Before I begin by telling stories about a famous entrepreneur, one that you would’ve heard on countless occasions by now, let us talk about films.
“What,” you might think, “has that got to do with an entrepreneur build series?” or “I shouldn’t bother wasting my time over this, for I have never even watched a film!”
To you I’d say, bear with me through two paragraphs if you will.
KPIs from the Heart : Net Fun Value
When they thwarted George Lucas’ attempts to buy the rights for Flash Gordon, he went back to the drawing board saying, “I’ll invent my own.” What he came up with was the skeletal idea for a sci-fi film about Jedis employing a mysterious ‘Force’ at will. He hired a designer to hand paint, as he had imagined, a few scenes from the script he’d written and rewritten many times over before pitching it to 20th Century Fox.
In the run-up to completing the script for Star Wars, Lucas recalled from having read The Hero with a Thousand Faces, that he was “following classical motifs”. George remarked that the executives were looking for what was popular the last year rather than looking forward to what could be popular the next. His idea of making a film was incorporating the simple plot of good vs evil as he remembered reading in popular books from his childhood. “The word for this movie,” he said, “is fun.”
This parable about the origins of Star Wars is to bring to focus someone who, much like George Lucas, was enamored by simplicity, had a vision for a new future and believed that the journey to bringing his vision to fruition was – 1) Fun and 2) Invoked classical elements of design and humanities before marrying them with technology. That person was Steve Jobs.
When the other companies were making products in black, which Steve thought looked too industrial, he emulated the white, ‘bright’, and ‘honest’ color scheme of the home appliances and electronics products of Braun. The affordable houses they lived in while he was growing up were designed by Eichler who brought clean design and ‘simple taste’ to the masses, which served as a lifelong inspiration for him (especially with the affordable and yet revolutionary device, the iPod).
A Carrots and Sticks approach but with way fewer Carrots
Steve had a strong personality which, as has been well documented, was viewed differently by disparate sets of his employees (the “Rashomon effect” as Walter Isaacson wrote). He was always uncompromising with the quality and efficiency of the work and some employees showing any hint of compromise were known to have been publicly rebuked.
But many others held their own and through their work demonstrated themselves as worthy of Steve’s admiration. Joanna Hoffman had the spirit to stand up to him and he would set aside his reality distortion field and ruthless rationality to build a long-standing professional relationship with her.
Xerox was at the vanguard of the movement towards creating the foundations of the modern desktop as we know it. Steve would display a not so known yet indispensable characteristic for an entrepreneur, that of a dominant and relentless negotiator.
When Xerox Venture Capital division was considering being a part of Apple’s financing Steve was playing a longer game. He convinced them to open up what was happening in the secrecies of the PARC division in exchange for million-dollar finance. A famous add-in from this nexus was the mouse.
A shortcoming, perhaps common in many an entrepreneur, and that some at Apple would readily acknowledge was his distance from emotional expressions or a disregard for sensitivities when faced with inefficiency or laziness. Jobs had a mental division of people lying in either the ‘Shitheads’ or the ‘Geniuses’ end of the spectrum.
During this dalliance with Xerox Jeff Raskin, an Apple employee, was the one who’d done the due diligence of new technologies at PARC and had asked his colleagues including Steve to take a look. But Jobs considered him a theorist “shithead who sucks.” So Raskin had to enlist a friend who lied in Jobs’ genius division of the world to convince him.
Seeking Inspiration from the building blocks of the Past
For all the insensitivities, there is a case to be made for his charismatic leadership which helped build Next and Pixar from the ground up. These two companies revitalized Apple and Disney with the innovation and Steve Jobs DNA that they brought on board. But in addition to that Steve was exceptional at assigning a true entrepreneur to their rightful role.
Avie at Next helped build systems that were better than what Apple was producing at the time and that prompted the acquisition along with the team. Steve invested in Pixar when no one else thought much about a nascent niche in filmmaking. Toy Story went on to be the highest-grossing animated film at the time and founder Edwin Catmull became the president of Disney after the deal.
Looking back at Jobs’ less than desirable character traits it’s easy for history to disregard his intolerance and impatience with people in lieu of the sheer will and ability to alter the ‘malleable reality’ to transform the many industries that he did.
Everything that Steve built was a product of what he gathered over the years – everything from ashrams in India and dropping into the calligraphy class after dropping out of college to the designs of the house that he grew up in and the appliances that he used.
Jobs’ ascendency towards becoming a self-anointed, and rightfully so, the authority on the design began with the Eichler home and its simple rectangular shapes and uninterrupted glass – something that an iPhone is reminiscent of.
Paraphrasing from the book Fluid – Eichler was inspired by the rectangular organic architecture of Frank Wright who was inspired by the Frobel gifts he played with in his Kindergarten. Kindergarten is german for Children’s Garden which was a playful introduction to the classroom for kids.
The fun Wright had with Frobel gifts translated into the architectural designs he made which further inspired Eichler and Jobs in return. Fun was the essence of Jobs’ contribution to the world and what made him the distinct entrepreneur that he was.