Don't Call Him One of the Best Innovators of High Tech Industry - thats simply not fair: Steve Jobs Rest In Peace!

Obviously the 24 hour news are all doing Steve Jobs tributes as they should. And there are many very touching words said. But again, my obsession with facts interferes with many of the glib reporter comments. Don't say he was one of the great innovators of the high tech industry. Don't say he was one of the great managers of his generation. Don't say he will be counted among the greats. That just reflects badly upon you and how ignorant you are.

Steve Jobs was the greatest businessman and chief executive of any industry and any era.. ever!  I wrote my thoughts about Steve Jobs's contributions when he stepped down from the CEO position. You can read the full blog here. But just to summarize.

Steve Jobs (and Steve Wozniak) launched Apple in a garage, and turned it into a Fortune 500 sized global corporation. Not just that, he did it in record time. So, if he owns (owned) the world record for starting a company and taking it to the Fortune 500 - that is excellence in management. He is by that accomplishment alone, one of the all-time greatest entrepreneurs.

Then Apple went from making profits when Jobs was onboard, to making losses and arriving to the brink of bankruptcy when he was away. He came back and rescued the company. The ultimate turn-around story, taking a giant Fortune 500 sized corporation that other managers had ruined and was on the brink of collapse, and bringing it back to profits - not just any profits - generating the biggest profits of his industry. For that kind of turnaround - also a world record (that still stands). A completely different skill from building a company is to rescuing a loss-making company. This is the biggest test of technical management competence. Management skill. A world record. On this measure alond, Steve Jobs is one of the all-time greatest managers.

Understand how rare that is - Steve Jobs did it while keeping Apple in its business of making personal computers. Other 'brilliant' managers have done that by shifting the corporation away from the business that got them to make losses (think IBM who abandoned the PC market). No. Steve Jobs genuinely did it properly, by keeping Apple making PCs (while adding new product lines) and turned the company from losses to profits.

Business is a race. Its competition. Apple under Steve Jobs's leadership became the biggest computer manufacturer (by volume of computers shipped). When he was away, Apple lost that leadership and fell out of the top 5 biggest computer makers. Now in his come-back, Steve Jobs once again turned Apple into the world's biggest computer maker by volume. Very few CEOs of any industry get to lead his/her company to capture first place - if you become CEO while your company is already the biggest, that is more a job of maintaining the course, not making bold decisions. But how many CEOs have there ever been in any global industry, who came to rule that industry twice (while other managers ruined in the middle). This is competitiveness. By this measure alone, Steve Jobs was one of the winningest leaders in all of business of all time.

Business is business. You have to make profits. Its not good enough to grow big. The real measure, the most difficult part in competitive business, is to be most profitable. And Apple under Steve Jobs has become the most profitable tech company, not just most profitable computer company. The real skill, the really clever bit, is to win by being most profitable. By this measure alone, Steve Jobs is one of the smartest executives of all time.

But technology changes. It is far easier to be the small guy and disrupt the big dinosaurs of an industry - like Apple did to the old computer industry giants like IBM, Univac, Control Data, Honeywell etc. Then it 'should have been' some newer younger companies that came in to take Apple's cake. Not with Steve Jobs in charge! He cannibalized his own business, re-invented the PC industry so thoroughly, the Macintosh (arguably first Apple's Lisa - also Steve Jobs's pet project - then the Mac) is seen as the start of the modern era in personal computers, and all PCs can be considered as born into one of the two eras. And very very rarely, the planet's biggest company of an industry, totally re-invented that industry. This is proof of exceptional vision. Steve Jobs was by this measure alone, one of the greatest visionaries of business.

The job of the CEO is not to make profits actually and not to grow the company and not to take market share. The real job of a CEO is, as all MBA students learn, 'to increase shareholder wealth'. The CEO needs to bring higher value to the owners of the company, ie increase the price of the shares when it is a publically traded corporation on the stock market. Apple became this year for a while the most valuable company on the planet - not of American Fortune 500 corporations, not of tech companies, but of all companies on the planet. By that achievement alone, Steve Jobs is one of the most successful executives ever.

When you take the above, you understand, they are so diverse skills, there has never been any executive of any industry, who mastered that many different aspects of business, so thoroughly and with global excellence, that he or she could easily be called the greatest on that measure. And I counted here what, SIX different measures by which Steve Jobs ranks as one of the very best. And definitely when taken together, these six set Steve Jobs as the greatest business manager ever, well ahead of classic icons like Henry Ford or Thomas Edison or Carnegie Mellon or Isambard Kingdom Brunel even.

But wait. I have only talked about the computer industry!

Now we go into overdrive. Boost up the afterburners, we go hypersonic. Warp drive. Steve Jobs thoroughly changed several OTHER industries! He totally reinvented the music industry not just in the music player - iPod (defeating Sony the undisputed master) and rescuing the music industry that was falling to piracy. He has mastered two totally distinct industries!

Wait, there is more. Then we Pixar. He ran the company that was awarded with Oscars and released the bestselling movie of the year. He mastered the completely different industry of motion pictures!

Then there is mobile phones. The biggest tech industry on the planet, the most widely spread technology and the fastest-growing and most competitive industry today. Steve Jobs brought the iPhone to the mobile industry, a revolution so radical it not only changed all of mobile - the iPhone is the gadget that brought totally dis-interested parties like advertising, television, movies, newspapers, magazines and even banking and credit cards - into mobile!

There is even more from retail - the Apple stores - to cloud computing. Please understand, as far as I have been able to find in research through past great executives, no other executive of any industry, has been so influential in even three distinct industries to lead them, far less to change them. At the very least, Steve Jobs mastered and led and totally changed four distinct global industries - including the one that is fastest growing giant business, and including the one that is most competitive (as a count of global giant corporations competing in it). Yet Jobs won, easily.

There is no other way to say it: Steve Jobs was the greatest business manager of all time. A true renaissance man, he mastered - and then revolutionized - every business he got into. And while doing that, he never abandoned his first love where he still brought excellence to Apple, turning it once again to be biggest computer maker while making the biggest profits of its industry too. Lets be fair to the man. He was the greatest. Our lives are better because of Steve Jobs, he will be sorely missed by all industries that he touched and his inspiration will lead future leaders for generations to come. Thank you Steve Jobs and may you rest in peace.

Comments

[Peter]

Steve Jobs life demos the theory of Buddism. It is the Karma that connects every one together. iMac, iPod,iPhone,iPad,iCloud are just a few of tools that carry Karma smoothly among the souls of people in the village of Earth. He is born as a Buddist and return as a Buddist. He will come back and teach us with his Buddism and Karma.
Glorious and Peace to Budda.

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi Lee

Hey, GREAT point! Yes, so true! He was ridiculed quite regularly on all of his new ventures (and some of my early blogs about the orig iPhone had elements of that too, haha, although I believe I always said, don't bet against Apple it has a history of changing industries haha). That is a missing piece to the blog and funny, it is also something I admire greatly in true leaders - part of why I admire IK Brunel - he faced the same out of all of the 'industry greats' of the industries he disrupted 150 years before Jobs haha.. Like the guy who had built the world's biggest bridge, said Brunel's proposed bridge (even bigger) was not sustainable and would collapse. Or the ship builders who said it was not possible to build a ship that could cross the ocean under its own power (Brunel proved them wrong) etc.. Very true, that is what has also plagued Jobs all through his career until perhaps the second half of this past decade, he was finally being given the benefit of the doubt, by at least some neutral observers..

Thanks Lee.

Tomi :-)

[billinboston]

You make a compelling argument. But I think two other American businessmen exceeded even Jobs: Thomas Edison and Cornelius Vanderbilt. Electricity and transportation were more life changing than even the internet. I blog in more detail here: http://billbulkeley.blogspot.com/2011/10/jobs-place-in-business-history-no-3.html

[Jonathan]

"Then Apple went from making profits when Jobs was onboard, to making losses and arriving to the brink of bankruptcy when he was away"

Apple was in trouble when Jobs was at the company, before his departure. The problems were partly caused by Jobs projects: Lisa had failed, Mac was not selling nearly as much as Apple needed. Ousting Jobs and being able to do the right things for the bottom line probably saved the company.

It is true that during the 12 years without Jobs Apple ended up in a bad position, which Jobs later turned around. But the cause and effect is far from being as clear as you imply. One must remember Jobs learned a thing or two about how to run a business, when NeXT was constantly in financial trouble and saw almost no sales.

[HCE]

@Jonathan

You say

"Apple was in trouble when Jobs was at the company, before his departure."

Actually that's not quite correct. It is true that Apple was, financially speaking, up and down during those years and the Mac didn't become a big hit until some years after it was introduced - but the company was quite profitable during those years. In fact their first loss-making year was 1993. In fact, until around 1990 their profits were on a par with those of Microsoft and their revenues significantly higher. The big decline started in the early 1990s - and you can hardly blame Steve Jobs for that.

- HCE

[Jukka]

Very good post! Steve and Woz are rightfully quoted as the founders of Applebut there was also a third man - Mike Markkula. Mike was not only the money man, but also an engineer contributing alittle to the technical side and being older than Steve and Woz, he was also a mentor. Mike was even Apple CEO for a while during those turbulent early years.

[Jonathan]

@Jukka

Mike Markkula was not the third founder, but Ronald Wayne. Mike Markkula was an early investor, advisor and CEO.

@HCE

Apple was in trouble because of Lisa failure and really slow start of the Mac. Jobs wanted to concentrate just on the Mac, he and Sculley fought and Jobs left. Sculley won and 8-bit "past" was still making money for apple for the next 5 years or so.

[HCE]

@Jonathan

Agreed Lisa was a flop and the Mac did not initially sell that well - which is why I described Apple's financials in those days as "up and down". However, I don't believe they ever were in any serious trouble. Mac sales took a little while to pick up but with the advent of more powerful machines and new software (particularly in the desktop publishing space), they were soon doing fine.

The real trouble started when Apple (without Steve Jobs' leadership) could not figure out how to develop and improve the Mac and had no clue as to what the next big thing was going to be for the company. That's the point I was trying to make - the trouble that Apple was in when the Mac launched was nothing like the far worse trouble they were in 7-8 years later. You really cannot compare the two.

- HCE

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