“I recently heard a successful business leader state that he was no different from Steve Jobs, and therefore Jobs was of no interest to him,” Eric Zelermyer writes for Medium. “It was a tossed-off, casual comment, but it bothered me, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time since pondering why.”
“Relentless devotion to minute improvements in product design is what engendered, over time, the emotional attachment of many millions of so-called ‘Apple fanboys,'” Zelermyer writes. “Apple under Steve Jobs consistently placed the improvement of their products over easy temptations of short-term profit. Why, even when Apple was nearly out of business, did Macs not become filled with sponsored crapware that undoubtedly would have brought in a huge boost to revenue? Jobs would rather have seen his products die than compromise on the experience of using them.
“It is hard to imagine any of today’s business leaders possessing the ability or desire to craft the details of their products to this level,” Zelermyer writes. “For many of us who are professionally engaged in creative pursuits, we see our skills almost in opposition to what is required to succeed in business. Self-promotion, financial meticulousness, managerial acumen, and competitiveness are traits that many of us wish we possessed but feel entirely foreign. For one person to have all those traits at a rarefied level and also possess brilliant creativity, design judgement on par with the world’s best, and a tireless devotion to enforcing his aesthetic standards is nearly unique.”
“It’s a cosmic accident, an extremely rare mutation,” Zelermyer writes. “So to those who think they possess equivalent greatness, I can only say: you’re not that lucky.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Steve Jobs was a jack of all trades and a master of many.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Mark” for the heads up.]