The Steve Jobs Way - Chapter 1

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After reading two books that tried to drive home the point that leaders don't matter but the right process, we switch to a book about one of the most charismatic and successful leaders - Steve Jobs. As we go over the chapters and try to decode his success, we will see how the insights stack up against the ideas in disruptive innovation and blue ocean.

The first chapter is about leaders and teams having passion about the product. The book talks about how Steve Jobs while being non technical was very excited about the idea of a personal computer as an user at a time when computer were mainframe behemoths with which communications was through batch jobs painstakingly encoded on data cards. 

The book talks of how he like the idea of a cursor controlled by a mouse being the primary control as against the traditional key board. Today the cursor and mouse are so central to our digital experience, we fail to even think of it as an innovation. It feels so obvious. But Steve Jobs was the person who popularized this concept in his first coming which was then taken up by Microsoft in their Windows Operating System.

We could associate this chapter with the job to be done concept in some way. Here the job to be done is for a human to communicate with a machine. In some ways if one were to evaluate entire Steve Job's legacy one could think of it as enabling communication between humans and machines. Working in the area of virtual reality, I can see how the world sorely misses someone like Steve Jobs to establish the right mode of communication.

In some ways this is more a product innovation or technology innovation. It is about finding a technology break through to get a job done. The models of blue ocean and disruptive innovation on the other hand are more about business innovation - finding the right use case and customer base to drive adoption. Steve Jobs is also known for his marketing skills. So I guess we would get there in the coming chapters.

Another new thing I learn in this chapter was that Macintosh is a type of Apple. 

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