Steve Jobs and Apple: The World's Biggest Startup
The untimely passing of Apple’s charismatic founder Steve Jobs continues to bring extremely high levels of comment and outpourings of grief. Today, Friday 14th October, sees an unofficial but popular celebration of Steve Jobs Day, complete with meetups, encouragement to wear black turtle necks to work and a Twitter hashtag #stevejobsday likely to become more popular as the US rolls around to morning! Today also sees the iPhone 4S go on sale, coupled with the release of iOS 5.0 and the integration of iCloud, Apple's own cloud storage service.
Jobs touched so many lives directly or otherwise with his firm, iconic leadership style, building arguably the most innovative technology company the world has seen. This style, which Jobs described as "collaborative", sees the multibillion dollar Apple organised and thinking just like most tiny startups. Apple is in some ways the 'biggest startup' on the planet.
Of course, every business was a startup once. But most grow out of it. Although Apple is certainly not a startup anymore by definition, in many ways it still is a startup at heart - and that's what counts.
So what do we know of collaborative leadership? Not only Jobs but also many of his colleagues in the high tech sector — such as Salesforce.com’s Mark Benioff — also practice collaboration. The July-Aug edition of The Harvard Business Review focussed on Collaborative Leadership. It's certainly not a new concept, with learned writings on the subject going back to the early '90s at least.
A simple definition would be that a collaborative leader accepts responsibility for building - or helping to ensure the success - of a heterogeneous team to accomplish a shared purpose. This is particularly powerful in the area of technology and innovation. As globalisation makes the world a smaller place and the internet plus social media make hyperconnectivity a part of everyday life, the ability to rapidly innovate is key to business survival. Business models have changed and companies are being challenged in unprecedented ways. New online e-commerce businesses have emerged, led by a new breed of startup geeks and entrepreneurs. We harness disruptive technologies such as cloud compute and cloud storage services and enable an 'always on', self service approach to innovation. Collaboration is a massively important leadership style in this environment.
There are many characteristics, but in my experience a Collaborative Leader:
- Sets a clear vision: injecting energy, drive and passion into all areas of the business. They’re great listeners who are optimistic about the future and are willing to take risks. They have to be if they are to be innovative and successful in the fast moving digital world.
- Hires the best people: which might seem obvious, but to quote Jobs - “the difference with Collaborative leadership is that to attract and retain the best people, you accept that they will often know more than the person at the top.” I freely admit this is very true in my own case! It is also important to hire diverse talent, with differing skill sets and perspectives. The collaborative challenge is to build these skills into a united homogeneous team and reward team members for common, not individual, goals.
- Measures everything: particularly when it comes to technology. As Oscar Wilde once said, “It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information". In Ninefold, it is performance measures such as capacity, utilisation, latency and support that matter and I can never have enough data on all of these. Measure and modify quickly! The digital world is all about analytics and detail. And processes - not to stifle innovation but to ensure all progress is locked in and successful strategies can be repeated many times with the minimum effort.
- Encourages teams to solve problems: and to challenge one another with “wonderful arguments” as Jobs would say. Have a culture which is run by ideas not by hierarchies. In this environment, leadership is more about facilitation. But, to again take a lesson from Jobs, definitely no committees! Teamwork is based on trusting your colleagues to achieve what’s required of them, with clear measures to identify success.
- Shows a strong hand: the collaborative leader needs to know when to step in and to “make a call". Sometimes this is needed to free up or unblock a discussion or to clearly give direction so that agility and speed to market are maintained. Rumour has it that Steve Jobs certainly wasn't afraid to be decisive when required!
- Ensures team members understand all parts of the business: and allows this culture to permeate everything.
- Most importantly, has FUN: the most important “F” word. We all spend a lot of time building businesses, innovating and taking products to market. So hang out with the talented people you want to be with, having a few laughs. Take the business seriously, but not ourselves!
If Steve Jobs built one of the most respected and valuable brands in the world using collaborative leadership, what of the future for Apple now that he’s gone? Steve himself predicted that Apple would thrive and prosper when he announced his retirement in August this year. "Apple is much more than Steve Jobs,” he said. One of the basic philosophies of collaborative leadership is that the culture is ingrained and built into the very heart of the business. Teamwork and processes should ensure that collaboration will continue from one leader to another.
With the release of iOS 5.0 and the Apple iPhone 4S, there's another final observation I can't resist making. All of those independently clever and useful Apple gadgets now come with Apple's own cloud storage services baked into them. Your gadgets are now made even more powerful through the cloud, linking them together for better syncing, backup and ensuring the user benefits from the best experience no matter which gadget they are currently using. The cloud allows Apple gadgets to collaborate even moreso than before, extracting the strengths and usefulness out of each device towards a single goal. The cloud could easily be described as a collaborative manager very much in the spirit of Steve Jobs.