Co-founder of Apple, and of Pixar's success
Was thrown out of the company he founded, spent twelve years elsewhere, came back and made it the most valuable in the world.
Photograph: Matthew Yohe · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Jobs co-founded Apple with Steve Wozniak in 1976. He was forced out in 1985 after a boardroom struggle, founded NeXT, bought the computer graphics division that became Pixar, and returned to Apple in 1997 when it bought NeXT and was close to failing.
What he did on returning is the instructive part. Apple had a sprawling product line; he cut it to a handful of machines that fitted a two-by-two grid — consumer and professional, desktop and portable — and killed most of the rest.
The iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad followed from that discipline rather than from a burst of invention. His own framing was that focus means saying no to a thousand good ideas, and that the hard part is refusing things that are genuinely worth doing.
Apple did not usually invent the category. There were MP3 players, smartphones and tablets before all of these. It shipped the version that was pleasant to use, which turned out to matter more than being first.
The first thing he did was reduce, not create. Most struggling small businesses have too many products, services and customer types for their size, each carrying its own complexity. Working out which three things you actually do is usually more valuable than adding a fourth.
Apple was late into nearly every category it dominated. Where a market already exists and the products are unpleasant, arriving second with something that works is a real strategy — and a far cheaper one than creating demand.
Hardware, software and eventually the shops. Where the quality of what the customer feels depends on a step, doing that step yourself is worth the cost and the trouble.
Accounts from people who worked with him consistently describe a manager who could be cruel, took credit that was not his, and denied paternity of his eldest daughter for years before acknowledging her. The mythology tends to file this under intensity; it was not.
It also produced real business failures. NeXT sold very few computers. The first Apple retail plans were widely predicted to fail and nearly did. And the 'reality distortion field' that shipped the iPhone also shipped a phone with an antenna problem that he initially told customers they were holding wrongly.
The cruelty was not the reason for the success, and treating it as though it were has done a great deal of damage to a generation of founders who copied the wrong half.