The last revolutionary…

Sergio Roitberg - February 15, 2013

This past November, on a business trip to Buenos Aires, I dropped into the office of one of my creative directors. On her desk was something new, something that seemed perfectly at home among the all-white Apple-inspired décor of the office the biography of one of the most influential and important figures in modern history. “Have you read it?,” she asked. “It’s very good; you’re a lot like him.” My first reaction was to beam with pride, even though a sixth sense warned me that the compliment was only aimed at pleasing the boss. A hundred pages into the book, I wondered if it was a compliment at all—this man was a maniac, selfish and abusive. But as I read on, I became immersed in a fascinating world and, indeed, began recognizing myself in many of its aspects. By the end of the 700-page tome, I felt that all dreamers and people, like me, who want to make things happen have something in common. We’re all a little like Steve Jobs.

In a few days, on February 24, he would have turned 58 years old. Beyond dramatically transforming six different industries, Jobs changed forever the standards of business management.

“You have to be ruthless if you want to build a team of A-players,” said Jobs. “It’s too easy, as a team grows, to put up with a few B-players.” A-players want to work with other A-players, people who contribute at their level or beyond to help the company succeed. But B-players seek to work with other B or even C-players, to make themselves look good by comparison.

Entrepreneur, inventor and pioneer of new technologies, Jobs was one of the most brilliant, complex and mystifying minds in history. Personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablets and digital publishing were all undeniably transformed thanks to his vision.

"My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. The products, not the profits, were the motivation,” he once said, a statement that has become emblematic of the successful philosophy that guided him in all endeavors.

He founded Apple in 1976 and returned in 1997, when the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. It was during his second term at Apple that he, among other amazingly insane things, launched the iTunes store, which managed to sell over 10 billion songs in just seven years.

He had a unique way of doing things, methods that now serve as examples for entrepreneurs around the world. Among other brilliant insights, Jobs noted that deciding what not to do is just as important as deciding what to do. From there, his management strategy emerged: instead of allowing the unabated proliferation of ideas, Apple focused on just two or three key projects at a time.

Jobs, whose annual salary was one dollar, built and rebuilt his company around his vision of a digital world, a vision that he regularly defended at any and every opportunity.

“People judge a book by its cover,” he would say time and again. Knowing this, one comes to understand his obsession with perfectionism in every detail of the industrial design of his machines—inside and out.

His perfectionism was notorious throughout Palo Alto, as well as his belief in accountability from start to finish. Apple’s top executives can attest to this.

He always held an overarching vision for his company, while simultaneously attending to every single detail of its operations. At the same time, he was an advocate of simplicity in all processes.

“There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat,” he said. “That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions.” That’s right: the biggest technology guru himself preferred face-to-face communication above any other method.

In the same vein, he was a proponent of combining science and the humanities; art with engineering; and creativity with technology. He knew a balance of both worlds paved the best path to success.

He offered tough advice to his own team. “If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will,” he once said regarding his company’s constantly evolving product lines. Above all else, he believed in rebelling from the norm—thinking different, to wit. “Stay hungry. Stay foolish,” he famously told a graduating class at Stanford.

All in all, he led his teams to achieve the impossible. Some say his best talent was distorting reality—even in that, he was one of a kind.

Source:
http://opinion.infobae.com/sergio-roitberg/

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