What Would Steve Jobs Do? How the Steve Jobs Way Can Inspire Anyone to Think Differently and Win Read Online Free PDF

leadership style carried forward with its intense customer sense, vision, and product sense, but also added a degree of maturity needed to work in a large corporate environment. He also developed a stage presence and a product face that hasn’t been matched in the history of business.
W HAT C AME N E XT
     
    Although he was worth $200 million at the time, Steve Jobs wasn’t about to stop creating products or chasing his vision after he left Apple. What would Steve do? Easy—he’d start another company.
    He started the appropriately named NeXT Computer, Inc., with a lot of his own money. The goal was to design the “next-generation Macintosh,” a more powerful dream machine targeted toward high-powered end users and the higher education market. While NeXT did become the first true Internet Web server, it was too expensive and too fancy, with not enough software to really succeed,but the core operating system developed for it became the model for the highly successful OS X (“OS Ten”) operating system. The OS elements became the main ticket for Steve’s late 1996 return to Apple and brought success back to the company.
    NeXT also gave us another breakthrough in the form of NeXTMail, an early manifestation of Steve’s vision that computers should be interpersonal, that is, networked. NeXTMail was the first graphics-based e-mail system, allowing embedded, visible, clickable graphics. After selling 50,000 machines, NeXT was slimmed down to emphasize software design, then was sold back to Apple in November 1996.
    Although by most traditional business measures, NeXT was a failure, it did allow Steve Jobs to refine and mature his leadership style, not to mention nourish his creative side. NeXT was a great place to work for both Steve and his employees, and it served as a valuable step and a new beginning in Steve’s path forward.
    He pretty much said that himself in his 2005 Stanford commencement address, in the now-famous quote: “I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”
M ORE T HAN A T OY S TORY
     
    It wasn’t part of Steve’s grand plan, but because of a divorce settlement, the graphics group in George Lucas’s successful Lucasfilm company came up for sale in 1986 for $10 million. Jobs bought it with the vision of developing high-end graphics hardware. The graphics hardware never really took off as a salable product, but then the company got a huge break.
    Pixar had been making some well-regarded shorts, like “Luxo Jr.,” the familiar short starring two emotional Luxo lamps. It was mainly a demo for the Pixar Image Computer, which hadn’t been doing very well. But Steve felt that Pixar was never really going to gain traction as it was and looked for something bigger. John Lasseter, a former Disney animator working for Pixar, had come up with some storyboards for a longer animated film called
Tin Toy
. He made a short that Jobs really liked and took a chance on, funding it out of his own pocket. Jobs and Lasseter went to Disney to sell Disney on a one-hour TV show based on this and similar animations, and were surprised to find that Disney saw it instead as a full-length feature film.
    From that eventually came the blockbuster hit
Toy Story
. There were some production glitches and some contentious moments with Disney, but the film, released in 1995 after five years of development, was a huge hit. Itredefined Pixar as a movie producer, not just a hardware producer. Pixar has released more than a dozen feature-length films since then, and the studio has never lost money. In 2006, Jobs sold his interest in Pixar to Disney for $7.4
billion
in Disney stock, making him the company’s largest shareholder.
    In his Pixar role, Steve was more the