“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” - Steve Jobs
Steven Paul Jobs was an inventor, industrial designer, entrepreneur and media proprietor. Jobs is widely recognized as a pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, along with his early business partner and fellow Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. Under Jobs' guidance, the company pioneered a series of revolutionary technologies.
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Steve Wozniak And Steve Jobs
Back when Jobs was enrolled at Homestead High School, he was introduced to his future partner and co-founder of Apple Computer, Wozniak, who was attending the University of California, Berkeley.
In the autumn of 1974, Jobs reconnected with Stephen Wozniak, friend who was working for the Hewlett-Packard Company.
When Wozniak told Jobs of his progress in designing his own computer logic board, Jobs suggested that they go into business together, which they did after Hewlett-Packard formally turned down Wozniak’s design in 1976. When Jobs was just 21, thus in 1976, he and Wozniak started Apple Computer in the Jobs’ family garage.
I had designed many computers, so I was way ahead of him in electronics and computer design, but we still had common interests. We both had pretty much sort of an independent attitude about things in the world.”
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NeXT and Pixar
Jobs quickly started another firm, NeXT Inc. designing powerful workstation computers for the education market. His funding partners included Texan entrepreneur Ross Perot and Canon Inc., a Japanese electronics company. Although the NeXT computer was notable for its engineering design, it was eclipsed by less costly computers from competitors such as Sun Microsystems, Inc.
In the early 1990s Jobs focused the company on its innovative software system, NEXTSTEP. Meanwhile, in 1986 Jobs acquired a controlling interest in Pixar, a computer graphics firm that had been founded as a division of Lucasfilm Ltd., the production company of Hollywood movie director George Lucas.
Over the following decade Jobs built Pixar into a major animation studio that, among other achievements, produced the first full-length feature film to be completely computer-animated.
Toy Story, in 1995. Pixar’s public stock offering that year made Jobs, for the first time, a billionaire. He eventually sold the studio to the Disney Company in 2006.
Return To Apple
While Pixar succeeded, NeXT, trying to sell its own operating system to American consumers, floundered. Apple bought the company in 1997, and Jobs returned to Apple as CEO. Working for an annual salary of $1 a year (in addition to the millions of Apple shares he owned), Jobs revitalized Apple, and under his leadership, the company developed numerous innovative devices – namely, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad and iTunes.
Apple revolutionized mobile communications, music and even how numerous industries, including retail and healthcare, carried out their everyday business operations. He showed a unique intuition when developing these products. When asked what consumer and market research went into the iPad, Jobs reportedly replied, “None. It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want,” according to his New York Times obituary.
Jobs used his personal experiences, such as growing up in the San Francisco area in the ’60s and his world travel, to shape the way he designed the products that made Apple synonymous with success. He criticized the sheltered lives that characterized many in the computer industry. “[They] haven’t had very diverse experiences,” he told Wired. “So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem.
The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”
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Building His Legacy
The resurgence of Steve's cancer was a painful reminder that it was time to 'put his affairs in order' before his passing —and he did. First, he made sure that Apple was ready to operate without him. In late 2008, he hired the dean of the Yale School of Management to create 'Apple University', a sort of internal business track to groom future Apple executives by exposing them to the Apple ways, through case studies of the history of the company.
He also consolidated his executive team and agreed with the board that his natural successor would be his second in command, COO Tim Cook. Finally, at his last public appearance in June 2011, he unveiled his plans for the future Apple campus in Cupertino (now Apple Park), a huge spaceship-sized building in the shape of a circle. All of this was in place when he eventually resigned as Apple CEO on August 24, 2011.
Jobs also prepared his personal legacy. In 2009, he started giving interviews to writer Walter Isaacson to prepare for his first and only authorized biography, sharing with him his perspective on his life and career. He also spent his last days designing a yacht for his family on which he hoped to travel the world.
Unfortunately, death took him too soon, and he died peacefully at home on October 5, 2011, surrounded by his family —the day following the introduction of the iPhone 4S, an Apple event that he most likely watched from his deathbed.
Apple's revolutionary products, which include the iPod, iPhone and iPad, are now seen as dictating the evolution of modern technology.
Steve Jobs’ Parents And Adoption
Jobs was born to Joanne Schieble (later Joanne Simpson) and Abdulfattah "John" Jandali, two University of Wisconsin graduate students. The couple gave up their unnamed son for adoption. Jobs’ father, Jandali, was a Syrian political science professor. His mother, Schieble, worked as a speech therapist.
Steve Jobs’ Parents And Adoption
Jobs was born to Joanne Schieble (later Joanne Simpson) and Abdulfattah "John" Jandali, two University of Wisconsin graduate students. The couple gave up their unnamed son for adoption. Jobs’ father, Jandali, was a Syrian political science professor. His mother, Schieble, worked as a speech therapist.
Shortly after Jobs was placed for adoption, his biological parents married and had another child, Mona Simpson. It was not until Jobs was 27 that he was able to uncover information on his biological parents. As an infant, Jobs was adopted by Clara and Paul Jobs and named Steven Paul Jobs. Clara worked as an accountant and Paul was a Coast Guard veteran and machinist.
Early Life
Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California. Jobs was raised by adoptive parents in Cupertino, California. He lived with his adoptive family in Mountain View, California, within the area that would later become known as Silicon Valley.
As a boy, Jobs and his father worked on electronics in the family garage. Paul showed his son how to take apart and reconstruct electronics, a hobby that instilled confidence, tenacity and mechanical prowess in young Jobs.
Steve Jobs’ Education And College
While Jobs was always an intelligent and innovative thinker, his youth was riddled with frustrations over formal schooling. Jobs was a prankster in elementary school due to boredom, and his fourth-grade teacher needed to bribe him to study. Jobs tested so well, however, that administrators wanted to skip him ahead to high school — a proposal that his parents declined.
Though he was interested in engineering, his passions of youth varied. He dropped out of Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, took a job at Atari Corporation as a video game designer in early 1974, and saved enough money for a pilgrimage to India seeking enlightenment.
Early Life
Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California. Jobs was raised by adoptive parents in Cupertino, California. He lived with his adoptive family in Mountain View, California, within the area that would later become known as Silicon Valley.
As a boy, Jobs and his father worked on electronics in the family garage. Paul showed his son how to take apart and reconstruct electronics, a hobby that instilled confidence, tenacity and mechanical prowess in young Jobs.
Steve Jobs’ Education And College
While Jobs was always an intelligent and innovative thinker, his youth was riddled with frustrations over formal schooling. Jobs was a prankster in elementary school due to boredom, and his fourth-grade teacher needed to bribe him to study. Jobs tested so well, however, that administrators wanted to skip him ahead to high school — a proposal that his parents declined.
Though he was interested in engineering, his passions of youth varied. He dropped out of Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, took a job at Atari Corporation as a video game designer in early 1974, and saved enough money for a pilgrimage to India seeking enlightenment.
Steve Wozniak And Steve Jobs
Back when Jobs was enrolled at Homestead High School, he was introduced to his future partner and co-founder of Apple Computer, Wozniak, who was attending the University of California, Berkeley.
In the autumn of 1974, Jobs reconnected with Stephen Wozniak, friend who was working for the Hewlett-Packard Company.
When Wozniak told Jobs of his progress in designing his own computer logic board, Jobs suggested that they go into business together, which they did after Hewlett-Packard formally turned down Wozniak’s design in 1976. When Jobs was just 21, thus in 1976, he and Wozniak started Apple Computer in the Jobs’ family garage.
They funded their entrepreneurial venture by Jobs selling his Volkswagen bus and Wozniak selling his beloved scientific calculator. The Apple I, as they called the logic board, was built in the Jobses’ family garage with money they obtained by selling Jobs’s Volkswagen minibus and Wozniak’s programmable calculator.
Jobs was one of the first entrepreneurs to understand that the personal computer would appeal to a broad audience, at least if it did not appear to belong in a junior high school science fair. With Jobs’s encouragement, Wozniak designed an improved model, the Apple II, complete with a keyboard, and they arranged to have a sleek, molded plastic case manufactured to enclose the unit.
Apple Computer, incorporated in 1977—the same year that the Apple II was completed. The machine was an immediate success, becoming synonymous with the boom in personal computers. In 1981 the company had a record-setting public stock offering, and in 1983 it made the quickest entrance (to that time) into the Fortune 500 list of America’s top companies.
Wozniak conceived of a series of user-friendly personal computers, and — with Jobs in charge of marketing — Apple initially marketed the computers for $666.66 each. The Apple I earned the corporation around $774,000. Three years after the release of Apple's second model, the Apple II, the company's sales increased by 700 percent to $139 million.
In 1980, Apple Computer became a publicly-traded company, with a market value of $1.2 billion by the end of its very first day of trading. Jobs looked to marketing expert John Sculley of Pepsi-Cola to take over the role of CEO for Apple.
In 1983 the company recruited PepsiCo, Inc. president John Sculley to be its chief executive officer (CEO) and, implicitly, Jobs’s mentor in the fine points of running a large corporation. Jobs had convinced Sculley to accept the position by challenging him: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life?” The line was shrewdly effective, but it also revealed Jobs’s own near-messianic belief in the computer revolution.
The next several products from Apple suffered significant design flaws, however, resulting in recalls and consumer disappointment. IBM suddenly surpassed Apple in sales, and Apple had to compete with an IBM/PC-dominated business world.
In 1984, Apple released the Macintosh, marketing the computer as a piece of a counterculture lifestyle: romantic, youthful, creative. But despite positive sales and performance superior to IBM's PCs, the Macintosh was still not IBM-compatible.
Sculley believed Jobs was hurting Apple, and the company's executives began to phase him out. Not actually having had an official title with the company he co-founded, Jobs was pushed into a more marginalized position and thus left Apple in 1985.
In a 2007 interview with PC World, Wozniak spoke about why he and Jobs clicked so well: "We both loved electronics and the way we used to hook up digital chips," Wozniak said. "Very few people, especially back then, had any idea what chips were, how they worked and what they could do.
Jobs was one of the first entrepreneurs to understand that the personal computer would appeal to a broad audience, at least if it did not appear to belong in a junior high school science fair. With Jobs’s encouragement, Wozniak designed an improved model, the Apple II, complete with a keyboard, and they arranged to have a sleek, molded plastic case manufactured to enclose the unit.
Apple Computer, incorporated in 1977—the same year that the Apple II was completed. The machine was an immediate success, becoming synonymous with the boom in personal computers. In 1981 the company had a record-setting public stock offering, and in 1983 it made the quickest entrance (to that time) into the Fortune 500 list of America’s top companies.
Wozniak conceived of a series of user-friendly personal computers, and — with Jobs in charge of marketing — Apple initially marketed the computers for $666.66 each. The Apple I earned the corporation around $774,000. Three years after the release of Apple's second model, the Apple II, the company's sales increased by 700 percent to $139 million.
In 1980, Apple Computer became a publicly-traded company, with a market value of $1.2 billion by the end of its very first day of trading. Jobs looked to marketing expert John Sculley of Pepsi-Cola to take over the role of CEO for Apple.
In 1983 the company recruited PepsiCo, Inc. president John Sculley to be its chief executive officer (CEO) and, implicitly, Jobs’s mentor in the fine points of running a large corporation. Jobs had convinced Sculley to accept the position by challenging him: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life?” The line was shrewdly effective, but it also revealed Jobs’s own near-messianic belief in the computer revolution.
The next several products from Apple suffered significant design flaws, however, resulting in recalls and consumer disappointment. IBM suddenly surpassed Apple in sales, and Apple had to compete with an IBM/PC-dominated business world.
In 1984, Apple released the Macintosh, marketing the computer as a piece of a counterculture lifestyle: romantic, youthful, creative. But despite positive sales and performance superior to IBM's PCs, the Macintosh was still not IBM-compatible.
Sculley believed Jobs was hurting Apple, and the company's executives began to phase him out. Not actually having had an official title with the company he co-founded, Jobs was pushed into a more marginalized position and thus left Apple in 1985.
In a 2007 interview with PC World, Wozniak spoke about why he and Jobs clicked so well: "We both loved electronics and the way we used to hook up digital chips," Wozniak said. "Very few people, especially back then, had any idea what chips were, how they worked and what they could do.
NeXT and Pixar
Jobs quickly started another firm, NeXT Inc. designing powerful workstation computers for the education market. His funding partners included Texan entrepreneur Ross Perot and Canon Inc., a Japanese electronics company. Although the NeXT computer was notable for its engineering design, it was eclipsed by less costly computers from competitors such as Sun Microsystems, Inc.
In the early 1990s Jobs focused the company on its innovative software system, NEXTSTEP. Meanwhile, in 1986 Jobs acquired a controlling interest in Pixar, a computer graphics firm that had been founded as a division of Lucasfilm Ltd., the production company of Hollywood movie director George Lucas.
Over the following decade Jobs built Pixar into a major animation studio that, among other achievements, produced the first full-length feature film to be completely computer-animated.
Toy Story, in 1995. Pixar’s public stock offering that year made Jobs, for the first time, a billionaire. He eventually sold the studio to the Disney Company in 2006.
Return To Apple
While Pixar succeeded, NeXT, trying to sell its own operating system to American consumers, floundered. Apple bought the company in 1997, and Jobs returned to Apple as CEO. Working for an annual salary of $1 a year (in addition to the millions of Apple shares he owned), Jobs revitalized Apple, and under his leadership, the company developed numerous innovative devices – namely, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad and iTunes.
Apple revolutionized mobile communications, music and even how numerous industries, including retail and healthcare, carried out their everyday business operations. He showed a unique intuition when developing these products. When asked what consumer and market research went into the iPad, Jobs reportedly replied, “None. It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want,” according to his New York Times obituary.
Jobs used his personal experiences, such as growing up in the San Francisco area in the ’60s and his world travel, to shape the way he designed the products that made Apple synonymous with success. He criticized the sheltered lives that characterized many in the computer industry. “[They] haven’t had very diverse experiences,” he told Wired. “So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem.
The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”
Health Concerns
Unfortunately, while he had never been so successful professionally, Steve Jobs had to start fighting cancer with renewed intensity. In late 2003, he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer of a rare kind, that could potentially be cured by surgery. However, against everyone's advice, he refused to have the surgery for nine long months.
Instead, true to the ideals of his youth, he tried alternative diets and treatments, including acupuncture and seeing a psychic. Only in July 2004 did he agree to have the surgery. He looked healthy for the next five years, and spoke publicly of being 'cured' of cancer at his famous Stanford commencement speech in 2005.
Unfortunately, while he had never been so successful professionally, Steve Jobs had to start fighting cancer with renewed intensity. In late 2003, he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer of a rare kind, that could potentially be cured by surgery. However, against everyone's advice, he refused to have the surgery for nine long months.
Instead, true to the ideals of his youth, he tried alternative diets and treatments, including acupuncture and seeing a psychic. Only in July 2004 did he agree to have the surgery. He looked healthy for the next five years, and spoke publicly of being 'cured' of cancer at his famous Stanford commencement speech in 2005.
Building His Legacy
The resurgence of Steve's cancer was a painful reminder that it was time to 'put his affairs in order' before his passing —and he did. First, he made sure that Apple was ready to operate without him. In late 2008, he hired the dean of the Yale School of Management to create 'Apple University', a sort of internal business track to groom future Apple executives by exposing them to the Apple ways, through case studies of the history of the company.
He also consolidated his executive team and agreed with the board that his natural successor would be his second in command, COO Tim Cook. Finally, at his last public appearance in June 2011, he unveiled his plans for the future Apple campus in Cupertino (now Apple Park), a huge spaceship-sized building in the shape of a circle. All of this was in place when he eventually resigned as Apple CEO on August 24, 2011.
Jobs also prepared his personal legacy. In 2009, he started giving interviews to writer Walter Isaacson to prepare for his first and only authorized biography, sharing with him his perspective on his life and career. He also spent his last days designing a yacht for his family on which he hoped to travel the world.
Unfortunately, death took him too soon, and he died peacefully at home on October 5, 2011, surrounded by his family —the day following the introduction of the iPhone 4S, an Apple event that he most likely watched from his deathbed.
The Real Leadership Lessons Of Steve Jobs
When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, it was producing a random array of computers and peripherals, including a dozen different versions of the Macintosh. After a few weeks of product review sessions, he’d 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. “Here’s 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. 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. “That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.”
When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, it was producing a random array of computers and peripherals, including a dozen different versions of the Macintosh. After a few weeks of product review sessions, he’d 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. “Here’s 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. 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. “That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.”
His uncanny ability to develop and design technology products (now everyday products) that people love was like no other entrepreneur's before, during or after his time. He's truly a legend in the concept of innovative and interactive design. He focused on design and was insistent that it be absolutely perfect.
“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” -Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs also ignored the maxim of giving the market what it wants. He was impudent about market research findings and would say, “The consumer doesn’t know what he or she wants until we make it.” He would create something so sexy and different that it would be irresistible, and then tell the market this is what it wanted. For instance, when the market was comfortably settled with the MP3 player, Jobs introduced the iconic iPod and revolutionised market demand.
