training. He relentlessly filtered out what he considered distractions. Colleagues and family members would at times be exasperated as they tried to get him to deal with issuesa legal problem, a medical diagnosisthey considered important. But he would give a cold stare and refuse to shift his laserlike focus until he was ready. Near the end of his life, Jobs was visited at home by Larry Page, who was about to resume control of Google, the company he had cofounded. Even though their companies were feuding, Jobs was willing to give some advice. The main thing I stressed was focus, he recalled. Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up, he told Page. Its now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus onGet rid of the rest, because theyre dragging you down. Theyre turning you into Microsoft. Theyre causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great. Page followed the advice. In January 2. 01. Android and Google, and to make them beautiful, the way Jobs would have done. Simplify. Jobss Zenlike ability to focus was accompanied by the related instinct to simplify things by zeroing in on their essence and eliminating unnecessary components. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, declared Apples first marketing brochure. To see what that means, compare any Apple software with, say, Microsoft Word, which keeps getting uglier and more cluttered with nonintuitive navigational ribbons and intrusive features. It is a reminder of the glory of Apples quest for simplicity. Jobs learned to admire simplicity when he was working the night shift at Atari as a college dropout. Ataris games came with no manual and needed to be uncomplicated enough that a stoned freshman could figure them out. The only instructions for its Star Trek game were 1. Insert quarter. 2. Avoid Klingons. His love of simplicity in design was refined at design conferences he attended at the Aspen Institute in the late 1. Bauhaus style, which emphasized clean lines and functional design devoid of frills or distractions. When Jobs visited Xeroxs Palo Alto Research Center and saw the plans for a computer that had a graphical user interface and a mouse, he set about making the design both more intuitive his team enabled the user to drag and drop documents and folders on a virtual desktop and simpler. For example, the Xerox mouse had three buttons and cost 3. Jobs went to a local industrial design firm and told one of its founders, Dean Hovey, that he wanted a simple, single button model that cost 1. Hovey complied. Jobs aimed for the simplicity that comes from conquering, rather than merely ignoring, complexity. Achieving this depth of simplicity, he realized, would produce a machine that felt as if it deferred to users in a friendly way, rather than challenging them. It takes a lot of hard work, he said, to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions. In Jony Ive, Apples industrial designer, Jobs met his soul mate in the quest for deep rather than superficial simplicity. They knew that simplicity is not merely a minimalist style or the removal of clutter. In order to eliminate screws, buttons, or excess navigational screens, it was necessary to understand profoundly the role each element played. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep, Ive explained. For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how its manufactured. During the design of the i. Pod interface, Jobs tried at every meeting to find ways to cut clutter. He insisted on being able to get to whatever he wanted in three clicks.