One More Great Lesson From Steve Jobs: Innovation Begins As A Social Movement

Why is the loss of one CEO the cause for universal mourning? Because he symbolized the kind of entrepreneurial capitalism that generates the fun that comes with creating the new.


Hardly anything unites Americans anymore--except for the death of Steve Jobs. His passing and the deep mourning for him across political, generational, and cultural divides remind us that we all can agree on one thing--that it is Jobs’s kind of capitalism, entrepreneurial capitalism, that we love, because it generates the incredible fun that comes with creating the new. His death reminds us that the big, disruptive innovations almost always come from entrepreneurs who embody their following and enable the dreams and talents that they have inside and haven’t yet expressed. It reminds us that all net new job growth in the U.S. comes from startups and businesses five years old or younger that begin in garages, college dorm rooms, or Starbucks cafés.


Above all, Jobs’s passing reminds us that entrepreneurial capitalism is not simply some rational economic market phenomenon but a social movement that binds groups of people together in communities of like interests and deep emotions. Think of the important innovations of our day that are changing our lives--Facebook, Twitter, Zipcar, YouTube, eBay, Amazon, iTunes/iPod/iPhone/iPad--and you find new social communities interacting on new platforms. Add them all up and you see entrepreneurial capitalism itself as a social movement that we join, participate in, and help create ourselves.





Contrast that to the crony capitalism that Occupy Wall Street is protesting against. This kind of capitalism has Wall Street no longer allocating capital to businesses so they can grow--which is its central economic and social function. With crony capitalism, banks and hedge funds trade for their own account--often with government-guaranteed savings and with government safety nets if they fail. With crony capitalism, big businesses, with a handful of exceptions, stop innovating and no longer generate jobs, income, or taxes for America. What crony capitalists have come to excel at is to game the political, regulatory, and tax system to favor their special interests. This anger against crony capitalism crosses the political spectrum.

Both Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin, on the right, and Occupy Wall Street protesters, on the left, specifically decry crony capitalism and celebrate entrepreneurial capitalism. Nearly all of my socially liberal design students at Parsons support Occupy Wall Street and, at the same time, want to launch their own startup businesses. And that is where the role of design in capitalism is becoming ever more important. The new surge in startup culture among the young, the turn of design toward new business, not just big business and the overall collision of creativity with capitalism now under way, is the best way for us to rebuild our country. This will require reframing capitalism as the space for creators, not traders, for risk-takers, not risk managers, for community-builders, not destroyers.

Steve Jobs, like all entrepreneurs, had an entirely different set of competencies from CEOs and managers of big corporations. His ability to be attuned to his following, his framing of the problem (it’s people’s experience with the product, not the functionality and technology, that’s key); his obsession with the look, feel, and materiality; and the charisma of his leadership generated an “aura” around Apple products. That aura extended to Jobs himself, which is why we feel so emotional for the passing of this particular CEO and not any others.

The most successful entrepreneurs, from Thomas Edison, who was called the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” to Steve Jobs, portrayed as a secular prophet holding the iPad as a religious tablet on the February 2, 2010 cover of The Economist (“The Book of Jobs”), are often described in transcendental terminology. They have an aura that directly connects them to their followings whom they embody. These “visionaries,” “prophets,” “wizards,” “oracles” (the “Oracle of Omaha”) have a secular priest and laity relationship with their following. The priest promises the laity a coherent vision of the world, a way to release inherent hopes and talents while curbing existential angst, and a community to which to belong. The laity offers fealty in return. Prophets, religious and secular, tend to arise in moments of social and economic breakdown, which helps explain why there is a surge toward entrepreneurialism today.

In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber says that Calvin believed that people lived in a radical state of uncertainty about going to heaven. So they had to work extra hard to get there. Work becomes a calling. Today, we are living through yet another state of uncertainty. Innovation and entrepreneurship are our calling.

It is not an accident that so many of our startup founders (Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube, Airbn, Slideshare) have design backgrounds and share so many of the competencies we associate with Jobs. The fact that design is being recognized in the startup space is a major victory for the field. But the real power of design may well lie in its reform of the venture capital process, which has traditionally been defined in terms of technology and functionality. Bringing design into the VC process early to define opportunities (identifying those who embody new groups and new cultures) and keeping it through the business development phase, has the potential to increase the dismal 10% success rate dramatically. India’s innovation and design consultancy Idiom has an 80% success rate in “designing out” new companies.

The movement of design toward big business led to a focus on process and a promise of rationality and routinization of inspiration into products. In the end, we didn’t get much real innovation or the economic value that comes with it. The recent turn of design toward new business is leading to a focus on capitalism as social movement, and a promise of charisma and embodiment generating spectacular experiences that enable and delight. That’s why Steve Jobs and his entrepreneurial capitalism are so important--and why we mourn for him.

BRUCE NUSSBAUM

Bruce Nussbaum blogs, tweets and writes on innovation, design thinking and creativity. The former assistant managing editor for Business Week is a Professor of Innovation

The Top Ten Lessons Steve Jobs Taught Us

a reprint from Forbes.com 

Here are the Top Ten Lessons Steve Jobs taught us:

1. The most enduring innovations marry art and science – Steve has always pointed out that the biggest difference between Apple and all the other computer (and post-PC) companies through history is that Apple always tried to marry art and science.  Jobs pointed out the original team working on the Mac had backgrounds in anthropology, art, history, and poetry.  That’s always been important in making Apple’s products stand out.  It’s the difference between the iPad and every other tablet computer that came before it or since.  It is the look and feel of a product.  It is its soul.  But it is such a difficult thing for computer scientists or engineers to see that importance, so any company must have a leader that sees that importance.

2. To create the future, you can’t do it through focus groups – There is a school of thought in management theory that — if you’re in the consumer-facing space building products and services — you’ve got to listen to your customer.  Steve Jobs was one of the first businessmen to say that was a waste of time.  The customers today don’t always know what they want, especially if it’s something they’ve never seen, heard, or touched before.  When it became clear that Apple would come out with a tablet, many were skeptical.  When people heard the name (iPad), it was a joke in the Twitter-sphere for a day.  But when people held one, and used it, it became a ‘must have.’  They didn’t know how they’d previously lived without one.  It became the fastest growing Apple product in its history.  Jobs (and the Apple team) trusted himself more than others.  Picasso and great artists have done that for centuries.  Jobs was the first in business.

3. Never fear failure – Jobs was fired by the successor he picked.  It was one of the most public embarrassments of the last 30 years in business.  Yet, he didn’t become a venture capitalist never to be heard from again.  He didn’t start a production company and do a lot of lunches.  He picked himself up and got back to work following his passion.  Eight years ago, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and told he only had a few weeks to live.  As Samuel Johnson said, there’s nothing like your impending death to focus the mind.  From Jobs’ 2005 Stanford commencement speech:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

4. You can’t connect the dots forward – only backward – This is another gem from the 2005 Stanford speech.  The idea behind the concept is that, as much as we try to plan our lives ahead in advance, there’s always something that’s completely unpredictable about life.  What seems like bitter anguish and defeat in the moment — getting dumped by a girlfriend, not getting that job at McKinsey, “wasting” 4 years of your life on a start-up that didn’t pan out as you wanted — can turn out to sow the seeds of your unimaginable success years from now.  You can’t be too attached to how you think your life is supposed to work out and instead trust that all the dots will be connected in the future.  This is all part of the plan.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

5. Listen to that voice in the back of your head that tells you if you’re on the right track or not – Most of us don’t hear a voice inside our heads.  We’ve simply decided that we’re going to work in finance or be a doctor because that’s what our parents told us we should do or because we wanted to make a lot of money.  When we consciously or unconsciously make that decision, we snuff out that little voice in our head.  From then on, most of us put it on automatic pilot.  We mail it in.  You have met these people.  They’re nice people.  But they’re not changing the world.  Jobs has always been a restless soul.  A man in a hurry.  A man with a plan.  His plan isn’t for everyone.  It was his plan. He wanted to build computers.  Some people have a voice that tells them to fight for democracy.  Some have one that tells them to become an expert in miniature spoons.  When Jobs first saw an example of a Graphical User Interface — a GUI — he knew this was the future of computing and that he had to create it.  That became the Macintosh.  Whatever your voice is telling you, you would be smart to listen to it.  Even if it tells you to quit your job, or move to China, or leave your partner.

6. Expect a lot from yourself and others – We have heard stories of Steve Jobs yelling or dressing down staff.  He’s a control freak, we’ve heard – a perfectionist.  The bottom line is that he is in touch with his passion and that little voice in the back of his head.  He gives a damn.  He wants the best from himself and everyone who works for him.  If they don’t give a damn, he doesn’t want them around.  And yet — he keeps attracting amazing talent around him.  Why?  Because talent gives a damn too.  There’s a saying: if you’re a “B” player, you’ll hire “C” players below you because you don’t want them to look smarter than you.  If you’re an “A” player, you’ll hire “A+” players below you, because you want the best result.

7. Don’t care about being right.  Care about succeeding – Jobs used this line in an interview after he was fired by Apple.  If you have to steal others’ great ideas to make yours better, do it.  You can’t be married to your vision of how a product is going to work out, such that you forget about current reality.  When the Apple III came out, it was hot and warped its motherboard even though Jobs had insisted it would be quiet and sleek.  If Jobs had stuck with Lisa, Apple would have never developed the Mac.

8. Find the most talented people to surround yourself with – There is a misconception that Apple is Steve Jobs.  Everyone else in the company is a faceless minion working to please the all-seeing and all-knowing Jobs.  In reality, Jobs has surrounded himself with talent: Phil Schiller, Jony Ive, Peter Oppenheimer, Tim Cook, the former head of stores Ron Johnson.  These are all super-talented people who don’t get the credit they deserve.  The fact that Apple’s stock price has been so strong since Jobs left as CEO is a credit to the strength of the team.  Jobs has hired bad managerial talent before.  John Sculley ended up firing Jobs and — according to Jobs — almost killing the company.  Give credit to Jobs for learning from this mistake and realizing that he can’t do anything without great talent around him.

9. Stay hungry, stay foolish - Again from the end of Jobs’ memorable Stanford speech:

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. 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.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

10. Anything is possible through hard work, determination, and a sense of vision – Although he’s the greatest CEO ever and the father of the modern computer, at the end of the day, Steve Jobs is just a guy.  He’s a husband, a father, a friend — like you and me.  We can be just as special as he is — if we learn his lessons and start applying them in our lives.  When Jobs returned to Apple in the 1990s, it was was weeks away from bankruptcy.  It’s now the biggest company in the world.  Anything’s possible in life if you continue to follow the simple lessons laid out above.