Business Policy
42002 - 81
Steve Jobs Book Report
Submitted by:
Kuntal Shah
“I pledge to my honor that I have not violated the Honor Code during this assignment." Steve Jobs was the embodiment of Apple in ways few founder’s and leaders ever are, and through his sheer power of personality was able to imbue his essence throughout not only Apple’s products and employees, but also to his customers. The Apple story is thus often linked to Jobs, and he is credited almost entirely with the success of Apple, while, in mainstream circles at least, given a pass for Apple’s past strategic blunders. In reality though, as shown in Isaacson’s book, both the ups and downs that Apple has gone …show more content…
In turn, when creating his products, Jobs was not intent on allowing his consumers to exercise similar powers, but instead manipulated them into Jobs controlled user experience, at the same time enthralling them into a ‘consumer reality distortion’ field which made them feel they were actually the revolutionaries and not just Jobs’ followers. The ‘1984’ ad is a perfect example of the cognitive dissonance that they were able to create consumer’s minds by positioning Apple as the tool for ‘hacker’ culture against IBM, when in fact Apple provided a closed system that limited one’s control and IBMs allowed almost free rein for people to tinker and create new disruptive technologies like Jobs …show more content…
It was not until his time at Pixar, when he was not in a position to control the actual product that he seemed to be able to take a step back and develop the ability to craft strategic directions that would enable him to resurrect Apple. Being a Visionary, which Jobs no doubt was, and being a great strategic thinker and leader, are two very different things, which often are conflated with each other. It is interesting that Pixar, which was largely other people’s vision, was where Jobs was able to learn how to think as a strategist and become a greater