5 Steve Jobs traits to adopt — and five to avoid

For those of us familiar with the writings of Walter Isaacson from Time, his brilliant bio of Steven Jobs will only enhance the opinion we had of him: precise and pain-staking, with a journalist’s knack of getting into the minds of people. The bio has been rated as one of the best non-fiction books of the year. The biography of Steve Jobs ( Buy here @ 40 percent discount) has been widely written about and critiqued. Isaacson prises apart the mind of a cranky genius. To get into Jobs’ mind is to learn to live in the future and deliver in the present. From the biography, I have gleaned five lessons which may be of use to Indian entrepreneurs and managers who often fumble, trip and then give up when faced with bureaucracy and other roadblocks, not to speak of lack of drive, will and imagination that bury many Indian projects. These are the Five Steve Jobs Mantras: TALK: No Indian big man (entrepreneur, manager or official) will ever call up someone whom he considers junior, inferior or below his salary bracket. And juniors fear calling up superiors. At the age of 13, Jobs, desperate to get a job, called up the CEO of HP, got through after many tries, and, sure enough, landed his first computer job. GO: Meet people. Force a hearing. Indian corporate managers too behave like bureaucrats, refusing to either search out or meet people. Jobs went to the house of his friend to sell him his used IBM typewriter and waited while the friend finished frenetic sex with his girlfriend. Just get out of your office and go. Jobs even went to the houses of his juniors. [caption id=“attachment_168971” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Jobs cried frequently in office and at home. AFP”]  [/caption] **DESIGN:**In India no company spends much on design. Whatever comes first, stays. See how terrible the design of our money order form is. For Jobs, design was everything. The cornerstone of the Jobs design concept was the rectangle with rounded edges. (iPhone, Mac etc). He killed many early designs to reach this classic. Which Indian entrepreneur kills the first evolved product to get at a better design? Switch focus from, profit maximisation (Great Indian Mantra) to product design (Great Indian Weakness). Don’t just make money, make great products, Jobs announced. For him design was not the veneer; it was the “soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers.” FUTURE: Live in the future, but deliver in the present. Indian CEOs and managers, spend all their time wrangling and sorting out present day issues or past debts. Indians are not trained to look ahead. The tip of the nose is as far as we can see. In 2000 itself Jobs realised that music was going to be huge. People were ripping music onto their computers. Some 320 million blank CDs were sold in the US in 2000 though the population was only 280 million. Jobs felt the music players in the market “truly sucked” and went about designing a player (iPod) where the computer would do the complex duties and the player the simple ones. iPod changed Apple forever.  Jobs first imagined and then created the future. HIRE: An Indian boss always lives in fear of a threat to his job from an insider who knows more. So best not to hire. Steve Jobs scoured the best companies in the world, including Ferrari and IBM, to hire a designer, for instance. He finally found Britisher Jony Ive in his own design team and immediately spotted his genius. “There’s no one who can tell him what to do or to butt out. That’s the way I set it up,” Jobs said about Ive. The result was the iPhone, new Mac and the iPad that we all deal with now. However, there are Five Steve Jobs Habits to avoid: Don’t be mean: Jobs cut people down to size and abused them frequently. Try it at your own risk in Indian offices. Don’t sack randomly: Sacking is a western managerial concept, now happily adopted by some Indian corporates. Steve once sacked 3,000 people. In India, this is not needed since salaries are pathetic in any case. No purpose is served other than bringing down company morale. Don’t cry: Jobs cried frequently in office and at home. Most of all when he was sacked from Apple in the mid-90s. Don’t be Dirty: Jobs was the dirtiest person around - having a bath only once a week, since he believed that his all-fruit diet was a self-cleaning mechanism. He loved to raise a stink and had a studied unshaven look. Don’t try zero-tolerance in office: In a team it is not just the century scorer who is valuable. There are many cogs and most of them may seem to be useless. Jobs had no patience with them. It’s all right being a genius but a company or product needs a lot of putting together. In India zero-tolerance will backfire.