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Steve will have a design in his mind and Jony will build it for Steve. Jony was very much into design as a passion rather than a job. After the success of apple 2, Jobs wanted to do something different. Steve wanted Jon Ivy to take the mp3 player design to a next level. Steve Jobs’s business feats were legendary long before he died in October 2011. Apple Inc., considered a niche player for much of its history, is the most valuable company in the world by market capitalization as of this writing. Download the genius of design or read online books in PDF, EPUB, Tuebl, and Mobi Format. Click Download or Read Online button to get the genius of design book now. This site is like a library, Use search box in the widget to get ebook that you want. Author by: Jason Quinn Languange: en. This fast-paced and entertaining biography in graphic format is a perfect complement to more text-heavy books on Steve Jobs like Walter Isaacson’s biography.
His saga is the entrepreneurial creation myth writ large: Steve Jobs cofounded Apple in his parents’ garage in 1976, was ousted in 1985, returned to rescue it from near bankruptcy in 1997, and by the time he died, in October 2011, had built it into the world’s most valuable company. Along the way he helped to transform seven industries: personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, retail stores, and digital publishing. He thus belongs in the pantheon of America’s great innovators, along with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Walt Disney. None of these men was a saint, but long after their personalities are forgotten, history will remember how they applied imagination to technology and business.
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“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
In the months since my biography of Jobs came out, countless commentators have tried to draw management lessons from it. Some of those readers have been insightful, but I think that many of them (especially those with no experience in entrepreneurship) fixate too much on the rough edges of his personality. The essence of Jobs, I think, is that his personality was integral to his way of doing business. He acted as if the normal rules didn’t apply to him, and the passion, intensity, and extreme emotionalism he brought to everyday life were things he also poured into the products he made. His petulance and impatience were part and parcel of his perfectionism.
One of the last times I saw him, after I had finished writing most of the book, I asked him again about his tendency to be rough on people. “Look at the results,” he replied. “These are all smart people I work with, and any of them could get a top job at another place if they were truly feeling brutalized. But they don’t.” Then he paused for a few moments and said, almost wistfully, “And we got some amazing things done.” Indeed, he and Apple had had a string of hits over the past dozen years that was greater than that of any other innovative company in modern times: iMac, iPod, iPod nano, iTunes Store, Apple Stores, MacBook, iPhone, iPad, App Store, OS X Lion—not to mention every Pixar film. And as he battled his final illness, Jobs was surrounded by an intensely loyal cadre of colleagues who had been inspired by him for years and a very loving wife, sister, and four children.
So I think the real lessons from Steve Jobs have to be drawn from looking at what he actually accomplished. I once asked him what he thought was his most important creation, thinking he would answer the iPad or the Macintosh. Instead he said it was Apple the company. Making an enduring company, he said, was both far harder and more important than making a great product. How did he do it? Business schools will be studying that question a century from now. Here are what I consider the keys to his success.
Focus
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.”
After he righted the company, Jobs began taking his “top 100” people on a retreat each year. On the last day, he would stand in front of a whiteboard (he loved whiteboards, because they gave him complete control of a situation and they engendered focus) and ask, “What are the 10 things we should be doing next?” People would fight to get their suggestions on the list. Jobs would write them down—and then cross off the ones he decreed dumb. After much jockeying, the group would come up with a list of 10. Then Jobs would slash the bottom seven and announce, “We can only do three.”
Focus was ingrained in Jobs’s personality and had been honed by his Zen training. He relentlessly filtered out what he considered distractions. Colleagues and family members would at times be exasperated as they tried to get him to deal with issues—a legal problem, a medical diagnosis—they considered important. But he would give a cold stare and refuse to shift his laserlike focus until he was ready.
Near the end of his life, Jobs was visited at home by Larry Page, who was about to resume control of Google, the company he had cofounded. Even though their companies were feuding, Jobs was willing to give some advice. “The main thing I stressed was focus,” he recalled. Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up, he told Page. “It’s now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.” Page followed the advice. In January 2012 he told employees to focus on just a few priorities, such as Android and Google+, and to make them “beautiful,” the way Jobs would have done.
Simplify
Jobs’s Zenlike ability to focus was accompanied by the related instinct to simplify things by zeroing in on their essence and eliminating unnecessary components. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” declared Apple’s first marketing brochure. To see what that means, compare any Apple software with, say, Microsoft Word, which keeps getting uglier and more cluttered with nonintuitive navigational ribbons and intrusive features. It is a reminder of the glory of Apple’s quest for simplicity.
Jobs learned to admire simplicity when he was working the night shift at Atari as a college dropout. Atari’s games came with no manual and needed to be uncomplicated enough that a stoned freshman could figure them out. The only instructions for its Star Trek game were: “1. Insert quarter. 2. Avoid Klingons.” His love of simplicity in design was refined at design conferences he attended at the Aspen Institute in the late 1970s on a campus built in the Bauhaus style, which emphasized clean lines and functional design devoid of frills or distractions.
When Jobs visited Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center and saw the plans for a computer that had a graphical user interface and a mouse, he set about making the design both more intuitive (his team enabled the user to drag and drop documents and folders on a virtual desktop) and simpler. For example, the Xerox mouse had three buttons and cost $300; Jobs went to a local industrial design firm and told one of its founders, Dean Hovey, that he wanted a simple, single-button model that cost $15. Hovey complied.
Jobs aimed for the simplicity that comes from conquering, rather than merely ignoring, complexity. Achieving this depth of simplicity, he realized, would produce a machine that felt as if it deferred to users in a friendly way, rather than challenging them. “It takes a lot of hard work,” he said, “to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions.”
In Jony Ive, Apple’s industrial designer, Jobs met his soul mate in the quest for deep rather than superficial simplicity. They knew that simplicity is not merely a minimalist style or the removal of clutter. In order to eliminate screws, buttons, or excess navigational screens, it was necessary to understand profoundly the role each element played. “To be truly simple, you have to go really deep,” Ive explained. “For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it’s manufactured.”
During the design of the iPod interface, Jobs tried at every meeting to find ways to cut clutter. He insisted on being able to get to whatever he wanted in three clicks. One navigation screen, for example, asked users whether they wanted to search by song, album, or artist. “Why do we need that screen?” Jobs demanded. The designers realized they didn’t. “There would be times when we’d rack our brains on a user interface problem, and he would go, ‘Did you think of this?’” says Tony Fadell, who led the iPod team. “And then we’d all go, ‘Holy shit.’ He’d redefine the problem or approach, and our little problem would go away.” At one point Jobs made the simplest of all suggestions: Let’s get rid of the on/off button. At first the team members were taken aback, but then they realized the button was unnecessary. The device would gradually power down if it wasn’t being used and would spring to life when reengaged.
Likewise, when Jobs was shown a cluttered set of proposed navigation screens for iDVD, which allowed users to burn video onto a disk, he jumped up and drew a simple rectangle on a whiteboard. “Here’s the new application,” he said. “It’s got one window. You drag your video into the window. Then you click the button that says ‘Burn.’ That’s it. That’s what we’re going to make.”
In looking for industries or categories ripe for disruption, Jobs always asked who was making products more complicated than they should be. In 2001 portable music players and ways to acquire songs online fit that description, leading to the iPod and the iTunes Store. Mobile phones were next. Jobs would grab a phone at a meeting and rant (correctly) that nobody could possibly figure out how to navigate half the features, including the address book. At the end of his career he was setting his sights on the television industry, which had made it almost impossible for people to click on a simple device to watch what they wanted when they wanted.
Take Responsibility End to End
Jobs knew that the best way to achieve simplicity was to make sure that hardware, software, and peripheral devices were seamlessly integrated. An Apple ecosystem—an iPod connected to a Mac with iTunes software, for example—allowed devices to be simpler, syncing to be smoother, and glitches to be rarer. The more complex tasks, such as making new playlists, could be done on the computer, allowing the iPod to have fewer functions and buttons.
Jobs and Apple took end-to-end responsibility for the user experience—something too few companies do. From the performance of the ARM microprocessor in the iPhone to the act of buying that phone in an Apple Store, every aspect of the customer experience was tightly linked together. Both Microsoft in the 1980s and Google in the past few years have taken a more open approach that allows their operating systems and software to be used by various hardware manufacturers. That has sometimes proved the better business model. But Jobs fervently believed that it was a recipe for (to use his technical term) crappier products. “People are busy,” he said. “They have other things to do than think about how to integrate their computers and devices.”
Being in the Apple ecosystem could be as sublime as walking in one of the Zen gardens of Kyoto that Jobs loved.
Part of Jobs’s compulsion to take responsibility for what he called “the whole widget” stemmed from his personality, which was very controlling. But it was also driven by his passion for perfection and making elegant products. He got hives, or worse, when contemplating the use of great Apple software on another company’s uninspired hardware, and he was equally allergic to the thought that unapproved apps or content might pollute the perfection of an Apple device. It was an approach that did not always maximize short-term profits, but in a world filled with junky devices, inscrutable error messages, and annoying interfaces, it led to astonishing products marked by delightful user experiences. Being in the Apple ecosystem could be as sublime as walking in one of the Zen gardens of Kyoto that Jobs loved, and neither experience was created by worshipping at the altar of openness or by letting a thousand flowers bloom. Sometimes it’s nice to be in the hands of a control freak.
When Behind, Leapfrog
The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first. It also knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind. That happened when Jobs built the original iMac. He focused on making it useful for managing a user’s photos and videos, but it was left behind when dealing with music. People with PCs were downloading and swapping music and then ripping and burning their own CDs. The iMac’s slot drive couldn’t burn CDs. “I felt like a dope,” he said. “I thought we had missed it.”
But instead of merely catching up by upgrading the iMac’s CD drive, he decided to create an integrated system that would transform the music industry. The result was the combination of iTunes, the iTunes Store, and the iPod, which allowed users to buy, share, manage, store, and play music better than they could with any other devices.
After the iPod became a huge success, Jobs spent little time relishing it. Instead he began to worry about what might endanger it. One possibility was that mobile phone makers would start adding music players to their handsets. So he cannibalized iPod sales by creating the iPhone. “If we don’t cannibalize ourselves, someone else will,” he said.
Put Products Before Profits
When Jobs and his small team designed the original Macintosh, in the early 1980s, his injunction was to make it “insanely great.” He never spoke of profit maximization or cost trade-offs. “Don’t worry about price, just specify the computer’s abilities,” he told the original team leader. At his first retreat with the Macintosh team, he began by writing a maxim on his whiteboard: “Don’t compromise.” The machine that resulted cost too much and led to Jobs’s ouster from Apple. But the Macintosh also “put a dent in the universe,” as he said, by accelerating the home computer revolution. And in the long run he got the balance right: Focus on making the product great and the profits will follow.
John Sculley, who ran Apple from 1983 to 1993, was a marketing and sales executive from Pepsi. He focused more on profit maximization than on product design after Jobs left, and Apple gradually declined. “I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies,” Jobs told me: They make some great products, but then the sales and marketing people take over the company, because they are the ones who can juice up profits. “When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off. It happened at Apple when Sculley came in, which was my fault, and it happened when Ballmer took over at Microsoft.”
When Jobs returned, he shifted Apple’s focus back to making innovative products: the sprightly iMac, the PowerBook, and then the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. As he explained, “My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything—the people you hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings.”
Genius By Design
Don’t Be a Slave To Focus Groups
When Jobs took his original Macintosh team on its first retreat, one member asked whether they should do some market research to see what customers wanted. “No,” Jobs replied, “because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.” He invoked Henry Ford’s line “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’”
Caring deeply about what customers want is much different from continually asking them what they want; it requires intuition and instinct about desires that have not yet formed. “Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page,” Jobs explained. Instead of relying on market research, he honed his version of empathy—an intimate intuition about the desires of his customers. He developed his appreciation for intuition—feelings that are based on accumulated experiential wisdom—while he was studying Buddhism in India as a college dropout. “The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do; they use their intuition instead,” he recalled. “Intuition is a very powerful thing—more powerful than intellect, in my opinion.”
Sometimes that meant that Jobs used a one-person focus group: himself. He made products that he and his friends wanted. For example, there were many portable music players around in 2000, but Jobs felt they were all lame, and as a music fanatic he wanted a simple device that would allow him to carry a thousand songs in his pocket. “We made the iPod for ourselves,” he said, “and when you’re doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you’re not going to cheese out.”
Bend Reality
Jobs’s (in)famous ability to push people to do the impossible was dubbed by colleagues his Reality Distortion Field, after an episode of Star Trek in which aliens create a convincing alternative reality through sheer mental force. An early example was when Jobs was on the night shift at Atari and pushed Steve Wozniak to create a game called Breakout. Woz said it would take months, but Jobs stared at him and insisted he could do it in four days. Woz knew that was impossible, but he ended up doing it.
Jobs’s (in)famous ability to push people to do the impossible was dubbed by colleagues his Reality Distortion Field, after an episode of Star Trek.
Those who did not know Jobs interpreted the Reality Distortion Field as a euphemism for bullying and lying. But those who worked with him admitted that the trait, infuriating as it might be, led them to perform extraordinary feats. Because Jobs felt that life’s ordinary rules didn’t apply to him, he could inspire his team to change the course of computer history with a small fraction of the resources that Xerox or IBM had. “It was a self-fulfilling distortion,” recalls Debi Coleman, a member of the original Mac team who won an award one year for being the employee who best stood up to Jobs. “You did the impossible because you didn’t realize it was impossible.”
One day Jobs marched into the cubicle of Larry Kenyon, the engineer who was working on the Macintosh operating system, and complained that it was taking too long to boot up. Kenyon started to explain why reducing the boot-up time wasn’t possible, but Jobs cut him off. “If it would save a person’s life, could you find a way to shave 10 seconds off the boot time?” he asked. Kenyon allowed that he probably could. Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if five million people were using the Mac and it took 10 seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to 300 million or so hours a year—the equivalent of at least 100 lifetimes a year. After a few weeks Kenyon had the machine booting up 28 seconds faster.
When Jobs was designing the iPhone, he decided that he wanted its face to be a tough, scratchproof glass, rather than plastic. He met with Wendell Weeks, the CEO of Corning, who told him that Corning had developed a chemical exchange process in the 1960s that led to what it dubbed “Gorilla glass.” Jobs replied that he wanted a major shipment of Gorilla glass in six months. Weeks said that Corning was not making the glass and didn’t have that capacity. “Don’t be afraid,” Jobs replied. This stunned Weeks, who was unfamiliar with Jobs’s Reality Distortion Field. He tried to explain that a false sense of confidence would not overcome engineering challenges, but Jobs had repeatedly shown that he didn’t accept that premise. He stared unblinking at Weeks. “Yes, you can do it,” he said. “Get your mind around it. You can do it.” Weeks recalls that he shook his head in astonishment and then called the managers of Corning’s facility in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, which had been making LCD displays, and told them to convert immediately to making Gorilla glass full-time. “We did it in under six months,” he says. “We put our best scientists and engineers on it, and we just made it work.” As a result, every piece of glass on an iPhone or an iPad is made in America by Corning.
Impute
Jobs’s early mentor Mike Markkula wrote him a memo in 1979 that urged three principles. The first two were “empathy” and “focus.” The third was an awkward word, “impute,” but it became one of Jobs’s key doctrines. He knew that people form an opinion about a product or a company on the basis of how it is presented and packaged. “Mike taught me that people do judge a book by its cover,” he told me.
When he was getting ready to ship the Macintosh in 1984, he obsessed over the colors and design of the box. Similarly, he personally spent time designing and redesigning the jewellike boxes that cradle the iPod and the iPhone and listed himself on the patents for them. He and Ive believed that unpacking was a ritual like theater and heralded the glory of the product. “When you open the box of an iPhone or iPad, we want that tactile experience to set the tone for how you perceive the product,” Jobs said.
Sometimes Jobs used the design of a machine to “impute” a signal rather than to be merely functional. For example, when he was creating the new and playful iMac, after his return to Apple, he was shown a design by Ive that had a little recessed handle nestled in the top. It was more semiotic than useful. This was a desktop computer. Not many people were really going to carry it around. But Jobs and Ive realized that a lot of people were still intimidated by computers. If it had a handle, the new machine would seem friendly, deferential, and at one’s service. The handle signaled permission to touch the iMac. The manufacturing team was opposed to the extra cost, but Jobs simply announced, “No, we’re doing this.” He didn’t even try to explain.
Push for Perfection
During the development of almost every product he ever created, Jobs at a certain point “hit the pause button” and went back to the drawing board because he felt it wasn’t perfect. That happened even with the movie Toy Story. After Jeff Katzenberg and the team at Disney, which had bought the rights to the movie, pushed the Pixar team to make it edgier and darker, Jobs and the director, John Lasseter, finally stopped production and rewrote the story to make it friendlier. When he was about to launch Apple Stores, he and his store guru, Ron Johnson, suddenly decided to delay everything a few months so that the stores’ layouts could be reorganized around activities and not just product categories.
The same was true for the iPhone. The initial design had the glass screen set into an aluminum case. One Monday morning Jobs went over to see Ive. “I didn’t sleep last night,” he said, “because I realized that I just don’t love it.” Ive, to his dismay, instantly saw that Jobs was right. “I remember feeling absolutely embarrassed that he had to make the observation,” he says. The problem was that the iPhone should have been all about the display, but in its current design the case competed with the display instead of getting out of the way. The whole device felt too masculine, task-driven, efficient. “Guys, you’ve killed yourselves over this design for the last nine months, but we’re going to change it,” Jobs told Ive’s team. “We’re all going to have to work nights and weekends, and if you want, we can hand out some guns so you can kill us now.” Instead of balking, the team agreed. “It was one of my proudest moments at Apple,” Jobs recalled.
A similar thing happened as Jobs and Ive were finishing the iPad. At one point Jobs looked at the model and felt slightly dissatisfied. It didn’t seem casual and friendly enough to scoop up and whisk away. They needed to signal that you could grab it with one hand, on impulse. They decided that the bottom edge should be slightly rounded, so that a user would feel comfortable just snatching it up rather than lifting it carefully. That meant engineering had to design the necessary connection ports and buttons in a thin, simple lip that sloped away gently underneath. Jobs delayed the product until the change could be made.
Jobs’s perfectionism extended even to the parts unseen. As a young boy, he had helped his father build a fence around their backyard, and he was told they had to use just as much care on the back of the fence as on the front. “Nobody will ever know,” Steve said. His father replied, “But you will know.” A true craftsman uses a good piece of wood even for the back of a cabinet against the wall, his father explained, and they should do the same for the back of the fence. It was the mark of an artist to have such a passion for perfection. In overseeing the Apple II and the Macintosh, Jobs applied this lesson to the circuit board inside the machine. In both instances he sent the engineers back to make the chips line up neatly so the board would look nice. This seemed particularly odd to the engineers of the Macintosh, because Jobs had decreed that the machine be tightly sealed. “Nobody is going to see the PC board,” one of them protested. Jobs reacted as his father had: “I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it’s inside the box. A great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody’s going to see it.” They were true artists, he said, and should act that way. And once the board was redesigned, he had the engineers and other members of the Macintosh team sign their names so that they could be engraved inside the case. “Real artists sign their work,” he said.
Tolerate Only “A” Players
Jobs was famously impatient, petulant, and tough with the people around him. But his treatment of people, though not laudable, emanated from his passion for perfection and his desire to work with only the best. It was his way of preventing what he called “the bozo explosion,” in which managers are so polite that mediocre people feel comfortable sticking around. “I don’t think I run roughshod over people,” he said, “but if something sucks, I tell people to their face. It’s my job to be honest.” When I pressed him on whether he could have gotten the same results while being nicer, he said perhaps so. “But it’s not who I am,” he said. “Maybe there’s a better way—a gentlemen’s club where we all wear ties and speak in this Brahmin language and velvet code words—but I don’t know that way, because I am middle-class from California.”
Agile software development company noida news. Was all his stormy and abusive behavior necessary? Probably not. There were other ways he could have motivated his team. “Steve’s contributions could have been made without so many stories about him terrorizing folks,” Apple’s cofounder, Wozniak, said. “I like being more patient and not having so many conflicts. I think a company can be a good family.” But then he added something that is undeniably true: “If the Macintosh project had been run my way, things probably would have been a mess.”
It’s important to appreciate that Jobs’s rudeness and roughness were accompanied by an ability to be inspirational. He infused Apple employees with an abiding passion to create groundbreaking products and a belief that they could accomplish what seemed impossible. And we have to judge him by the outcome. Jobs had a close-knit family, and so it was at Apple: His top players tended to stick around longer and be more loyal than those at other companies, including ones led by bosses who were kinder and gentler. CEOs who study Jobs and decide to emulate his roughness without understanding his ability to generate loyalty make a dangerous mistake.
“I’ve learned over the years that when you have really good people, you don’t have to baby them,” Jobs told me. “By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things. Ask any member of that Mac team. They will tell you it was worth the pain.” Most of them do. “He would shout at a meeting, ‘You asshole, you never do anything right,’” Debi Coleman recalls. “Yet I consider myself the absolute luckiest person in the world to have worked with him.”
Engage Face-to-Face
Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its potential to be isolating, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings. “There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by e-mail and iChat,” he told me. “That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.”
He had the Pixar building designed to promote unplanned encounters and collaborations. “If a building doesn’t encourage that, you’ll lose a lot of innovation and the magic that’s sparked by serendipity,” he said. “So we designed the building to make people get out of their offices and mingle in the central atrium with people they might not otherwise see.” The front doors and main stairs and corridors all led to the atrium; the café and the mailboxes were there; the conference rooms had windows that looked out onto it; and the 600-seat theater and two smaller screening rooms all spilled into it. “Steve’s theory worked from day one,” Lasseter recalls. “I kept running into people I hadn’t seen for months. I’ve never seen a building that promoted collaboration and creativity as well as this one.”
https://yellowhall848.weebly.com/quruli-tanz-walser-rarest.html. Jobs hated formal presentations, but he loved freewheeling face-to-face meetings. He gathered his executive team every week to kick around ideas without a formal agenda, and he spent every Wednesday afternoon doing the same with his marketing and advertising team. Slide shows were banned. “I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking,” Jobs recalled. “People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”
Know Both the Big Picture and the Details
Jobs’s passion was applied to issues both large and minuscule. Some CEOs are great at vision; others are managers who know that God is in the details. Jobs was both. Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes says that one of Jobs’s salient traits was his ability and desire to envision overarching strategy while also focusing on the tiniest aspects of design. For example, in 2000 he came up with the grand vision that the personal computer should become a “digital hub” for managing all of a user’s music, videos, photos, and content, and thus got Apple into the personal-device business with the iPod and then the iPad. In 2010 he came up with the successor strategy—the “hub” would move to the cloud—and Apple began building a huge server farm so that all a user’s content could be uploaded and then seamlessly synced to other personal devices. But even as he was laying out these grand visions, he was fretting over the shape and color of the screws inside the iMac.
Combine the Humanities with the Sciences
“I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics,” Jobs told me on the day he decided to cooperate on a biography. “Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.” It was as if he was describing the theme of his life, and the more I studied him, the more I realized that this was, indeed, the essence of his tale.
No one else in our era could better firewire together poetry and processors in a way that jolted innovation.
He connected the humanities to the sciences, creativity to technology, arts to engineering. There were greater technologists (Wozniak, Gates), and certainly better designers and artists. But no one else in our era could better firewire together poetry and processors in a way that jolted innovation. And he did it with an intuitive feel for business strategy. At almost every product launch over the past decade, Jobs ended with a slide that showed a sign at the intersection of Liberal Arts and Technology Streets.
The creativity that can occur when a feel for both the humanities and the sciences exists in one strong personality was what most interested me in my biographies of Franklin and Einstein, and I believe that it will be a key to building innovative economies in the 21st century. It is the essence of applied imagination, and it’s why both the humanities and the sciences are critical for any society that is to have a creative edge in the future.
Steve Jobs Genius By Design Pdf Online
Even when he was dying, Jobs set his sights on disrupting more industries. He had a vision for turning textbooks into artistic creations that anyone with a Mac could fashion and craft—something that Apple announced in January 2012. He also dreamed of producing magical tools for digital photography and ways to make television simple and personal. Those, no doubt, will come as well. And even though he will not be around to see them to fruition, his rules for success helped him build a company that not only will create these and other disruptive products, but will stand at the intersection of creativity and technology as long as Jobs’s DNA persists at its core.
Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish
Steve Jobs was a product of the two great social movements that emanated from the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s. The first was the counterculture of hippies and antiwar activists, which was marked by psychedelic drugs, rock music, and antiauthoritarianism. The second was the high-tech and hacker culture of Silicon Valley, filled with engineers, geeks, wireheads, phreakers, cyberpunks, hobbyists, and garage entrepreneurs. Overlying both were various paths to personal enlightenment—Zen and Hinduism, meditation and yoga, primal scream therapy and sensory deprivation, Esalen and est.
An admixture of these cultures was found in publications such as Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog. On its first cover was the famous picture of Earth taken from space, and its subtitle was “access to tools.” The underlying philosophy was that technology could be our friend. Jobs—who became a hippie, a rebel, a spiritual seeker, a phone phreaker, and an electronic hobbyist all wrapped into one—was a fan. He was particularly taken by the final issue, which came out in 1971, when he was still in high school. He took it with him to college and then to the apple farm commune where he lived after dropping out. He later recalled: “On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: ‘Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.’” Jobs stayed hungry and foolish throughout his career by making sure that the business and engineering aspect of his personality was always complemented by a hippie nonconformist side from his days as an artistic, acid-dropping, enlightenment-seeking rebel. In every aspect of his life—the women he dated, the way he dealt with his cancer diagnosis, the way he ran his business—his behavior reflected the contradictions, confluence, and eventual synthesis of all these varying strands.
Even as Apple became corporate, Jobs asserted his rebel and counterculture streak in its ads, as if to proclaim that he was still a hacker and a hippie at heart. The famous “1984” ad showed a renegade woman outrunning the thought police to sling a sledgehammer at the screen of an Orwellian Big Brother. And when he returned to Apple, Jobs helped write the text for the “Think Different” ads: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes…” If there was any doubt that, consciously or not, he was describing himself, he dispelled it with the last lines: “While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
A version of this article appeared in the April 2012 issue of Harvard Business Review.
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Preview — Steve Jobs by Jason Quinn
(Campfire Graphic Novels)
iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, iPad, iCon! Steve Jobs and his inventions changed the world we live in. His extraordinary life story is brimming with passion, innovation and creative genius. Share his triumphs and failures, as we journey from his birth and his adoption, through the advent of the computer age and on into the digital age. Forced out of the company he created, hi..more
Published September 4th 2012 by Campfire (first published July 3rd 2012)
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Great Graphic Novels 2013 22 books — 16 voters
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Feb 17, 2014Moe rated it it was amazing
Steve Jobs. When we hear this famous name, our mind triggers many pictures at once. I used to see images like the apple logo, iPad, iPhone, etc. After reading this book, I look at Jobs in a different perspective. I see him as a normal, plain person with a short temper. He really isn't different than anyone else. In fact, he is as normal as one can get in today's society. As you read this you may think: No, he was a genius, he changed the world. Yes he did. And that makes him the most normal pers..more
Oct 02, 2015Ian Tymms rated it really liked it Shelves: picture-books, middle-school-collections, my-classroom-library
A compelling portrait of a complex and driven man. The Graphic Novel medium lends itself well to a biography about design. Lots to learn from this book - particularly useful when exploring character and values.
Nov 26, 2012Lisa rated it liked it
I enjoyed this waaay more than I thought I was going to. I didn't know much about Steve Jobs, but I learned how he was an asshole, but he did innovative things in a complete and total way.
Apr 17, 2017Solomon Richards rated it it was amazing
I read this book with no knowledge about what all suffering he passed throughout his entire life. This book felt so great
It humanizes the technology giant and that's what I liked the most about this book. There is a balance to the point where you see his flaws as well. It is really nicely illustrated and is a 1-hour read.
Steve Jobs: Genius by Design. by Jason Quinn
Steve Jobs was an inspirational human being. He changed the way we work, play, and use technology. This graphic novel was based on a true story of his challenging life. Steve was adopted at birth as his parents could not afford to take care of him, dropped out of college, came up with amazing ideas for our future to come, and changed the world. In this graphic novel, Steve Jobs was portrayed as a hard worker and a very clever one too. The thing about S..more
Steve Jobs was an inspirational human being. He changed the way we work, play, and use technology. This graphic novel was based on a true story of his challenging life. Steve was adopted at birth as his parents could not afford to take care of him, dropped out of college, came up with amazing ideas for our future to come, and changed the world. In this graphic novel, Steve Jobs was portrayed as a hard worker and a very clever one too. The thing about S..more
• Elby Wang
• Quinn, J., & Tayal, A. (2012). Steve Jobs: Genius by design. New Delhi: Campfire.
• Genre: Biography
• Format: print, graphic novel
• Selection process: Goodreads
• Review:
The preface page with all the significantly relevant persons in Apple in their own soliloquy clearly shows each of their position in the Apple and the relationship with Steve. The amazing introduction page is launched with Steve Jobs’ sitting in a cloud with the most famous saying: three apples have changed the..more
• Quinn, J., & Tayal, A. (2012). Steve Jobs: Genius by design. New Delhi: Campfire.
• Genre: Biography
• Format: print, graphic novel
• Selection process: Goodreads
• Review:
The preface page with all the significantly relevant persons in Apple in their own soliloquy clearly shows each of their position in the Apple and the relationship with Steve. The amazing introduction page is launched with Steve Jobs’ sitting in a cloud with the most famous saying: three apples have changed the..more
Dec 29, 2015Shalini Sharma rated it really liked it
Nicely written. My first comic book and I loved it..
Very interesting man. Very interesting book. Great quick read :-)
Steve Jobs, an innovator, a creator, and a legend. Those are the first words that crossed my mind after I finished reading this graphic novel biography on the one and only Steve Jobs.
This compelling coming of age graphic novel by Jason Quinn and Amit Tayal tells the underrated story of Steve Jobs, one of the most innovative people in history. The overwhelming response and reviews to this novel was one of the reasons I decided to pick it up in the first place, and I do not regret my decision at a..more
This compelling coming of age graphic novel by Jason Quinn and Amit Tayal tells the underrated story of Steve Jobs, one of the most innovative people in history. The overwhelming response and reviews to this novel was one of the reasons I decided to pick it up in the first place, and I do not regret my decision at a..more
Sep 28, 2017Brendan rated it really liked it
Quick-paced, easy read. I learned a lot about him, but it could have explained better why he gets the credit when it seems other people did most of the work. Also, there could have been more clarification of Apple's place in the computer world. Its chief competitors are nearly ignored.
Oct 06, 2018Sireesha Avvari rated it it was amazing
Loved the concise, colorful and graphic depiction of the great man.
Apr 17, 2018Lionheart rated it it was amazing
Rated 5 stars!
Ages 13+
Ages 13+
Aug 28, 2019Prashant Badiger rated it it was amazing
The inspiring story of the man who changed the face of technology - Steve Jobs
I didn't really know about steve jobs much, but by reading this book, I knew about him a lot and I agree with he is the great designer. I pretty much like this book
I thought it was an interesting book to read about how apple started and see what Steve jobs went through.
Jun 10, 2013Laura (booksnob) rated it it was amazing
Steve Jobs was adopted in 1955 by Paul and Clara Jobs. He grew up in California an inquisitive child, full of energy and willfulness. He was stubborn and knew what he wanted out of life and let no one stop him. Steve had a lot of creative energy and friends and family who believed in his ideas. He could have taken many wrongs turns and ended up a penniless hippie, but his strong will to persevere won out.
Steve's friend, Woz, created the first personal computer and Steve was the brains behind the..more
Steve's friend, Woz, created the first personal computer and Steve was the brains behind the..more
Mar 05, 2017Abhijeet Jain rated it really liked it
A nice graphic novel depicting life & times of greatest businessman the world ever saw. (yes, you can debate that he was an inventor , but for me , or what atleast I know , he was more of a businessman than an innovator , no doubt he took the electronic market heads on by his innovative ideas :) )
As a former Apple employee, and complete Apple geek I was super excited to read this book. I had read the Isaacson book when it first came out..and I must admit, it was a bit of a challenge-fascinating one though. What I liked about this book (other than the design) was that it was approachable for both young and old. I adore how graphic novels bring certain stories to life, and I felt that this story was one well suited for a graphic novel. I also appreciate that the authors took on the task o..more
Jun 12, 2014Nick rated it liked it
A succinct overview of the career, and to some extent the life of Steve Jobs. It certainly doesn't delve deep into what made him tick, his personal life, the fate of the characters around him etc., but it covers all of what most people would care or need to know about Steve Jobs in 102 well-illustrated pages. Some sections were difficult to swallow, such as the wee Jobs telling the priest to stuff it at a very young age..the dramatic visionary off to a great start in his quest to coolify and pl..more
Jason Quinn's graphic autobiography based on Steve Jobs life is a very great novel as it shows how Steve Jobs became the one and only infamous genius that took the world of electronics by storm. The book begins by showing the man and woman that gave Mr. Jobs away and into the hands of a sweet family that receives its income from a father who works as a mechanic. Steve immediately became interested in his new fathers job and started becoming a mechanic of his own by building radios. By the time J..more
May 16, 2013Andrea Mullarkey rated it it was ok
A review of this book said that it was 'illustrated minimally and elegantly,' two things I like in a graphic novel artwork. And since I know very little about Steve Jobs and have no intention of reading a big biography of him, I figured why not learn a little more in this perfectly painless way. That's the idea behind the graphic classics series of books isn't it..learn something you don't really care about by picking a more engaging format. Well, my first experiment in this tells me that it wa..more
Dec 03, 2013Emily rated it really liked it
Steve Jobs: Genius by Design is a short graphic novel written by Jason Quinn depicting the life story of Steve Jobs. This graphic novel definitely altered my opinion on Steve Jobs. Before reading this, I always believed Steve Jobs was an kind, civilized, intelligent man. However, it turns out he definitely wasn't the nicest guy out there. He was often crowned as a 'jerk' by those he worked with and many people actually quit the Apple company because of his aggression. All in all, Jobs was a perf..more
Nov 18, 2014Becky B rated it liked it Shelves: graphic-novels, ya-nonfiction, juvenile-non-fiction, biography
This is a graphic novel biography of computer guru Steve Jobs. The book gives an overview of his entire life, and feels like it does a respectable job in the relatively brief number of pages.
I've never read a biography of Jobs before, so I really can't say how well the authors did. It felt like they didn't skip anything major though. They also didn't portray Jobs through rose-colored glasses. He was not always a pleasant person to be around evidently, and the authors convey that, while at the sa..more
I've never read a biography of Jobs before, so I really can't say how well the authors did. It felt like they didn't skip anything major though. They also didn't portray Jobs through rose-colored glasses. He was not always a pleasant person to be around evidently, and the authors convey that, while at the sa..more
Steve Jobs Genius Quote
Steve Jobs: Genius by Design by Jason Quinn is a 104-page graphic biography about Steve Jobs. The graphic novel tells about Steve's life, from his adoption into Paul and Clara Job's family until his retirement from Apple and his death. It talks about his early life, growing up a smart but rebellious kid. When he didn't want to go to school anymore, he went to a small tech community, where he learned a lot about computers and met a new friend, Steve Wozniak. It tells about everything Apple went t..more
I found this at my local library and picked it up based upon its cover. I love Apple products but never knew much about Steve Jobs outside of a 60 Minutes profile that aired shortly after his death. This book is excellent for many reasons. First, the illustrations are clean, simple, and a joy to look at. Second, the writing is lean and riveting. The authors give a visual overview of Jobs's amazing life, and they aren't afraid to point out the man's interpersonal faults. Having said that, this bo..more
May 04, 2013Charlos rated it really liked it
While not an Apple fanboy by any means, I finally got around to reading this, guilted into doing so by the fact that I had ordered it for our library.
The layout is evocative of Apple aesthetics, artwork is simple and clean, and the cover layout is clever enough to draw in its intended audience.
The story content is well produced as well, giving me enough information to satisfy without bogging down the visual medium. I learned many new things about Jobs and Apple, without feeling burdened by the i..more
The layout is evocative of Apple aesthetics, artwork is simple and clean, and the cover layout is clever enough to draw in its intended audience.
The story content is well produced as well, giving me enough information to satisfy without bogging down the visual medium. I learned many new things about Jobs and Apple, without feeling burdened by the i..more
Nov 15, 2012Michael rated it it was ok
The history of Apple is pretty interesting, but Steve sure comes off as boring and unlikable. He's making a cruel or arrogant comment in pretty much every panel -- behavior that is jarringly contradictory to the narration text, which is practically hagiography. This bizarre disconnect actually made the book more interesting, but I don't see how it could possibly have been intentional (why would it have been?!)
the art was fairly bland and didn't gel at all with the design of the pages/bubbles/con..more
Feb 01, 2013Anish Antony rated it it was amazingthe art was fairly bland and didn't gel at all with the design of the pages/bubbles/con..more
Shelves: autobiography, motivational, small-books
Completed the book in 2 hours. An awesome book. I haven't read much biographies. It is the first time I am reading the life of a legend in graphic style. Steve Jobs really mesmerizes me with his creativity, innovative ideas and entrepreneurial skills.
If you want to understand Steve Jobs at a glance, this book is your must pick. Really loved reading it.
A worthy collection for your library. I would like to give 5 stars because I completed the book in a single run. Once finished, I felt I grasp th..more
If you want to understand Steve Jobs at a glance, this book is your must pick. Really loved reading it.
A worthy collection for your library. I would like to give 5 stars because I completed the book in a single run. Once finished, I felt I grasp th..more
This graphic novel was a great way to learn more about the man behind the iPhone. While it really highlighted some of the less appealing aspects of Steve Jobs' personality, I think it also provides a great example of how to get knocked down and come back strong. Personally, I always assumed Jobs' career was a straight line to the top and was surprised to read that this wasn't the case at all.
My only gripe.. I feel like the 'look' of the art should have been more streamlined to carry on the tru..more
My only gripe.. I feel like the 'look' of the art should have been more streamlined to carry on the tru..more
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Jason Quinn is the award winning author of Campfire's Steve Jobs: Genius by Design. He learned to read with Marvel Comics and was devastated when his teacher told him Spider-Man did not exist. He has worked in publishing for the last twenty years as an editor and writer, working on everything from Spider-Man toBarbie. He moved to India in 2012 and currently works as Campfire's Creative Content Hea..more
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