Steve Jobs 1955-2011

Nigerian society encourages cheapening of honours and lofty words-everyone is a “Chief”, “Alhaji”, “Honourable”, “Dr”, “elder statesman”, “chieftain”. Extraordinary words like “mega” “role model” or “icon” are so carelessly bandied as to become virtually meaningless. Every year hundreds of national honours, universities doctorates and traditional titles are offered usually to anyone who can donate large enough sums of money. When “Chief” became common, we created “High Chief” to differentiate the men from the boys! We have so devalued honour and achievement that it is often difficult to recognise true excellence. But like the Yorubas say, when you see an elephant you can not mistake it for anything else! Steve Jobs is the definition of the words “icon” and “visionary” yet he bore no title-he was simply Steve Jobs. My last obituary was for Tayo Aderinokun; alas Steve Jobs shared the same years of birth and death as Tayo, both deaths had links with cancer, and both were very wealthy men, within the context of their societies. I had a “relationship” with both men-Tayo was my boss in a professional banking environment; but like most citizens of the world, I only met Steve Jobs through his work at Apple Computers. I was however “intimate” with him as a business school professor teaching several of the many case studies written on the PC market, Apple and its truly iconic CEO. My first exposure to computers was not Apple products but the more conventional IBM, HP, Dell, Compaq and Sony personal computers and later laptops. Even though Jobs, his partners Steve Wozniak and A.C “Mike” Markkula and Apple Computers were industry pioneers, by the early 1990s, Apple had become more or less niche products leaders, restricted to devotees in graphics, design, printing, education and other markets where its strengths in graphical user interfaces, design dexterity and ease of use were highly valued. For corporate and professional users, especially in environments such as banking which depended on connectivity within the organisation and the outside world, Bill Gates, Microsoft and the IBM-compatible had basically wiped out Apple. Gates and Jobs had two differing visions of how the PC market would evolve and Bill Gates vision won overwhelmingly! Gates placed his emphasis on connectivity, open systems, the decoupling of hardware and software and a business model that depended on small, but regular annuity incomes. Jobs saw value in great design, productivity, differentiated products and large margins. When I started teaching business strategy in the early to mid-2000s, the case studies essentially cast Steve Jobs as a visionary who got it wrong in the PC market, drawing inspiration from industries (such as automobiles) where a superb product (say a BMW) earned premiums over less-differentiated cars, rather than looking towards perhaps telecommunications or broadcasting where value depended on the number of users and in the particular case of the then emerging technology market, their openness and interconnectedness. Many wrote off Steve Jobs, with Michael Dell of Dell Computers at one time mocking that Jobs should return money to shareholders and close down Apple! But in the event, the joke was on Dell (and we business school types!) as Steve Jobs re-invented himself in consumer electronics through the iPod and iTunes; then went back into computing and publishing with the iPad, and eventually to phones, through the iPhone! Jobs also had strong influence on other industries and companies-he founded NEXT when he was pushed out of Apple and eventually sold the company to Apple for $429million in 1997; he founded Pixar which produced animated films and had a serious impact on media and film industries, producing the popular “Toy Story” film series. Jobs later sold Pixar to The Walt Disney Company in a deal valued at $7.4billion in 2006 becoming Disney’s director and largest individual shareholder with 7% of the company’s stock. In 2010, Forbes estimated Steve Jobs net worth at $8.3billion, the 42nd wealthiest American and one of the richest men in the world. But Jobs significance was not in the amount of money he had in the bank. As he himself noted, “I was worth over $1,000,000 when I was 23, and over $10,000,000 when I was 24, and over $100,000,000 when I was 25, and it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money“. Jobs was listed as primary or co-inventor on 338 US patents or patent applications for products and technologies as diverse as actual computer and portable devices to user interfaces (including touch-based), speakers, keyboards, power adapters, staircases, clasps, sleeves, lanyards and packages. His real essence was his typification of the American dream; creativity, innovation and the courage to follow his intuition; quest for perfection and desire to impact the world; ability to recover and rise again after every failure; and the final lesson that money can’t buy you health or life. In his words, “almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart”