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Steve Jobs’ Legacy Still Drives Apple’s Current And Future Products

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October 5th was the 8th anniversary of Steve Jobs' death. He succumbed to pancreatic cancer in 2011 and will always be known as the guy who co-founded Apple with Steve Wozniak and created the very successful Mac, iPad and iPhone. He brought Apple back from the brink of death when he came back to Apple in 1997 and breathed new life into a company that was $1 billion in the red and six-to-eight weeks from bankruptcy. 

I have followed Apple since 1981 and spent significant time with all of their CEOs and top management over the years. I have a relatively good sense of Apple’s history and why, even eight years after Steve Jobs death, Apple is one of the highest valued companies in the world and has grown exponentially even after Jobs has been gone. 

One key reason for Apple’s continued success is that Jobs created a company in his likeness and has installed in his top executives a deep understanding of his own business and technology philosophy that still guides Apple’s leadership today.

The first tenet of Job’s legacy is tied to creating a culture of innovation at Apple. Jobs had an uncanny sense of what a consumer might want in the way of technology and drove Apple’s innovation in this direction.  

Jobs also helped his leadership team understand a key element of his thinking that was tied to Steve Jobs' view that technology for technology's sake is worthless unless it is also tied to elegant form, function, ease-of-use. The battleship grey IBM PCs were, in his mind, a failure in this area and he strove to bring new design and thinking to the PC when he introduced the Mac.

Another tenet of Jobs’ philosophy was based on his belief that the computing experience should be easy to use and intuitive. That was embodied in his decision to follow early user interface designs created at Xerox Parc and with the Mac, popularized that graphical user interface. He also “borrowed” ideas from Xerox PARC and introduced a mouse, which made working with a graphical user interface easy.

Over the many decades of talking with Apple execs and engineers, it is clear that the culture of innovation and ease of use mantra has guided everything Apple has done in hardware, software and even services. It is part of the DNA that was passed down from Steve Jobs and has been a major reason for Apple’s continued success even today. 

However, there is one other element of Steve Job’s legacy that I believe is perhaps 50% of the reason Apple continues to be successful long after Jobs passed away. Apple has a special program for management and when an executive level manager or director is hired at Apple, they go through a program, designed to instill in them what I would loosely call “the Apple Way” of thinking and doing things. They go through a kind of Apple University to learn the principles of Apple’s vision, leadership and management goals and style and become entrenched in the way Apple thinks and manages the company. 

I believe Jobs patterned this on a similar type of program HP had for executive hires when David Packard and William Hewlett led HP called the HP Way. In fact, late in his career, David Packard even wrote a book on this subject called “The HP Way.” 

Apple is a very unique company in the way they think and operate. When Jobs was at Apple originally, his way of managing was chaotic and highly confrontational. When he was forced out of Apple in 1985, he became a bit more introspective and while his management style while CEO of Next was just as volatile, by the time he came back to Apple in 1997 he had matured and mellowed a bit.  

When he rejoined Apple he had a greater understanding of what it takes to manage a company and began creating the original Apple University-like concept. Over the years, he and his team evolved the Apple Way to share with new executives and managers Apple’s business philosophy, code of ethics and principles of management. This includes ways to propagate a culture of innovation, matched with design style and fundamentals and their ease of use methodology. 

What is important about this is that Apple’s management is all on the same page when it comes to executing Apple’s corporate vision and strategy. Unlike many other companies that have multiple divisions with many silos, some with their own objectives and visions, Apple’s entire management team and all of their divisions are constantly in sync. 

The other thing Jobs did, starting in the early 2000s, not long after he was diagnosed with cancer, was to start the serious process of grooming his successor. 

By the mid-2000’s it became clear to many that Tim Cook was being trained to eventually take Steve’s place, regardless of the outcome of his illness. 

Given the success that Tim Cook has had leading Apple after Steve Jobs's death, Jobs’ grooming a handpicked successor has to count as one of the more important legacies of Steve Jobs, who left Apple in very good hands to carry on his legacy of the Apple Way. 

Since Jobs' death, Tim Cook has advanced Apple’s vision and added his own touch and style to the Apple way. But even with Cook’s stamp on Apple’s, products, management and direction, you can still see Jobs's legacy played out in most of the ways the company is still managed and the direction Cook has led them in the last eight years. Apple is still a Steve Jobs driven company, led by many people who, in most part, he has tutored and mentored since he came back to Apple in 1997. 

 Steve Jobs preparing his team for his eventual passing and instilling his thinking and vision in his team is a huge reason why Apple has succeeded even without him here to do it personally. It is no wonder that, eight years after Steve Job’s death, that Apple is a $1trillion company and has the potential of greater growth in the future. Steve Jobs may be gone but his legacy lives on at Apple.

 

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