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The Real Leadership Lesson of Steve Jobs

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Submitted By SourBoy
Words 6753
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Focus

Simplify

Take
Responsibility
End to End

When Behind,
Leapfrog

150
100
150
100

Put Products
Before Profits

Don’t Be a
Slave to Focus
Groups

Bend Reality

150

150

100

Push for
Perfection

Impute

100

Tolerate Only
“A” Players

Engage
Face-to-Face

150 0 150
15

Know Both the
Big Picture and
The Details

100 0 100
10
150
100
150
100
150
100

Combine the
Humanities with
The Sciences

Stay Hungry,
Stay Foolish

150
100

HBR.ORG

ILLUSTRATION: TREVOR NELSON

The Real
Leadership
Lessons of
Steve Jobs
Six months after Jobs’s death, the author of his best-selling biography identifies the practices that every CEO can try to emulate. by Walter Isaacson

April 2012 Harvard Business Review 93

THE REAL LEADERSHIP LESSONS OF STEVE JOBS

“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

—Apple’s “Think Different” commercial, 1997

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. 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

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