“It’s a great disservice to everyone, especially young people, that the stories that we often hear about the most accomplished entrepreneurs sound so effortless,” Peter Sims writes for Harvard Business Review. “The truth is just the opposite, even for visionary creative success stories like those of Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Howard Schultz, Wendy Kopp, and even the legendary Steve Jobs.”
“Like any creative process, any entrepreneur who wants to invent, innovate, or create must be willing to be imperfect and make mistakes in order to learn what works and what does not,” Sims writes. “It took Dorsey years of experimentation before he finally latched onto what ultimately became Twitter. Wendy Kopp started Teach for America, initially as a conference, on a shoestring budget after graduating from college. And Howard Schultz, while he had great foresight to recognize that Americans needed a communal coffee experience like those that existed in Europe, failed on his first try. As I wrote in Little Bets, when his first store opened in Seattle in 1986, there was non-stop opera music, menus in Italian, and no chairs. As Schultz acknowledges, he and his colleagues had to make ‘”a lot of mistakes’ to discover what would become the Starbucks we know today.”
Sims writes “Despite what we may have read, Steve Jobs was no different.”
Five of Steve Jobs’ biggest mistakes:
1. Recruiting John Sculley as CEO of Apple
2. Believing that Pixar would be a great hardware company
3. Not knowing the right market for NeXT computer
4. Launching numerous product failures
MacDailyNews Take: Blaming Jobs for the Newton and Macintosh TV, both of which were launched by Apple long after Steve Jobs was gone building what would become the basis for Apple’s salvation, Mac OS X, earn Sims two demerits. iMac’s hockey puck mouse, not Newton or Macintosh TV, should have been on Sims’ list of Jobsian product failures.
5. Trying to sell Pixar numerous times
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: No quibbles with the bozo headlining Sims’ list, we can assure you.
MacDailyNews Note: Today is Martin Luther King Day in the U.S. and the markets are closed. As usual on such trading holidays, we will have limited posting today.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]