I. Biography

Steve Jobs (born Steven Paul Jobs on February 24, 1955) is the CEO, chairman, and

co-founder of Apple Inc. and founder of cutting edge animation studio Pixar.

In 1976, Jobs and Wozniak founded Apple Computer Co. in the Jobs family garage.  It

had a wildly successful IPO, which made both founders millionaires many times over. A tiff

with the Apple board led to the resignation of Steve Jobs. Jobs left Apple and founded NeXT,

a computer platform development company specializing in the higher education and business

markets. NeXT's subsequent 1997 buyout by Apple Computer Inc. brought Jobs back to the

company he co-founded, and he has served as its CEO since then.

Steve Jobs also started Pixar Inc., which has gone on to produce animated movies such

as Toy Story (1995); A Bug's Life (1998); Toy Story 2 (1999); Monsters, Inc. (2001); Finding

Nemo (2003); and The Incredibles (2004). In 2006, Pixar was sold to Walt-Disney at $7.6b.

Returning Apple, Steve Jobs wanted to create another round of revolution. This time it

was the music industry. He introduced the iPod in 2003. Later he came up with iTunes, which

was a digital jukebox. Apple has a great advertising track record with its ‘Rip, Mix, Burn’

campaign. Now the industry uses a Mac to make the music and an iPod to store it.  Not much

later Steve proved himself be the man of breakthrough innovations with the introduction of

iPhone in 2007. This is the first multitouch-screen multimedia Internet-based phone. This

product changed mobile phone industry when the first time customer not operator has the

decisional role on how they will use mobile services and functions.

In 2007, Steve Jobs was named Most Powerful Businessman by Fortune Magazine

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Steve Jobs1955 -

“Stay hungry, stay foolish”

II. Analysis on leadership style

Danger

In 1996, Steve Jobs became the CEO of Apple the second time, when the company

was in serious financial crisis. Apple’s market share fell down to around 4%, making it

a small player in the market it had created! Its annual sales had gone from $11 billion to

$7 billion, and during calendar year 1996, it had lost $1 billion. Apple computer was

losing its competitive advantages because of increasing manufacturing expense, empty budge

and poor talent management. In February 1996, Businessweek even made its cover with the

headline “The fall of an American icon”, under the Apple logo. It seemed like everything was

over for the "fruit company" (Forrest Gump, 1994).

Meanwhile, the biggest competitor of Apple, Microsoft was growing tremendously.

The release of Windows 95, which combined DOS and the user interface program, was a

huge success for multibillionaire Bill Gates. 110 million copies were sold in just two years,

setting it as the PC industry’s unrivaled standard.

Confronting with accumulative difficulties, Steve Jobs made an incredibly courageous

judgment. He decided to compromise with the competitor. Jobs invite Bill Gates, Chariman of

Microsoft to settle a “non-war agreement” in which Apple would drop all the sue of

copyrights to Microsoft. In return, the other had to pay the compensation of $150M and

commit to develop Office (the main product of Microsoft) compatible with Mac computer.

Although Apple was well-know of computer quality at that time but the number of soft wares

and add-ons compatible to Mac computer were quite few. Steve Jobs ‘s motto are “One more

friend, one less foe. Apple is not living alone, it needs partners to support and it needs support

partners. ”.

Physical hardship

Steve Jobs is different from most “General Managers” in that he performs micro-

management. He takes personal responsibility for what Apple makes and how those products

feel to the end user. Jobs directs the design process from start to finish, asking endless

questions, expressing opinions, unfailingly pushing the company toward better products. The

sort of decisions that at most companies are considered finishing touches like the colour of a

computer case, the sound a product makes when it is opened or closed are to him the very

heart of the user experience and so are at the core of the design process. It is this that sets him

apart from normal managers, in fact one of the key attributes that entrepreneurs display is that

they take the initiative and feel a personal responsibility of their company / product.

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As most people probably know, Jobs was diagnosed with a form of pancreatic cancer

in October 2003 and was operated on in July 2004—after reportedly not seeking treatment for

more than nine months, while he explored other alternatives to surgery. Jobs hid his battle

with cancer for full nine months before informing shareholders and anyone else outside his

most intimate of inner circles until the surgery, and had to schedule time away from the office

for the surgical operation. Jobs took a leave from his duties at Apple that August in order to

recuperate but returned to work the following month. As many of you are already aware,

Steve Jobs’ health concerns have played a major role both in investor emotion/confidence and

within the company as a whole. Apple CEO Steve Jobs is more than ready to display his

physical appearance to the public eye. He knows good and well that he is going to be

scrutinized by the media, and any uncomfortable signs pointing to him being sick, will surely

lead the media into another tailspin. Both Steve and Apple know that the economy is in a

downturn and although Apple’s shares have been outperforming, confidence in the company

and its CEO is very vulnerable.

Uncertainty

iPod player, which carried “1,000 songs in your pocket” for $399, was widely

acclaimed for its breathtaking easy-to-use interface and scrolling wheel, its compactness, as

well as its large hard-drive capacity (5 GB). But it remained reserved to Mac users. Not for

long: in July 2002, iPod — which could then host 2,000 songs on its 10 GB hard drive — was

made compatible to the Dark Side of Computing, the Windows world. Job believed this

decision will benefit Apple after all thought it may decrease revenue from selling Mac.

Because 98% people using iPod have a Windows not Mac computers.

Chance

In 1998, Steve did not expect the digital hub to expand around music: he

thought the next big thing would be desktop video editing. He even compared it to the

desktop publishing revolution. That’s why the first iApp Apple released was iMovie, and not

iTunes; that’s also why the latest generation of iMacs were called the iMac DVs, as they

came with FireWire connectivity to plug digital movie cameras in. When the Napster

phenomenon erupted in 2000, Steve realized he might have been wrong this time. Steve asked

his team to work on another new project, that of a portable digital music player. Apple’s

market analysis had shown that, unlike the markets of digital cameras and digital

camcorders, the MP3-player market was a zoo, with miserable products and no clear leader.

Apple felt it could seize this opportunity to enter the market in a big way with an elegant and

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easy-to-use device that would be the ideal companion to its own music software, iTunes. The

MP3 player, which carried “1,000 songs in your pocket” for $399, was widely acclaimed for

its breathtaking easy-to-use interface and scrolling wheel, its compactness, as well as its large

hard-drive capacity (5 GB) Such outstanding features result in the iPod's huge market share,

which is currently around 60% of all MP3 players, with a total number of iPods sold

above 110 million as of September 2007. 10 million iPods were sold in Q4 2007 alone.

III. Leadership effect on Top Management Team

What make Apple success and what Steve Paul Jobs effects the Top management Team of the

organization which he has led?

1. Learn from failures. Steve Jobs has been failure in his life. He dropped out of

University, even though struggled to get him there. And, ten years after building up a

very successful computer companies in the world, he was fired by the board.

However, Steve turned failure into success. If he had not dropped school, he would not

have started his love job in his own garage. Or if he had not fired from Apple, there

would not have had NeXT, Pixar Companies.

2. Leadership: “ So when a good idea come, you know, part of my job is to move it

around, just see what different people think, get people talking about it, argue with

people about it, get ideas moving among that group of 100 people, get different people

together to explore different aspects of it quietly, and, you know-just explore thing”.

This is what Jobs has done, and he successes in his 12 success rules “Ask for

feedback”, each one will tell you one useful thing, then you can learn from others.

3. Hiring: With the rule of “Do what you love to do” Steve Jobs believes that the only

way to do great work is to love what you do. Then when he hires somebody really

senior, competence is the ante. They have to be really smart. But the real issue for him

is, Are they going to fall in love with Apple? Because if they fall in love with Apple,

everything else will take care of itself. They’ll want to do what’s best for Apple, not

what’s best for them, what’s best for Steve, or anybody else. Hiring is an important

task for management. Top management cannot know enough about participant in a

one-hour interview. So they can hire their people by the feeling, how do you feel about

that person?

4. Strive to become a market leader: Steve is one of CEO who does not care about

what the current moneymaking trends are. He just wants to trails and ensures customer

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loyalty and satisfaction. He wants to blaze trails and ensure consumer loyalty and

satisfaction, and he is unafraid of what the big players’ moves were. Because of that,

he has secured a top niche on the market, and he and his company will continue to

redefine the view of technology, as long as Apple Inc. holds true to Steve Jobs. “Be

the first, and make it an industry standard” is what Steve strives to do.

5. Innovate. “Innovation distinguishes a leader from a follower. Delegate, let other top

executives do 50% of your routine work to be able to spend 50% your time on the new

stuff. Say no to 1,000 things to make sure you don’t get on the wrong track or try to do

too much. Concentrate on really important creations and radical innovation. Hire

people who want to make the best things in the world. You need a very product-

oriented culture, even in a technology company. Lots of companies have tons of great

engineers and smart people. But ultimately, there needs to be some gravitational force

that pulls it all together”.

6. Learn continually. “There’s always “one more thing” to learn! Cross-pollinate ideas

with others both within and outside your company. Learn from customers, competitors

and partners. If you partner with someone whom you don’t like, learn to like them –

praise them and benefit from them. Learn to criticize your enemies openly, but

honestly”. This is what Steve has the balance right. He keeps learning by sitting back

colleague to continual his education without defining where he is today. This is one of

the way how Steve continues learning.

Tim Cook, chief operating officer

While Steve Jobs enjoys a reputation for having a hand in everything that happens at

Apple, behind the scenes Tim Cook is just as involved in the details. Apple's chief operating

officer is responsible for every aspect of Apple's supply chains, sales, and support services in

addition to overseeing the Mac division. An October 2006 profile in the Wall Street Journal

described Cook as a "low-key operator making sure the company runs smoothly behind the

scenes." He joined Apple 10 years ago, taking charge of Mac manufacturing and smoothing

out the inefficiencies in the process. As the years went on, Cook added more responsibilities

before becoming COO in October 2005. The fruits of his labours can be seen in Apple's sales

figures – the company has sold a record number of Macs in four of the last five quarters.

Eddy Cue, vice president of Internet Services

How do you know when somebody's a go-to guy within Apple? When Steve Jobs calls

on that person to fix a high-profile product whose launch was marred by technical glitches

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and widespread user complaints. That's the situation Eddy Cue finds himself in with

MobileMe. After Apple's rebranded version of .Mac stumbled out of the gate, Jobs, in a

memo acknowledging that MobileMe "was simply not up to Apple's standards," turned

responsibility for the subscription-based service to Cue, who now holds the newly created title

of vice president of Internet Services. "Eddy has been brought in to fix it," wrote former

Apple employee Chuq Von Rospach in a blog post about Mobile Me, "which means it's going

to get fixed." And Cue has a track record at Apple – he's spent the last several years heading

up the iTunes team at a time that the online store has become a dominant force in digital

music.

Scott Forstall, senior vice president of iPhone software

A few days before this year's Worldwide Developers Conference keynote – the venue

where Apple would unveil the iPhone 3G as well more details about the iPhone 2.0 software

update – the company had another announcement to make. It promoted Scott Forstall to the

newly created position of senior vice president of iPhone software. The timing was not

coincidental: The iPhone has grown into a critical part of Apple's business, and Forstall has

emerged as one of the key figures in the product line's development. When it's time to discuss

the intricacies of iPhone software at an Apple event like this year's WWDC keynote or the

March unveiling of the iPhone SDK, Steve Jobs turns the stage over to Forstall. Of course,

Forstall has earned that trust – he's an 11-year veteran of Apple and one of the original

architects of Mac OS X and the Aqua interface. His last job before coming to Apple?

Working at NeXT, under the watchful (and apparently approving) eye of his current boss,

Steve Jobs.

Jonathan Ive, senior vice president of industrial design

In the consumer electronics and computer markets, Apple is famous for its attention to

design. While the popular perception might be that Steve Jobs himself is responsible for all of

Apple's products, in recent years it's been the notoriously publicity-shy Jonathan Ive who has

played the major role in shaping the company's iconic look and feel. Ive and his team were the

force behind the eye-catching industrial design of such prominent projects as the iMac, iPod,

and iPhone. Given Apple's emphasis on the marriage of form and function, and the visceral

reaction that its products evoke in users, Ive's hand is keenly felt in everything Apple makes,

from the placement of screws to the boxes the hardware comes in. British born-Ive has won

nearly every design accolade you can name, including a Commander of the Order of the

British Empire for his contributions to the design industry.

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Ron Johnson, senior vice president of retail

Since moving to Apple from Target in 2000, Ron Johnson has presided over the roll

out of more than 200 Apple Stores across the world, including the company's first store in

China. After Steve Jobs, Johnson is one of the most outwardly charismatic members of

Apple's executive team and is a common sight at Apple Store openings. Under Johnson's

watch, Apple's retail operations have risen to become the envy of the company's competitors,

bringing in almost $1.5 billion in net sales in Apple's last quarter and routinely drawing new

customers to the Mac platform. Apple Stores have become not only attractive places to shop,

but also outlets for expert tech support and personal training, as well as social landmarks.

Greg Joswiak, vice president of worldwide iPod and iPhone product marketing

Greg Joswiak is a longtime Apple veteran who rose through the ranks as a product

manager in the company's PowerBook line of laptops. After becoming the company's chief

product marketing manager for Mac Hardware products, he transitioned over to the then-

fledgling iPod line – with more than 100 million iPods sold, that product line is anything but

fledgling now. Joswiak now manages all product marketing for both Apple's iPod and iPhone

product lines, when he's not making cameo appearances in iPod-based poker games.

V. Leadership effect on developing human capital

Regarding effect of Jobs's strategic leadership in developing the human capital of

Apple, there are two aspects that we need to take into consideration.

Jobs's talent in developing human resource for the company shows in the way he

recruits people. The reason why he considers recruiting people the most important job is

because recruiting is "finding a apartment". He would be half of your company. Why should

you take any less time finding a third of your company or a fourth of your company or a fifth

of your company? When you're in a startup, the first ten people will determine whether the

company succeeds or not. Each is 10 percent of the company. So why wouldn't you take as

much time as necessary to find all the A players? If three were not so great, why would you

want a company where 30 percent of your people are not so great?

Steve spends a lot of time on it, yet he can not have enough time to understand an

enormous number of applicants thoroughly before he recruit them. So, in the end, it's

ultimately based on gut. "How do I feel about this person? What are they like when they're

challenged? According to Steve, collaborative recruiting and having a culture that recruits the

A players is the best way. After recruiting, it's building an environment that makes people feel

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they are surrounded by equally talented people and their work is bigger than they are. The

feeling that the work will have tremendous influence and is part of a strong, clear vision.

Jobs considers each employee an individual contributor, but only some are key

individual contributors. So when a good idea comes, he gets different people together to

explore different aspects of it quietly. Moreover, he has them know everything, not just in

their part of the business, but in "every part of the business."

On June, 2008, Glassdoor let employees rate the companies they work for, share

salary information, and post their own company reviews anonymously. The Web site let

employees rate their managers, and Apple staffers were giving Mr. Jobs a 91 percent approval

rating, according to Seeking Alpha.

The high ranking Mr. Jobs has earned from the 161 employees and former employees

has not been matched by his peers. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer earned a 55 percent

approval rating, and Dell CEO Michael Dell scored 66 percent. Google CEO Eric Schmidt

came in closer with an 86 percent approval rating.

The high approval rating Mr. Jobs has earned may bode well for the company’s future.

The Mac and iPod maker is producing popular products, and is also popular with the media

and the public right now. If the company can capitalize on the productivity of satisfied

employees and keep the public happy, too, it will likely continue to crank out must-have

products that pad the company’s bottom line.

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The flip side of Jobs's enthusiasm is arrogance and an autocratic management style

because he centralizes the authority, ruling with an iron hand, attending to every little product

detail, and keeping employees on a roller coaster of praise and fear. He never gives a chance

to subordinate to involving decision making. He thinks that what ever he do is right. His

relation with employees not good, he fails to motivate his employees in many times. Some

times he acts as anti Gates, and some times request Microsoft to develop software for his

computer. His cocky attitude and lack of management skills became a threat of APPLE’S

success.

"My whole thought about Steve Jobs is that he's a fair-weather friend of Apple," one

employee said. "Six months ago, all he did was criticize the way Apple ran, and now he's

jumping on board. Depending on where the money is, is where his opinion is."

Jobs play duel personality sometimes he oppose Microsoft sometimes request

Microsoft to develop software for their operating system. Jobs force people to choose between

Microsoft-IBM operating system and his MAC-operating system. Lack of proper management

skills and relation with employees became a barrier of APPLE’s growth.

The vast body of biographical and analytical literature on Steve Jobs builds a complex

profile of a man who bullied everyone around him to get his own way; someone who

deceived his business partner, lost lucrative business alliances out of sheer petulance and

expropriated the creative inventions of countless people.

The fact that his designs were radically different from what the computer giants of the

day were saying was feasible, and delivered a level of style and utility that users fell in love

with, was at the heart of Apple’s early success. And it is success, more than anything else, that

attracts and retains talented staff. The opportunity to be part of the development of products

that actually change the world was a motivator powerful enough to secure their loyalty despite

recurring stories of staff being generally underpaid in the industry, driven to exhaustion on

ridiculously short deadlines and often berated and demeaned in front of their peers when they

didn’t measure up to Jobs’ exacting standards. But as Leander Kahney notes in Wired

Magazine, “Jobs’ employees remain devoted… because his autocracy is balanced by his

famous charisma – he can make the task of designing a power supply feel like a mission from

God.”

VI. Situational Dimension

Jobs has been known to pull up to Apple's front entrance and park in a handicapped

space. (Sometimes he takes up two spaces.) It's become a piece of Apple lore — and a

running gag at the company. Employees have stuck notes under his windshield wiper: "Park

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Different." They have also converted the minimalist wheelchair symbol on the pavement into

a Mercedes logo. Jobs' fabled attitude toward parking reflects his approach to business: For

him, the regular rules do not apply.  Rules can be changed at any time if it turned out to be not

matching to the benefit of himself and Apple.

June 6, 2005: during his keynote speech at Apple’s Worldwide Developers

Conference 2005, Steve announced one of the biggest move in Apple's history: the

switch from PowerPC to Intel chips (see the video in the Movie Theater). Intel was seen

as the enemy when Steve returned to Apple, and he is now considered the company’s

savior. One of the reasons this switch was decided is that Apple’s engineers simply could

not put powerful but way too energy-consuming G5 processors inside its notebook

computers. The transition from the PowerPC to the Intel architecture went smoothly, as

Apple had secretly developed Intel-compatible versions of Mac OS X since the very

beginning. The first Intel Macs were the iMac and the MacBook Pro, introduced in

January 2006 at Macworld SF watch it in the Movie Theater). The transition was

complete with the introduction of the Mac Pro at WWDC 2006, only eight months later!

VII. Leadership effect on development of ethical practices

This is the controversial side of Apple: the secrecy environment

Even Apple employees often have no idea what their own company is up to. Workers'

electronic security badges are programmed to restrict access to various areas of the campus.

(Signs warning NO TAILGATING are posted on doors to discourage the curious from

sneaking into off-limit areas.) Software and hardware designers are housed in separate

buildings and kept from seeing each other's work, so neither gets a complete sense of the

project. "We have cells, like a terrorist organization," Jon Rubinstein, former head of Apple's

hardware and iPod divisions and now executive chair at Palm, told BusinessWeek in 2000.

At times, Apple's secrecy approaches paranoia. Talking to outsiders is forbidden;

employees are warned against telling their families what they are working on. (Phil Schiller,

Apple's marketing chief, once told Fortune magazine he couldn't share the release date of a

new iPod with his own son.) Even Jobs is subject to his own strictures. He took home a

prototype of Apple's boom box, the iPod Hi-Fi, but kept it concealed under a cloth.

But Apple's radical opacity hasn't hurt the company — rather, the approach has been

critical to its success, allowing the company to attack new product categories and grab market

share before competitors wake up. It took Apple nearly three years to develop the iPhone in

secret; that was a three-year head start on rivals. Likewise, while there are dozens of iPod

knockoffs, they have hit the market just as Apple has rendered them obsolete. For example,

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Microsoft introduced the Zune 2, with its iPod-like touch-sensitive scroll wheel, in October

2007, a month after Apple announced it was moving toward a new interface for the iPod

touch. Apple has been known to poke fun at its rivals' catch-up strategies. The company

announced Tiger, an upgrade to its operating system, with posters taunting, REDMOND,

START YOUR PHOTOCOPIERS.1

Secrecy has also served Apple's marketing efforts well, building up feverish

anticipation for every announcement. In the weeks before Macworld Expo, Apple's annual

trade show, the tech media is filled with predictions about what product Jobs will unveil in his

keynote address. Consumer-tech Web sites liveblog the speech as it happens, generating their

biggest traffic of the year. And the next day, practically every media outlet covers the

announcements. Harvard business professor David Yoffie has said that the introduction of the

iPhone resulted in headlines worth $400 million in advertising.

But Jobs' tactics also carry risks — especially when his announcements don't live up to

the lofty expectations that come with such secrecy. The MacBook Air received a mixed

response after some fans — who were hoping for a touchscreen-enabled tablet PC — deemed

the slim-but-pricey subnotebook insufficiently revolutionary. Fans have a nickname for the

aftermath of a disappointing event: post-Macworld depression.

Still, Apple's radical opacity has, on the whole, been a rousing success — and it's a

tactic that most competitors can't mimic. Intel and Microsoft, for instance, sell their chips and

software through partnerships with PC companies; they publish product road maps months in

advance so their partners can create the machines to use them. Console makers like Sony and

Microsoft work hand in hand with developers so they can announce a full roster of games

when their PlayStations and Xboxes launch. But because Apple creates all of the hardware

and software in-house, it can keep those products under wraps. Fundamentally the company

bears more resemblance to an old-school industrial manufacturer like General Motors than to

the typical tech firm.

VIII. Conclusion and recommendation

All this plays to Steve Jobs' strengths. No other company has proven as adept at giving

customers what they want before they know they want it. Undoubtedly, this is due to Jobs'

unique creative vision. But it's also a function of his management practices. By exerting

unrelenting control over his employees, his image, and even his customers, Jobs exerts

unrelenting control over his products and how they're used. And in a consumer-focused tech

industry, the products are what matter. 

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His most highly criticized flaws are also his strongest assists: his drive for

perfection, his refuse of compromise with products as well as employees, his undeniable

business skills, his love of aesthetics. He has left an indelible mark on every one of the

three companies he's founded: one has failed, the two others have become giant successes

and corporate icons, but all are recognized as being at the edge of innovation in their

respective fields. He has changed the worlds of computing, computer animation, music, and

communications forever.

Steve has learned from his failures and has gained maturity. In early years, he was a

selfish and autocratic businessman. In early years, during the speech of celebrating Apple I

computer. he attributed all achievement and success to his own effort. These characteristics

has changed over time. As recommended by Harvard Business Magazines, Steve Job had to

learn “humibtion” if he wanted to achieve further success. “Humibion” is an invented word by

the author, which is the combination of humility and ambition. You have learn to follow in

order to lead. That is also our recommendation for Jobs. This time, he leaned the lesion well

as in the ceremony of iPid, he gave the honor and contribution to the development team. And

we can see how influence Apple has put on customer with its innovative products. It is

partially derived from the treatment and recognition of Steve to his emplyees.

While many would have given up after the two successive downfalls he's endured,

Steve Jobs has made his way back to the top with his characteristic intensity and force of will,

and with astonishing success: in 1994, he was considered a has-been and technological

outcast. In 2007, he was honored at the California Hall of Fame and Fortune named

him the most influential businessman on the globe.

IXI. Reference

http://www.romain-moisescot.com/steve/

http://www.apple.com

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