Summary: Inside Steve's Brain

Review and Analysis of Kahney's Book

BusinessNews Publishing

• Publisher: Must Read Summaries
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9782806224972
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Industrie informatique

The must-read summary of Leander Kahney's book: `Inside Steve's Brain: The Principles that Guide Steve Jobs as He Launches Killer Products, Attracts Fanatically Loyal Customers, and Manages Some of the World’s Most Powerful Brands`. 

This complete summary of the ideas from Leander Kahney's book `Inside Steve's Brain` shows that Steve Jobs has single-handedly revolutionised the personal computer industry, built Pixar, dramatically changed the music industry and turned around a Fortune 500 company in dire straits. He has the reputation of being a tricky person to work with, but he’s a self-made billionaire who must be doing something right. This summary analyses Steve Jobs’ career, identifying some key personality traits which have propelled him to the top. It also looks at each trait, and demonstrates how it’s helped him in crucial decisions. For example, Jobs is focused: he’s aware of what he’s good at, and what he’s not. He delegates the latter in order to focus on the former. He takes that philosophy into a wider arena, by always concentrating on what Apple does best as well. Jobs is a perfectionist: this has meant that good projects have been killed, and that product design takes longer. But this has paid off, because Apple has won countless design awards and intuitive design is one of its USPs. 

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To lear more, read `Inside Steve's Brain` and discover a fascinating book, combining biographical detail with business advice and strategy analysis.

Summary of Inside Steve’s Brain (Leander Kahney)

1. Focus

At a personal level, Steve Jobs excels at focusing on what he’s good at and delegating the rest to others. The same philosophy applies to business. When he regained control of Apple, his first priority was to get the company focused on what its good at.

Irrespective of any personality issues which may become involved, Steve Jobs is crystal clear about what he’s good at and what he’s not:

In just the same way as Steve Jobs is crystal clear about where he adds value and where he does not, when he returned to Apple Computer as interim CEO in 1997, Steve Jobs systematically took the company apart and analyzed its components. Jobs quickly found there were four facts staring him in the face:

1. Apple was about six months from bankruptcy if it kept doing business the same way it then was.
2. The company was selling about forty different products -everything from inkjet printers and hand-helds to computers.
3. Apple’s computer product line had become so confusing it was impossible for customers to tell one model from another.
4. Apple’s R&D engineers were working on some interesting stuff but nobody was doing the difficult work of buckling down and getting things market ready.

Jobs went through all of the product lines offered by Apple one by one and then came back with his “go-forward plan” which was considered to be quite radical at that time:

• Apple would develop and sell four machines – two notebooks (one for consumers, the other for professionals) and two desktops (again, one for consumers, one for professionals).
  
• Apple would sell everything else – its printer business, monitors, software, hand-helds, etc.
• Apple would focus on making premium world-class computers. Any research projects which did not relate to this aim were cancelled – which meant Jobs killed hundreds of projects with immediate effect.
• The product managers were responsible for matching staffing levels to the company’s needs moving forward – which resulted in mass layoffs. Jobs was careful, however, to retain a core team of talented engineers which he referred to as his A team. They would later work on the iPod.
• Jobs also streamlined Apple’s organizational chart so everyone knew who they reported to and what was expected of them.
• Jobs killed the Mac clones in the marketplace, and insisted on keeping everything Apple did totally proprietary.

“The roots of Apple were to build computers for people, not for corporations. The world doesn’t need another Dell or Compaq.”

– Steve Jobs

“When I joined Apple in 1993 it was wonderful. You could do creative, innovative things. But it was chaotic. You can’t do that in an organization. You need a few creative people, and the rest get the work done.”

– Steve Jobs

“What are the great brands? Levi’s, Coke, Disney, Nike. Most people would put Apple in that category. You could spend billions building a brand not as good as Apple. Yet Apple hasn’t been doing anything with this incredible asset. What is Apple, after all? Apple is about people who think outside the box, people who want to use computers to help them change the world, to help them create things that make a difference, and not just to get the job done.”

– Steve Jobs

“Jobs has taken his interests and personality traits -obsessiveness, narcissism, perfectionism – and turned them into the hallmarks of his career. Jobs has used his natural gilts and talents to remake Apple. He has fused high technology with design, branding and fashion.”

– Leander Kahney

2. Despotism

When developing technology-based products, it’s easy to try and cram more and more features in. You’ve got to have someone who makes the hard call to stop developing new things and start manufacturing and shipping. Steve Jobs is good at acting like a despot and making the hard calls.

“As technology becomes more complex, Apple’s core strength of knowing how to make very sophisticated technology comprehensible to mere mortals is in even greater demand.”

– Steve Jobs

“What makes Steve’s methodology different than everyone else’s is that he always believed that the most important decisions you make are not the things that you do, but the things you decide not to do.”

– John Sculley, Apple CEO 1983 – 1993

When developing consumer products, it’s very easy to let “feature creep” get in the way-where engineers keep on adding more and more features to products merely because they can rather than for any other rationale. Steve Jobs is very good at avoiding this all-too-common trap. He never sets out to cram as many bells and whistles into the devices Apple makes. Instead, he’s much more likely to par...