What Steve Jobs meant to Apple?

"Musicians play the instruments. I play the orchestra."

Steve Jobs to Apple was its dad, whose DNA is embedded deep inside the child.

Aforementioned statement would probably best describe Job's role in Apple .

He?may?not?have?conceived?or?developed?any?Apple?product?entirely?on?his?own,?but?he?was?the?only?one?who?could?pull?it?off?within?Apple's??work?culture?I?doubt?

anyone?else,could?manage?Apple's?personnel?and?work?atmosphere.?

Woz?was?a?brilliant?computer?scientist,?but?he?lacked?the?leadership

?qualities?essential?to?run?Apple.?During?Apple's?mid1990s?crisis,?a?number?of

?brilliant?minds?with?impressive?track?records?served?as?CEOs.?Nevertheless,?no?one?could?control?the?company's?work?culture.?In?reality,?the?majority?of?those?

geniuses?exacerbated?the?work?environment?by?continually?reprimanding?people?and?informing?them?that?they?were?stupid, Something that any good leader should never do.

By?the?time?Steve?Jobs?returned?to?Apple,?things?had?deteriorated?to?the?point?

where?even?he?considered?quitting.?The?employees'?internal?fire?had?extinguished,?and?they?had?begun?to?believe?that?they?were?good?for?NOTHING.?Their?morale?was?at?an?all-time?low?since?joining?the?organisation.

Then it was Jobs, and it could only be Jobs who turned around that environment

His first suggestion was to re-price stock options so that staff morale would improve;

Second was to make everyone in the company work to a bonus that was stock-related so the whole crew would pull together;

Third was allowing Microsoft to use Apple's most precious intellectual property that separated Macs from Windows PCs: an agreement that allowed Microsoft to design a user interface similar to Apple's, something that Bill Gates needed very badly. He realized the fact that Apple won't be able to survive in a Microsoft dominated PC market, especially not when its financials are bleeding. If Apple had to survive, it had to settle the old disputes. And why not settle them when Bill Gates himself had been requesting to do so from quite sometime?

Fourth was inventing the new catchy slogan "Think Different" and plastering it everywhere around the company in form of posters and billboards. This gave the company a new spirit and marked a new beginning;

Fifth was taking the reigns of company completely in his hand and letting everyone know that the old ways of working could not work any longer. To make this point clear, I need to tell you a bit more about Apple's renegade work culture those days: Before Jobs no other CEO had figured out how to effectively takeover the reigns of the company. Those days Apple had become a full-fledged bureaucracy. And the biggest problem with bureaucracies is "we know better than you" mindset. There was same "we know better than you" mindset, and same unwillingness to co-operate with the CEO because they knew that CEOs come and go in a matter of few years.

Jobs installed a Board of Directors that won't throw him out without any proper reason and soon after it by passing a policy that enforced "an absolute ban on talking to anyone outside the company who used words as a tool of his trade."

All these things paid off, and company started turning around. The morale of employees once again went high and we already know what happened after it.

What did Steve Jobs actually mean to Apple: A Visionary Leader, Marketing Genius, Consumer Behavior Expert and Process Designer; All Rolled into One

Visionary Leader: Many technical people may not want to accept it, but there's little they can accomplish under lack of excellent leadership. It's a leader who identifies capabilities of different individuals and brings them on board. And once they're on board, it's also the job of leader to keep them super-focused and combine their energies in perfect harmony so they can accomplish something big and meaningful. As big and meaningful as they couldn't even imagine in the wildest of their imaginations.

. Some of his accomplishments as a visionary leader include:

Identifying the talent of Jony Ive. Before Steve Jobs' comeback at Apple company's current Design Chief Jony Ive felt that he was wasting his talents at Apple as he had been thrown into a sh***y lab as a team member. The pain part of being in that situation was that there was absolutely no one who to listen his creative ideas in the team. . The design team, just like other teams inside Apple, had no effective leadership at that time.

This changed after comeback of Steve Jobs, who recognized Ive's talent and gave him better leadership positions into design team of Apple. The result? Jony went on to design some outstanding Apple products, like iPod, iPhone and iPad. These products not only brought out the best hidden inside him, but also made Apple into one of the most successful companies of all time. Today Jony is in the top brass of Apple, the most valuable company in the world. This is what happens when you work with the best leaders.

• Getting a team of software engineers to develop a graphical user interface (GUI) for original Macintosh within a very tight deadline of one year - when all those techies had ZERO experience in developing a GUI and hadn't expected even in their dreams that they'll be able to develop it within an year.

• Getting the first iPod developed within an year. Once again, the teams doubted that they'll be able to complete it on time, but Steve Jobs, who was in the command of project, was seeing that the project was proceeding on schedule.

These're the qualities of a best leader: he sees something into his vision, then breaks it into smaller?missions?so they can be accomplished in a step-by-step manner, recognizes the best people to complete those missions, brings them on board and keeps them focused and motivated until they successfully accomplish all the missions; thus bringing the vision to real life. This is how great teams accomplish big things and how their team members become even better at their arts. Without leadership, teams are doomed - no matter how qualified the team members are.

Marketing Genius:?Aside from leadership, second thing Steve Jobs contributed to Apple was his marketing expertise. Sure, there have been other great marketers at Apple, but Steve too was great at it. He knew how to build up the momentum before launch of a product.

• He ushered the era of something called "event marketing" with Apple's 1984 commercial. In this form of marketing promotion itself is so revolutionary and unique that it's covered as an event in its own right. He went big and he hired Ridley Scott, the director of Alien and Blade Runner, and spent $900,000 making the 60-second spot and $800,000 to run it one time during the Super Bowl. The big bet paid off and that ad generated as much coverage as the Macintosh itself.

• In words of Jean-Louis Gassee, a former executive at Apple, Jobs understood the power of storytelling and used it again and again in things like the?"I'm a Mac, You're a PC"?campaign.
• Aside from this, there were two primary reasons due to which people lined up at Apple events - his own charisma, and the secrecy of Apple. He was a master of suspense and surprise, so people always thought that he could reveal something big. I doubt that some people from his staff used to leak information to the press on his orders to build up the momentum for upcoming product launches.

He created a strong brand for Apple by following his marketing principles since the very beginning of the company.

Consumer Behavior Expert:?Finally, he also had a complete grasp of his customers, which was very helpful in building products that people loved. Since the very beginning of Apple he had a tendency of fighting for the rights of his customers.

• There's a story that during the early years of Apple he had fought with Apple president Scott to provide one year warranty to buyers of Apple II (the standard during those days was 3 months).
• There's another story that says it was Jobs who put in place the upgrade policy of Apple - he was the guy who suggested the idea that buyers of original Apple computer could upgrade to Apple II.

He used to represent his customers inside the company and he used to ensure that the customer experience shouldn't be spoiled even a bit. Small things like this paid off a lot and contributed to the brand value of Apple.

Steve Jobs to Apple was its dad, whose DNA is embedded deep inside the child.

What products could his name take credit for?

As I said above, big things can be accomplished only under effective leadership. So if one wants to give credit, Jobs can be given credit for almost all products that launched under his leadership, whether they were hits or flops. On the other hand, if one has a mentality that Steve shouldn't be given any credit, then no explanation can convince him. And at the same time it's also worth understanding that giving credit to Jobs doesn't mean throwing other people who worked on those products out of the window - they too deserve equal credit because they worked hard to build those products. The fact is that all the people who worked on those products deserve credit and were equally important for successful completion of those projects. Even if one person among them wouldn't have contributed his best, those products wouldn't have been as revolutionary and successful as they were.

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