Art of Doing Business: 7 Business Mantras I Learned from Steve Jobs

By Dr. Amarja Nargunde

Steve Jobs is considered to be the greatest entrepreneur of modern times. In a world where people consider themselves fortunate for getting even partial credit for changing one industry, Steve Jobs went on changing not one, but seven industries namely personal computers, desktop publishing, animation movies, computer retailing, music players, mobiles phones and tablet computing. He didn’t have any business management degree. He was a college drop out and a hippie. He considered himself as an artist and went on creating his two masterpieces, Pixar and Apple. This book takes a look at what made Steve Jobs one of the greatest business icons of all time and how he applied seven business mantras in his own way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: Jan 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543704587

Dr. Amarja Nargunde

Amarja Satish Nargunde is working as an Associate Professor in the department of Management Studies in Bharati Vidyapeeth (Deemed to be University), IMRDA, Sangli, Maharashtra, India. She has got fourteen years of teaching experiece. Her academic qualification is M.Com, M.B.A., M.J.(Master of Journalism). She received PhD from Shivaji University, Kolhapur. She was selected for Group Study Exchange program by Rotary International to Kansas, USA. She has developed her own training program for “Soft Skills Development”. She writes articles for various newspapers. An article featuring her PhD work was published in the Times of India in February 2013. She has also written a book titled “Motivation Theories and Teaching Profession in India”.

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Copyright © 2019 by Dr. Amarja Nargunde.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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CONTENTS

1 Passion

2 Perseverance

3 Perfection

4 Vision

5 Innovation

6 Marketing

7 Talent Management

Dedicated To Lord Shani Maharaj

The Cause of My Faith and Devotion

To Whom

I Shall Always Remain Grateful

For the Very Existence

Of My Life

Preface

I was lucky……..

I have heard many of my friends and colleagues describing their extreme fondness of a celebrity, saying they were lucky that they were part of a generation which saw X or Y or Z singing or acting or playing. I thought that time would never come for me because I never felt impressed by anyone to that extent. But then I heard Steve Jobs and surely today I can say that I was extremely lucky of being part of a generation which saw Steve Jobs working. It was this time during which Steve Jobs worked, introducing one after the other revolutionary products. Steve Jobs is considered to be the greatest entrepreneur after Henry Ford and Thomas Alva Edison. My generation didn’t get a chance to see Ford or Edison working. But I consider myself lucky that I could see somebody changing the world and it was because of Steve Jobs.

Surprisingly, I didn’t know much about Steve Jobs until as late as 2009. Working in the field of management studies I knew there was a company called Apple and there was its CEO Steve Jobs who introduced the iPod and the iPhone. I remember one of my friends proudly showing the iPod of her sister and gave me to listen to music on it. One of my senior colleagues was proudly showing the iPhone little after the iPhone was introduced in the Indian market. I had also read about the Macintosh computer in the books on personal computers. I had discussed a case study about Steve Jobs’ medical leave and whether it was appropriate in terms of business ethics to keep such secrecy and not disclosing the needed information to the stakeholders. Beyond it, I never found any interest in knowing about Steve Jobs’ life. But then in 2009, I joined Facebook and one of my Facebook friends had shared a video titled Stay Hungry Stay Foolish. The title looked a little interesting and I listened to that 15-minute video. It literally blew me away to that extent that I can very well understand now what must have happened to John Sculley when Steve Jobs asked him, Do you want to come with me or sell sugar-coated water for rest of your life? I was myself going through a lot of confusion about what exactly life was all about? Was it right to follow heart when you were unsure of what exactly was going to unfold in times to come? And here was somebody who was standing at the podium, sharing his personal experiences and almost assuring me that I was right in doing something about which I was extremely passionate. I was pursuing my Ph.D. research those days. Studies have always been my passion. I remember seeing his Stanford commencement video for many times whenever I used to feel down.

My remotest connection with Steve Jobs can be I live in India which Steve Jobs visited when he was young. I never had even glimpse of him personally. I saw Steve Jobs’ iPad presentation on TV and I saw him introducing the iCloud. I read the news that he resigned. I kept sharing all the interesting stories of Steve Jobs on my Facebook wall. And then on the morning of 6th October 2011, I read the news of his death on Facebook. Those were the festive days in India and also due to India-US time difference I could see the news a little late. I read the post RIP Steve Jobs. I tried to check the news on some other site thinking that somebody was misinformed. But the news was true and for 10 minutes or so I didn’t know what to do. I posted a photo of Steve Jobs with just a line You can’t go. For the whole day, I kept seeing the news of his death, read articles which paid him tributes on the Internet and in the evening I broke down. I had believed Steve Jobs’ words when he said that he was ok after the cancer surgery. After reading the news of his resignation also I had thought perhaps this man was working for such a long time of his life and surely he needed some break and he was going to be back. News of his death was a complete shock for me. But then I realized I was not the only one. There were millions who felt the same. I saw people paying tributes outside his house, outside Apple Stores, people on street carrying iPad and iPhone in their hands with pictures of lighted candles. I read many, many touching tributes to Steve Jobs. The most touching was the article written by a lady owner of a traveling agency in one of the regional dailies here in India. Her teenage son who was an avid fast food eater and always loved eating out, refused to come with her for dinner in a hotel, saying he was in mourning as Steve Jobs was no more. She expressed her surprise how a 56-year-old man was able to strike a chord with her teenage son who used to stay awake till late nights to see Steve Jobs’ presentations.

I read many books written on Steve Jobs’s life and saw hundreds of his videos. My favorite book on Steve Jobs remains Steve Jobs’s authorized biography. Steve’s one time associates have criticized the biography as being too negative and it has failed to capture the charisma of the man. But I love the book; especially reading the young days of his life, putting guts on doing things which he didn’t know how it was going to benefit his future. He just followed his heart, doing whatever he was interested in and doing it with extreme passion and his confidence at a young age when he said that he was going to make a dent in the universe.

Steve Jobs’s colleagues have talked about his ‘reality distortion’ field. Even I felt captured many times in the ‘reality distortion field’ after reading his biography that I could do so many things that I never had the confidence to do. I wrote my first book where I extended one of the chapters of my Ph.D. work. I wasn’t quite sure how the book would eventually turn out as it was my first attempt. But then I remembered Steve Jobs when he told his friend Steve Wozniak that although the company they were going to start might not succeed but once in life they would have their own company. I thought the same for my first book writing. I knew it was not going to be the best of my writing. But then I would have my own book, my own creation. And now I have got my own book. The time I submitted all the material of my first book, I was pretty sure what would be the topic of my second book.

And here I am writing my second book. You really got to be lucky to get somebody who can guide you when you are standing at a crossroads in your life and unsure which one to follow. For me, Steve Jobs showed that road.

I read immensely about him and saw many of his videos. I could find certain things that he was extremely good at being an entrepreneur. In this book, I have written about his business mantras and how he applied those in his own way.

Being a Steve Jobs fan I have addressed him by his first name, Steve in this book. There are so many things that aspiring entrepreneurs and current CEOs can learn from the greatest entrepreneur of the modern era. This book is intended for the same purpose.

1

Passion

T he Flow Experience Theory of Motivation says that it is not the goal but the process of achieving the goal, gives a human being intrinsic satisfaction. Such people do not feel happy when the process is going on because they are completely engrossed and concentrated in the activity and don’t have time to think about the process. But once the process is completed, when they look back at it, it gives them immense pleasure and this pleasure makes them repeat the process again. People experiencing such pleasure have stated the task characteristics. The tasks are challenging and creative and require a high level of skills, goal-directed and give feedback. Although the task is goal-directed, it is not the goal but the process of achieving the goal gives satisfaction to the individual. The theory can be perfectly applied to Steve Jobs.

Much of similarity with the theory can be found with Steve’s famous quote, Journey is the reward. Steve told his original Macintosh team that when they would look back at the days of making the Macintosh, they would find these days as some of the greatest days of their lives. Indeed many Mac team members agree to it. Steve gave meticulous attention to even the tiniest details of the process of making insanely great products. He did it relentlessly day in and day out. Passion is the first thing one can notice when one studies the work of Steve Jobs. The fact that Steve could put so much of passion was simply for the reason that he loved what he was doing. Computer electronics was Steve’s love and he spent his entire life coming up with one after the other groundbreaking innovative products.

Some of the styles or ways of Steve’s works are called as Steveism or Jobsism by Jay Elliot who worked as VP, HR in early times at Apple. One of the prominent ways of Steveism was to call people directly without hesitation being bothered about the kind of response he would get. Steve said that whenever he felt in need of help he called people and most of the time he got a positive reply. He said that most people would get hesitant in it and that made the difference. Apple co-founder, Stephen Wozniak too recalled: I never wanted to deal with people and step on toes, but Steve could call up people he didn’t know and make them do things. Steve said, I never found anyone said no and hung up the phone when I called, I just asked and when people call me I just try to be as responsive as that to pay back the gratitude, most people never pick up the phone and call, most people never ask, that’s what separates people who do the things from the people who just dream about it, you got to act and you got to be willing to fail, willing to crash and burn, if you are afraid of failing, you will not go far.

One can get to read the theories, methods, and techniques of innovation in the books and research studies. But if one studies the life and work of Steve Jobs, one can definitely conclude that innovation starts with passion. It is the passion with which ideas can be actualized into products and services. World-changing innovations are possible with passion. However the problem with passion is that it cannot be taught in business schools, it can’t be quantified. Even while fighting cancer, Steve kept working relentlessly and passionately. The reason he could do it was that he loved what he did.

There are thousands of videos of Steve Jobs on YouTube. Three of them are unmissable. The file names for the videos are Secrets of life, The Lost Interview and The Steve Jobs 95 Interview Unabridged. All three are of the time when Steve was out of Apple and was running his second venture NeXT. The passion with which Steve talked about Apple, the personal computer industry and its future, his love for personal computers can be easily seen. In one of the books on Steve, he is has been rightly called as more than just a preacher in the religion of computer. Most people consider themselves lucky if they get to work on at least one thing that changes the industry. For Steve, it was a continuous process which he continued with unmatchable passion since the time he started Apple with Steve Wozniak in the garage of his parents.

In one of the interviews, when asked for his advice for being a successful entrepreneur, Steve said that anybody who wanted to be an entrepreneur should first ask himself about the idea of his business, problem or wrong he wanted to do right, what he was passionate about. And if there was no idea, he said that the person could work as a busboy or something till the time he got an idea and found out his real passion. Steve emphasized that if there was no passion, an entrepreneur was going to find hard to survive and might give it up. He said, You put so much of your life into this thing. There are such rough moments in time that I think most people give up. I don’t blame them. It’s really tough and it consumes your life. If you’ve got a family and you’re in the early days of a company, I can’t imagine how one could do it. I’m sure it’s been done, but it’s rough. It’s pretty much an eighteen hour day job, seven days a week for awhile. Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you’re not going to survive. You’re going to give it up. So you’ve got an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you’re passionate about, otherwise you’re not going to have perseverance to stick it through. I think that’s half the battle right there.

Childhood and Teenage

Steve was adopted by a loving couple from California and the couple treated him as the special chosen one. Indeed Steve was intellectually special. His mother taught him to read. So he could read before he went to school. When he got into school he didn’t find anything much interesting to learn. He was often sent home for troubling teachers and his parents also found it difficult to handle him. He made his parents bend to his will and since his childhood, Steve hated hearing ‘no’ for any of his demands. If he decided on something, he made sure he got what he wanted.

Steve was found intellectually exceptional and his school put a proposal of skipping two grades after fourth to directly go for the seventh grade. Steve’s parents decided to skip only one. However, that meant changing Steve’s school. His new school was notorious for fights and he was bullied. Frustrated Steve gave his parents an ultimatum that if they didn’t change the school he would not go to school at all. Although financially it was difficult still Steve’s parents decided to move. I insisted they put me in a different school. When they resisted, I told them I would just quit going to school if I had to go back, he recalled.

As a teenager when caught with Marijuana, Steve had a rare but serious fight with his father. His father wanted him to promise to give it up. But Steve refused. In fact, Steve considered dropping acid as one of the most of unforgettable experiences of his life.

Although he could have got a scholarship at Stanford or Berkley University which were not far away from his home, he decided to go to Reed College, a liberal arts college, from Oregon. It was not only far away but was also very expensive for his parents. They tried to convince him. But again he was adamant that he would go to Reed College otherwise he would simply quit education. His parents were left with no choice but to accept his demand.

Later Steve wanted to move out to live with his girlfriend Chrisann Brennan whom he met at Reed, his father opposed. He simply moved out.

At the Reed College, Steve and his college friend Daniel Kottke became serious vegetarians. He started having only one or two foods like carrots or apple for weeks. Kottke said that Steve became a ‘champion juicer’. With carrot juice and carrot salads, Steve’s friends remember him turning orange. He often took things to an irrational extreme once he felt interested in something. Later in life, he became the fan of Odwalla juices and his passion for the brand gave quite a feed to journalists to write about and in turn, made the company famous.

Another of Steve’s interest during his junior high school days was spiritualism and often he would discuss things with his friend Bill Fernandez. Fernandez remembered, Mostly it was Steve who would do the talking. He would have a grand passion of the day or something that was on his mind, and he would bend my ear for hours as we walked.

Steve called himself lucky that he found his love early in life. He found his love for computer electronics when he was nine. He saw the 1st desktop computer in 1968 when he was 9 at Hewlett-Packard Explorers Club. It was made by HP called 9100A. It was huge, as long as a suitcase and Steve fell in love with it. It had a language called Basic. He spent every moment trying to write the program for it, he was so fascinated by it. He used his ideas and wrote programs. If programs gave answers which were expected, he could know the program worked and he felt excited about it.

He read an article about measuring the efficiency of loco-motion for lots of species on the planet earth when he was twelve. The article measured the kilocalories extended by different species and then made a ranking. It found that the Condor was the most efficient animal and human being was at the bottom of the list. But when the efficiency of humans riding the bicycle was tested, humans came on top of the list. It made a big impression on Steve. He always found humans good at building tools that could amplify their inherent abilities to spectacular magnitude. He always considered computers as bicycle of human minds.

Electronic tool building came to Steve early in life as he grew up in Palo Alto. Surrounded by many establishments of defense industries, the local economy based on technology grew rapidly. The area later came to know as Silicon Valley. The experimental technical work that normally went in the garage soon took shape of many big companies. By the mid-twentieth century, a technical instruments company started by two entrepreneurs David Packard and Bill Hewlett, Hewlett Packard became a fast-growing prominent company of the area.

Steve’s father, Paul Jobs was a dealer in cars who fixed them and sold for margins. Paul Jobs didn’t have a deep knowledge of electronics, but he could see a lot of it in automobiles and while fixing cars and because of him, Steve got introduced to electronics.

As a kid, Steve called none other than the CEO of HP, Bill Hewlett when he needed some parts to build the frequency counter which measured the number of pulses per second in an electronic signal. He was only nine at that time. As there was nothing like unlisted numbers those days, Steve got the number and talked directly to Hewlett who chatted with him for almost twenty minutes. Steve said in an interview that he would remember the conversation as long as he lived. He not only got the parts but he also got a summer job at HP. The job made a lot of impression on him about how well the company treated its employees which also motivated him to make a long-lasting company of his own based on values in later part of his life.

The houses in the area where Jobs family lived including that of Jobs’ family were built by a real estate developer, Joseph Eichler. Steve admired these ‘Eichler Homes’ and it brought the passion in him to make nicely designed products for the mass market.

One of the turning points of Steve’s life was the making of ‘Blue Box’, a digital equipment that allowed making free long distance phone calls using the AT&T network. It was the time after he decided to drop out of Reed College. When Steve and his friend Wozniak heard about server tones, they decided to get their hands on the AT&T technical journal which had this article. But AT&T had already asked libraries to remove the journal. Steve and Wozniak went to Stanford Linear Accelerator Center at one night. At the last bookshelf in the corner bottom neck, they found the journal. After six months of efforts, Blue Box could be made. Both friends were young but the experience of making Blue Box gave Steve the confidence that they could build something that could control the infrastructure worth billions of dollars. Steve stated that had there been no Blue Box there would have been no Apple.

Steve was a tough negotiator and he did business on his terms and on conditions that gave him leverage. Steve got his negotiation skills from his father. Steve watched his father negotiate at the counter. Steve recalled, He was a good bargainer because he knew better than guys at the counter what the parts should cost. Blue Box had an actual cost of $40 per piece. But Steve and Wozniak charged it $150 per piece. With more popularity, they demanded even $300.

Early Days at Work

After dropping out of Reed College, an advertisement in a newspaper caught Steve’s attention. It was an advertisement for the computer company, Atari calling for applications from those who wanted to earn money along with having fun. Steve went to Atari and refused to leave the place till the time the company gave him a job. In retrospect, it was weird to hire a drop out from Reed, Al Alcorn, chief engineer at Atari said. But Alcorn saw something in him. He found Steve very intelligent, enthusiastic and excited about tech.

At Atari, Steve came to know Ron Wayne who was a draftsman. Wayne had started a company that manufactured slot machines which eventually had failed. The fact that Wayne had his company made Steve feel excited that even he could start his company. He wanted to start a business with Wayne. But Wayne who already had burned his hands financially refused the idea. Wayne recalled, But I admired the fact that he had a burning drive to start his business.

Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari too found the spark of an entrepreneur in Steve. Steve was not only interested in the engineering but also in the business aspects. Steve learned from Bushnell to act as if he was in complete control of the situation so that people would believe the same.

After some time at Atari, Steve wanted to go to India in the spiritual quest. He wanted Bushnell to pay money for it. Bushnell refused to give money directly but assigned a job of fixing problems with the Pong game which Atari was selling in Germany. From there Steve took to India where he spent the next nine months. Dan Kottke joined Steve in the middle of the tour. Even in the unknown land of India, Steve bargained very hard. He found out the real price after looking at prices everywhere. He saw a woman selling watered buffalo milk and the arguments made both Kottke and Steve run out of one town.

Early Apple Days

Steve knew the engineering brilliance of Wozniak. Wozniak was never interested in making money but was fascinated with electronics and making something with electronics. For convincing Wozniak to get into the business, Steve didn’t show any dream of making money. He showed it more of a fun adventure. The prospect of having own company was more exciting to Wozniak than making money.

Steve wanted investment in the early days of Apple. Don Valentine who was the founder of Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm came to Steve’s garage and found that Steve had no knowledge of marketing. Valentine advised Steve that he should have one partner who knew marketing and distribution and could write a business plan. Steve asked Valentine to recommend three persons whom he knew. Steve met all three of them and one of it was Mike Markkulla. Steve got along with Markulla well who turned out to be a crucial player for running Apple in the next two decades.

Markkula wanted Steve to work with him on writing the business plan. Steve started going to Markkula’s house in the evenings. The talks went on into late nights, sometimes as late as 4 a.m.

In the early days of computers, they were huge like that of the size of a room. They were hard to assemble and were out of reach of a common person. Steve had a terminal, a time-sharing computer as computers those days were too expensive to own. So Steve and Wozniak came up with a terminal like Apple I, an extension of terminal putting a microprocessor on the back end. Steve sold 50 to Byte Shop and 50 were still in stock. Steve who was looking after the business side of the venture started calling all the computer shops and that was the start of Apple. When we first started Apple we really built the first computer because we wanted one, said Steve. With Apple II, the company got real fame. Steve said, Then we designed this crazy new computer with color and a bunch of other things called the Apple II. We had a passion to do this one simple thing which was to get a bunch of computers to our friends so they could have as much fun with them as we were.

In his early biography of Steve Jobs, author Jeffrey Young has described Steve, had a salesman’s belief in the product that he was producing, an evangelist’s Bible-thumping passion, the zealot’s singularity of purpose, and the poor kid’s determination to make his business a success. Jay Elliot has also noted the salient trait of Steve, His obsession is a passion for the product, a passion for product perfection.

Apple had a time-sharing account with Call Computer as Apple still in its infancy could not afford the large computers needed for storing data. Randy Wigginton, a programmer was working tirelessly on a new version of BASIC, found that his six weeks of work and thousands of lines code had disappeared from the time-sharing system. He tried to recover but couldn’t. He called the company and asked for the previous back-up which wasn’t that recent. But at least he did not require starting from scratch. Alex Kamradt, the head of the company refused. Bad relations of the past with Steve and Wozniak, plus the fact that Apple had not paid bills for last some months, made matters worse. Steve convinced Kamradt to collect the check on the spot and load the tape reel so that Wigginton could start his work. Till the time Kamradt was driving over, Wigginton downloaded the files, signed off the system and left the building with rest of the staff. When Kamradt came, Steve refused to pay saying weeks of work had vanished and Kamradt could go to hell. Kamradt was an ex-boxer but that didn’t deter Steve. Angry Kamradt walked out empty handed.

Mike Markkulla got Mike Scott as CEO to basically rein in Steve who always had his own way of working. Scott was equally feisty like Steve. It didn’t take too long that both came into conflict. It was regarding the badge numbers. Scott had given number 1 to Wozniak and number 2 to Steve. Steve wanted number 1. Whenever Steve found himself not getting what he wanted, the argumentative volleys would break, finally, Steve would turn to tears. The trait of turning to tears continued even in the later part of Steve’s career when he was extremely successful. He was never shy about showing his feelings. On the badge number argument, Steve proposed a solution. He said that he would have number 0. At least for the badge purpose, Scott agreed but the payroll system at Bank of America accepted the only positive integer, so for the system, Steve remained number 2 only.

Steve ensured if customers were to be passionate about Apple products, it had to first start with the employees using Apple products and also those who wanted to do business with Apple. One company wanted to be Apple vendor for the disk drives. They came for a demo of their drives with IBM MS-DOS machine. Steve just walked into the room, saw the IBM machine and walked out without speaking anything. His silence was more powerful than words. It is said that innovative organizations should have an absolute commitment to the product. Such companies ensure that their employees are committed to using products that the company manufactures and also take pride in speaking about the product, to relatives and friends and even to strangers. Not surprisingly if somebody visits Apple campus, all the employees can be seen using Apple products. Every Apple employee carries an iPhone, MacBook or MacBook Pro or iPad. Every time Steve introduced Apple product, his enthusiasm and commitment impacted every employee who even remotely contributed to the development, promotion, or marketing the product. They saw none other than the CEO himself praising the entire organization. What made Steve captivating and plausible speaker was the way in which he spoke passionately about the product. His words This is the greatest product in the world while introducing the products showed the pride he had in creating the product and the organization which he headed. Jay Elliot has rightly described Steve’s ‘Say No’ principle with passion. Steve could brag that Apple