Dear Friends,
Steve Jobs is no more. Long live Steve Jobs. Steven P. Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple who helped usher in the era of personal computers and then led a cultural transformation in the way music, movies and mobile communications were experienced in the digital age, passed away on 5th October 2011.
His authorised biography released a little later, on 25th October 2011, biography doesn't hide the Apple CEO's shortcomings.
We can learn so much from this great man.
Volume II, Issue VI of December 2011 is a tribute to this great personality. We will see how the principles applied to Apple can influence us to become more effective first-line managers.
Vivek Hattangadi
9376100041
| A tribute to Steve Jobs: What can we learn from him? Learn about the three principles that always drove Apple! |
I am currently reading 'Steve Jobs', the authentic biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson.
The three principles of Apple as told to his biographer Walter Isaacson and which have created a great impact in my mind, which I desire to share with you are:
· Empathy
· Focus
· Impute
Walter Isaacson in ‘Steve Jobs’ writes on page 78:
| “Steve Jobs wrote his principles in a one-page paper titled “The Apple Marketing Philosophy” that stressed three points. The first was empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer: “We will truly understand their needs better than any other company.” The second was focus: “In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.” The third and equally important principle, awkwardly named, was impute. It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys. “People DO judge a book by its cover,” he wrote. “We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.” |
Let us dwell on these principles.
Empathy: Empathy is about understanding people. Empathy and sympathy are not synonyms, they have different connotations. In sympathy, we feel sorry for a person. For example, when a friend of yours loses his job, we have ‘sympathy’ for the friend because we perceive the distress of the friend. When we have ‘empathy’ for the friend we go into a similar emotional state of the friend if we accurately perceive the friend’s situation or predicament. Empathy is identifying ourselves with and understanding the situation, feelings and motives of the other person. It is our ability to not only know or detect what others are feeling, but to also experience that emotion ourselves. It is about empathy with the customer – both internal i.e. our medical representatives and the external customers – the doctors and the retailers. In all our interactions, we need to have empathy with our medical representatives if we have to establish our leadership. Emotional Intelligence is a pre-requisite for effective leadership.
Focus means to eliminate the many unimportant things, so as to do a good job of the important things. It means we need to understand our priorities and focus on important issues rather than end up doing a ‘fire-fighting’ job when the important tasks become urgent. Learning to prioritize and then focussing on the most important issues is a skill which we must all develop. In the Mahabharata, when Dronacharya was testing the shooting skills of his pupils, all could see the beautiful leaves and flowers on the trees, the blue sky and so on. On the other hand, Arjuna could see only the eye of the bird – he was focussed! That is the kind of focus we all need to develop in our activities.
Impute literally means to relate to a particular cause or source; attribute the fault or responsibility to the actual cause (for e.g. imputed the rocket failure to a faulty gasket). Our doctors and retailers form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that that they receive from us during our interaction. “People do judge a book by its cover”. We may have the best of the products and of the highest quality. However, if we present our products to the doctors in a slipshod manner, our products may be perceived by the doctors as slipshod. If we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.
Therefore, we the first-line managers need to empathize with the medical representatives, and focus on their development so that we impute their growth to our leadership skills.
Good luck!
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