Leadership skills and qualities of Steve Jobs, which everyone should learn from.

5 min readAug 26, 2019

Steve jobs is a great leader, heres why? — Steve Jobs

Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”- one of the most heard Steve Jobs famous quotes, Think Different (1997)

Steve Jobs’ brief history -

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak co-founded apple in 1997. They first introduced the Apple I and later the Apple II. Apple went public in 1980 with Jobs as the blazing visionary and Wozniak, the shy genius executing his vision.

Executive John Scully was added in 1983 by Jobs himself and in 1985, Apple's board ousted the combative Jobs in favour of Scully.

Away from Apple, Jobs invested in and developed animation producer, Pixar and then founded NeXT to create high-end computers; NeXT eventually led him to Apple.

Jobs returned to Apple in the late 1990s and spent the later years until his death in 2011 revamping the company, introducing the iPod, iPhone and iPad, transforming technology and communication in the process.

6 leadership qualities of Steve Jobs -

1. Invent and simplify

Steve Jobs is listed as the primary or co-inventor on 241 patents.

These are some of his great ideas -

i pod (2001)

This was the game-changer for apple. They created I tunes which opened them not only to the portable device market but also for the digital downloadable marketplace as well. If Apple is successful now and if there are so many great products by them today it is only because of the success of the I pod. They wouldn’t have been able to come this far without that success.

iOS (2007)

iOS is the leading mobile device operating system in the world. It is simple, extremely powerful and has a great UI and UX ( User interface and User experience), the iPad, iPhone and other such great devices from Apple would not be the market changing devices they are without the iOS software.

Magic mouse (2009)

When the magic mouse was released in 2009, it was the first consumer mouse to have multi-touch capabilities and no wheels.

2. Hire and develop the best

In an interview of his, Steve Jobs says, “ The greatest people are self-managing. They don’t need to be managed. Hire and develop the best, once they know how to do it they go out and do it. But what they need is a common idea.”

“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do : we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do”

He also says that one of his great responsibilities in Apple was hiring people.

3. Have a clear vision

Like many innovative game-changers, Jobs wasn't looking to replicate what's already been done. He had a totally different mindset from the others. He found what the customer needed before they asked for it.

Here is a very interesting interaction between Campbell and an interviewer, which shows what his vision was:

“What is your vision for the personal computer?” Campbell asked Jobs. Campbell said what happened next still gives him goosebumps. “Steve Jobs was a magical storyteller,” Campbell told me. “For the next hour, he talked about how personal computers were going to change the world. He painted a picture of how it would change everything about the way we worked, educated our children and entertained ourselves. You couldn’t help but buy-in.” Vision, said Campbell, was the one thing that separated Steve Jobs from the others.

4. Focus

Steve Jobs's only focus was on making Apple great. Jobs' ability to focus on getting fewer projects done helped to propel Apple to the successful brand it is today. When Steve Jobs rejoined Apple in the late 1990s after being fired, the first thing he did after joining back was scraping the useless products which they were developing and turned their focus to a few products which he thought were good. Job’s vision was to identify a need and then command all energy into developing the product and fulfil the needs of the user.

“Focusing is about saying no”
the late co-founder explained at apples 1992 worldwide developer conference (WWDC)
“you’ve got to say no, no, no, and when you say no people get pissed off”.

5. Customer obsession

Steve Jobs was very obsessed with customer experience.

I think that a quote of his speaks for himself.

“Get closer than ever to your customer.
So close that you tell them
what they need well before they realize it
themselves.”

6. Deliver results

As of June 2019, Apple is reported as the 2nd most valuable company in the world. In the 2018 financial year (October 2017 to September 2018), Apple’s revenue came to a total of 265.6 billion U.S. dollars.

Apple’s doughnut-shaped headquarters in Cupertino, California has been valued at $4.17bn, according to a new assessment this week — making it one of the most expensive buildings in the world.