A Butterfly in a World of Bulls and Bears

 As I read through, I feel this is more of a book around the life and myth of Steve Jobs than hard business lessons. More of self improvement type lessons if any than business theory that that can be replicated. So let me go with the flow. The Chapter is about surviving lean periods. The 10 years when Steve Jobs was out of Apple. What he did during that period. He took his money out of the Apple Company shares. So he had money. He started Next Computers to realize his Mac vision on his own. He invested in Pixar. Though Pixar was an animation company, Steve Jobs' interest was more from the point of view of a computer for high resolution graphics which they had built for their animation work.  There are some superficial lessons mentioned in this chapter. About executives who live for the passion of the product versus those who care only about personal career growth. This is my own personal peeve about corporate careers. I could resonate but not sure if there is any solid lesson to ta

 This chapter is about the right organization structure, right incentive, right channels - aspects that professor Christensen talks about a lot. This chapter's hypothesis is that a company should be organized by product rather than by function. Rationale being functional organization will try to standardize and not cater to the different needs of different product. This books talks of Mac, Lisa and Apple II. It doesn't really talk of how each one's need is different. But the chapter is more on how John Sculley wanted to adopt approaches similar to consumer goods focusing on distributors and retailers which was not working for Mac. The retailers obviously are not incentivized to sell Mac with no need for peripherals and no training needs thus giving them no scope for revenues. This is the aspect of choosing the right channel. Traditional channels will not favor innovative products. And from blue ocean stand point this is the implementation aspect. We see how Steve Jobs wante