Why do people think it’s odd that Steve Jobs was a hippie, did LSD and listened to Dylan – and yet was successful? It’s funny that people think any of this inhibited his creativity. The fact is that Steve Jobs was successful because he followed his own passion and didn’t let the dictates of financial models program his actions.
This from the Harvard Business Review:
In the lead up to today’s release of the Steve Jobs biography, there’s been an increasing stream of news surrounding its subject. As a business researcher, I was particularly interested in this recent article that referenced from his biography a list of Jobs’s favorite books. There’s one business book on this list, and it “deeply influenced” Jobs. That book is The Innovator’s Dilemma by HBS Professor Clay Christensen.
But what’s most interesting to me isn’t that The Innovator’s Dilemma was on that list. It’s that Jobs solved the conundrum.
When describing his period of exile from Apple — when John Sculley took over — Steve Jobs described one fundamental root cause of Apple’s problems. That was to let profitability outweigh passion: “My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. The products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything.”
via Steve Jobs Solved the Innovator’s Dilemma – James Allworth – Harvard Business Review.
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