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Jobs' passion for innovation and for his company, his passion for life, really, set him apart from his contemporaries like Bill Gates or Larry Ellison. Steve was a magical man who could enchant you with his vision if you gave him even half a chance. He changed the world with Apple Computers, created entirely new products. In fact, he created entirely new categories for products! He created things we never thought of, things we could not think of. Steve Jobs was an innovator's innovator. A retrospective
That was Steve Jobs' life focus: changing the world. Even a perfunctory reading of the history of Apple will tell you that Steve Wozniak was the engineer (and a visionary one, eclipsed only by his partner), not Jobs. Jobs spent his time in college (he dropped out of Reed College after his first six months) studying calligraphy and other fun things, things that expanded his mind. He spent time in an ashram, where he got the name "Apple Computer." He was so very not an engineer, I can't begin to tell you. But he was a designer, one of the best ever in the history of the world, with a product home run record that is, frankly, unprecedented. Let me clear up a potential misconception. Not all engineers are designers and not all designers are engineers. There is a great deal of overlap, but there are differences. Try this: All architects are designers, but few architects are engineers. Another easy way to look at it is that there are two kinds of engineers: designers and analysts (I adore sweeping generalizations - one way you can tell I'm a designer and not an analyst). Many engineers are one or the other, most are some of both. I am mostly a designer; my stress guy is mostly an analyst. Jobs was a designer. And he had things to say about design that make perfect sense to other designers. "In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains, of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service." "Design is not just what it looks like. Design is how it works." To understand that, you don't have to be able to do calculus or Laplace transforms. On the other hand, to bring an idea from concept to something you can hold in your hand does. That partnership between Wozniak and Jobs made sense. Jobs had a sort of design ethos, one of transcendent simplicity. He said it like this: "That's been one of my mantras--focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains." This is how we get such insanely great products from Apple. The design is simple. Or rather, the way we interact with the product seems simple. It feels intuitive, and therefore effortless. We feel in control of it rather than the other way around. His push for an elegant, Zen-like simplicity took Jobs down a different path. The standard corporate design process wanders through a number of focus groups, vetting the concept, the basic design, the interface, the form factor, etc. Jobs did not go this route. "It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them." Seriously. Steve Jobs did not focus group the Macintosh, the iPhone, or anything else. This is not as weird as it sounds. In the arena of food products, Malcolm Gladwell quotes Howard Moskowitz, "The mind knows not what the tongue wants." In the case of incredible high-tech consumer electronics, we the customer did not know we wanted an iPad or an iPod, not until we saw it. Then we had to have it. Millions and millions of us. Jobs' method is brilliant, but extremely idiosyncratic. That is, for anyone else to be as successful as Apple at this sort of product picking, they needed someone like Steve Jobs, but how did Steve do so incredibly well? Here's what he had to say about his process: “Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.” That's right. He would sometimes swing and miss (remember the Newton?), but if a product didn't work, he'd drop it and move on quickly. He didn't "wait for the market to catch up." Either it worked, or it didn't and he was perfectly willing to pull the plug on stuff that didn't. Steve brought more to the design table than his personal aesthetic. He knew intuitively how to manage his R&D. "Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it." This is a kind of corporate leadership that we rarely see today. Granted, we get a lot of Serious American Executives, but they, bless their hearts, are not innovators; they are not designers, most aren't even leaders. They are administrators. Executives are essential, but they do not change the world. The universe does not fear administrators. Jobs was much more than an executive. He was an evangelist, a story-teller, a leader. He provided direction and just as importantly, he provided a role model. He would say, "Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected." Jobs expected excellence and people lived up to his expectations. "The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay." This is a great management style. This is how you get people to function reliably at peak. This is what self-actualization looks like in an organization. This is the face of empowerment. Maslow would understand and approve. Towards the end of his life, Steve talked a lot about death and how to live. Early on, he had told Wozniak that he felt like he would die young, before he was 40, really, so he was always pushing to accomplish something great and do it soon. He gave a commencement address to the graduating class of 2005 at Stanford, where he said: "You can't connect the dots looking forward you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well worn path." We in aviation, particularly business aviation, seem to be stuck not just on the well worn path, but deep in a rut. We have no Steve Jobs, and our current processes and leaders don't allow for one. This does us no favors as an industry, or as individual firms. Look at our products. Look at their longevity. Are they long-lived because they are insanely great designs? Or are they long-lived because we have nothing with which to replace them, no will to replace them, no leaders among us who are willing to pull the plug on a mediocre design and put the talent and resources into a project that can change the world? Who among us will connect the dots and put another dent in the universe? As an industry, we seem a bit short in the leadership department, particularly with respect to design. This used to be our forte, our strength as an industry. We used to be great pioneers with a vision! Now, it seems we are mere industrialists. Industrialism is not a calling. There is no romance to industrialism. No one willingly works across the weekends for the dream of industrialism. No one gets divorced because of their obsession with industrialism (industrialists get divorced, but it's because they are boring). We need to lead with our hearts again. We need to move past this obsession with safe little incremental improvements. We need to simplify. We need to re-embrace elegance. We need inspiration, a vision. We need leaders who are designers. Terry Drinkard is currently consulting on an aviation start-up. His interests and desire are being involved in cool developments around airplanes and in the aviation industry. Usually working as a contract heavy structures engineer, he has held positions with Boeing and Gulfstream Aerospace and has years of experience in the MRO world. Terry’s areas of specialty are aircraft design, development, manufacturing, maintenance, and modification; lean manufacturing; Six-sigma; worker-directed teams; project management; organization development and start-ups. Terry welcomes your comments, questions or feedback. You may contact him via terry.drinkard@blueskynews.aero Other recent articles by Terry Drinkard:
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