What we can learn from Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
Don Schmitz/Human Resource Staffing
For Christmas, I was given the book Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. It is a large book and took me a long time to read it but there is a great deal to say about the genius of this man. Mr. Isaacson, the author, did a magnificent job of telling the story of the life of one of probably the most industrious individuals of our lifetime. This book has something for everyone especially HR…not how he treated his employees but the opposite.
Steve Jobs is world famous for starting and developing the companies Apple & Pixar and for products such as; iMac, iPod, iTunes Store, Apple Stores, iPhone, iPad and iCloud. He was also known for his eye for design and keeping things simple. “It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple…to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions.”
For the HR geek, he broke all the rules; he fired people publicly in his board room who had worked for years with his company, he told employees their ideas weren’t worth a bleep before they had a chance to speak, he asked candidates outlandish questions in the interview process and he wasn’t respectful for anyone who couldn’t continue to produce. “I was hard on people sometimes, probably harder than I needed to be…I figured it was my job to make sure that the team was excellent and if I didn’t do it, nobody was going to do it.”
Steve Jobs was a perfectionist beyond our understanding; in style, design, color and employees expectations. He would spend hours deciding on a shade of grey. This need for perfection drove his compulsion for Apple to have end-to-end control of every product. He believed he was right most of the time. “Some people say, “Give the customer what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do.”
In his eye for perfection, he surrounded himself with excellent people like Steve Wozniak, John Sculley, John Lasseter, Paul Rand, Dan’l Lewin and his wife Laurene Powel.“For most things in life, the range between best and average is 30%.... I realized A players wanted to work with A players. At Pixar, it was a whole company of A Players.”
It was his treatment of employees that astonished me most of all. He was brutal and unaccepting of anything less than excellence “People were allowed, even encouraged, to challenge him…but you had to be prepared for him to attack you, even bite your head off as he processed your idea.”
I strongly recommend this book to anyone. The book encourages us to examine our idea of what we can expect of ourselves and those we work with every day.
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of this article cannot be accomplished without the expressed
consent of Human Resource Staffing. Don Schmitz is a popular
speaker and writer on all aspects of HR and CEO of Human Resource
Staffing. Don holds graduate degrees in Education, Administration
and Human Development.
Contact Don@HumanResourceStaffingInc.com
952 854 6040
