The True Genius of Steve Jobs

Focus

Simplify

Take

Responsibility

End to End

When Behind,

Leapfrog

150

100

150

100

Put Products

Before Profits

Don’t Be a

Slave to Focus

Groups

Bend Reality

150

150

100

Push for

Perfection

Impute

100

Tolerate Only

“A” Players

Engage

Face-to-Face

150 0 150

15

Know Both the

Big Picture and

The Details

100 0 100

10

150

100

150

100

150

100

Combine the

Humanities with

The Sciences

Stay Hungry,

Stay Foolish

150

100

HBR.ORG

ILLUSTRATION: TREVOR NELSON

The Real

Leadership

Lessons of

Steve Jobs

Six months after Jobs’s death, the author

of his best-selling biography identifies the

practices that every CEO can try to emulate.

by Walter Isaacson

April 2012 Harvard Business Review 93

THE REAL LEADERSHIP LESSONS OF STEVE JOBS

“The people who are crazy enough to think they

can change the world are the ones who do.”

—Apple’s “Think Different” commercial, 1997

HIS SAGA IS the entrepreneurial creation myth writ

large: Steve Jobs cofounded Apple in his parents’ garage in 1976, was ousted in 1985, returned to rescue

it from near bankruptcy in 1997, and by the time he

died, in October 2011, had built it into the world’s

most valuable company. Along the way he helped

to transform seven industries: personal computing,

animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing,

retail stores, and digital publishing. He thus belongs

in the pantheon of America’s great innovators, along

with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Walt Disney.

None of these men was a saint, but long after their

personalities are forgotten, history will remember

how they applied imagination to technology and

business.

In the months since my biography of Jobs came

out, countless commentators have tried to draw

management lessons from it. Some of those readers

have been insightful, but I think that many of them

(especially those with no experience in entrepreneurship) fixate too much on the...