Walter Isaacson: The Real Management Lessons of Steve Jobs

Sketch, not a photograph, of Steve Jobs created by Autodesk employee, Nikhil Nayak, using Autodesk SketchBook Pro

I recently read The Real Management Lessons of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson on the Harvard Business Journal site. While doing so, I couldn't help but think of our own CEO Carl Bass. I was particularly struck by their comments on innovation which made me recall Bill O'Connor's recent interview with Carl. In Isaacson's article, he touches on 13 business lesson topics with quotes from Steve Jobs. I couldn't help but add my own quotes from Carl Bass.

Aspect	STEVE JOBS source	CARL BASS
Focus	"Stop! This is crazy." He grabbed a Magic Marker, padded in his bare feet to a whiteboard, and drew a two-by-two grid. "Here’s what we need, Consumer and Pro."	"One of the things we observed, by looking at the work of our customers, is the range of software tools they need to use to accomplish their tasks. This inspired us to bring to market the design and creation suites." source
Simplify	"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."	"At Autodesk our mission is to simplify and democratize sustainable design. We want to make it easy for architects, designers, and engineers everywhere to make smart, more sustainable design decisions." source
Take Responsibility End to End	"People are busy. They have other things to do than think about how to integrate their computers and devices."	"Customers tell me 'I love your products, but I hate doing business with you.' We need to fix that." OTC 2011
When Behind, Leapfrog	The iMac’s slot drive couldn't burn CDs. "I felt like a dope. I thought we had missed it."	"Acquisitions are a great way to say, here's a company, or even just a small team of smart people, that's doing something interesting; and if we bring them aboard, ideally we can benefit from not only the ideas they've already had, but from the good ideas they'll have in the future, as well." source
Put Products Before Profits	"Don't worry about price, just specify the computer’s abilities. Don't compromise."	"We're still selling boxed software, of course, and that's how we run the business today; but we're also migrating those capabilities into Autodesk 360, because we know in the cloud we can offer much greater value to our customers. There's this kind of 'left-brain/right-brain' thing that you have to get right if you want to be a large, successful company and an innovative organization - and at Autodesk we're going to have to get that balance just right as we move into the cloud." source
Don't Be a Slave to Focus Groups	"If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’"	If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, "A faster horse!" source
Bend Reality	"You did the impossible because you didn't realize it was impossible."	"The first thing is to reward attempts at innovation, and the second is to avoid punishing failure. In some ways, because innovation deals with things that are relatively new, to some degree you can't know what's going to succeed and what's going to fail until you actually try some things out." source
Impute	"Mike [Markkula] taught me that people do judge a book by its cover."	"It always seemed a shame to me that we might sell a $5,000 piece of software that doesn't look as good as a $49 video game." source
Push for Perfection	"Guys, you've killed yourselves over this design for the last nine months, but we're going to change it. We're all going to have to work nights and weekends, and if you want, we can hand out some guns so you can kill us now."	"He was the kind of guy who had very strong views about things, very impatient, and he could be a pain in the ass," J. Hallam Dawson, a member of Autodesk’s board, said in an interview. "There’s a fine line between somebody being persistent and somebody being stubborn. And maybe Carl approaches that line sometimes." source
Tolerate Only "A" Players	"I don't think I run roughshod over people, but if something sucks, I tell people to their face. It’s my job to be honest."	"The single biggest thing you can do is hire the people who are going to be more imaginative, more creative, and have more innovative ideas. At TEDx I used the example of a basketball team, saying that, if your team is shooting badly, sure, you can always hire a shooting coach, but probably what you should focus on first is going out and getting some really good shooters." source
Engage Face to Face	"There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by e-mail and iChat. That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they're doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you're cooking up all sorts of ideas."	Autodesk Chief Executive Officer Carl Bass has come a long way since he was fired from the San Rafael design software company a decade ago. "I was here a couple years working for [Carol Bartz], and I continually told her what a screwed-up company she had. She thought there were not enough suggestions about how to fix it, and there was too much complaining about what was wrong. I remember she said to me, 'You will never be happy here, will you?' I said, 'Nope.'" source
Know Both the Big Picture and the Details	Some CEOs are great at vision; others are managers who know that God is in the details. Jobs was both.	Carl Bass gets inspiration for running design-software maker Autodesk Inc. from an unlikely place: a woodshop where he fashions beds and baseball bats by hand. While spending his off-hours at a studio near his home in Berkeley, California, Bass uses the company's software to design objects out of wood and metal. The hands-on testing helps him spot where the technology is difficult to use -- a perspective he rarely gets sitting in a boardroom, he says. source
Combine the Humanities with the Sciences	"I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics. Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do."	"There is a certain amount of tension between innovation vs. execution - and I think the key is finding the right balance between them. In a fast-changing world, you have to be innovating - creating both new things and new ways of doing things - and you also have to be executing, in terms of the plans and products you've already committed to." source

Business lessons are alive in the lab.