Case Study Series #1 - Steve Jobs

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Steve Jobs - Wikipedia
Image Source: Wikipedia

In the first blog of the case study series, I am going to be elucidating on Steve Jobs' life and try to analyze how he became so successful. 

Few men have changed the world today as much as Steve Jobs did. From being one of the pioneers in bringing about the personal computing revolution to transforming the mobile, music and digital printing industry through his company Apple, Steve Jobs serves as an example for all future entrepreneurs and leaders for innovation, ingenuity, leadership and marketing among countless other things. 

The reasons why I feel Steve Jobs was so successful are: 

1. Innovation - Steve Jobs always believed that innovation was the key to success. Having an exceptional sense and taste for design and detail, he often observed that the standard design of phones and laptops at that time could be made in a much better way. This is proven by products such as the Apple iPhone, which although was completely different to the standard button phones at that time, soon became the foundational design of all touch screen phones today. 

2. Marketing - In my opinion, Steve Jobs was arguably one of the greatest marketeers ever to have walked the face of the Earth. Through iconic ads such as "1984" and "Think Different", Jobs was able to convince people why they should buy Apple products. Furthermore, Jobs was extraordinarily skilled at giving keynote addresses(known colloquially as Stevenotes) to introduce new Apple products. Although they were more expensive than similar products made by other companies, Jobs was able to effectively sell his products by heavily emphasizing on their various strengths and comparing them to the weaknesses of similar other products, thereby showing potential buyers why they should buy computers or phones made by Apple. To further make my point, I highly recommend that you watch Job's keynote address for the first iPhone in 2007. I am sure that by the end of the address, you too will want to buy the iPhone released 13 years ago just like I wanted to😂 

3. The Reality Distortion Field - The 'Reality Distortion Field' is a term often used to describe Jobs' charisma and ability to make his employees or audiences to believe in something that would be hard to achieve. It is said that Jobs often used his reality distortion field to distort his co workers' scale of challenges to make them believe that even an extremely difficult project with a near impossible deadline could be achieved. This shows how he fully leveraged the skills he had to his complete advantage. 

4. Using Failures As A Stepping Stone To Success - Although Jobs was the cofounder of Apple along with Steve Wozniak, he was ousted from the company in 1985 following the failures of the Macintosh and Apple Lisa and a huge fight with the then CEO John Sculley. However, Jobs took this as a new opportunity to form a new company and hence founded NeXT. Although NeXT was not a successful company like Apple, Jobs continued to scour for new ventures and heavily invested in an unknown company called the Graphics Group, who pioneered computer animation, from near bankruptcy. This company later came to be known as Pixar Animation Studios and it went on to become the biggest animation studio after Disney. Jobs later said the reason he invested in Pixar was because he believed that in the future all animation was going to be computer generated, thus vindicating his far-sightedness. Ironically, Apple was on a steep decline at the same time, thus the board decided to bring Jobs back. This marked the beginning of Apple's dominance as new revolutionary products such as the iPod, iPhone, iPad and the MacBooks were released under Jobs' leadership, thereby showing how big a change a great leader can bring about to a company. 

To conclude, Steve Jobs was, is and will always remain an inspiration to all of us not only in the world of business, but also in developing a never-say-die attitude which will take us far in life. Thank you for reading the first blog on the case study series(which also happens to be the 100th blog for me overall!)😀

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