Steve Jobs’ resignation as Apple’s CEO for health reasons is going to dominate the headlines for days to come. We’ll leave the business analysis and speculation to others; in line with Lifehacker’s focus on productivity, here are our favourite lessons learned from Jobs.
How to give great presentations
Jobs’ presentation skills are legendary; indeed, we scheduled a post referencing this morning just before news of his resignation emerged. You can look to jobs for general presentation strategies as well as what to do when things go awry.
How to organise your home office
It’s tempting to image Jobs’ home office looks like an Apple store, but in fact it’s rather more personalised than that, as you can see in a 2004 photo shoot. We imagine there’s an iPad in evidence these days.
You can’t please everyone
One of the defining strategies used by Apple in general, and epitomised by Jobs, is to push ahead with a given strategy even if it’s unpopular. Consider its ongoing refusal to support Flash. Or a trivial but illustrative case: a common complaint about iTunes is that every time there’s a minor update, you have to download the entire package again. Jobs’ response? “It’s about the size of one downloaded album. Not so big.” That attitude has remained in place (witness the recent download-only update to Mac OS X Lion); bad news if you still have dial-up, but pretty much consistent.
Obviously, Apple can’t ignore everything consumers say (demonstrated by the belated release of a USB version of Lion, for instance). But single-mindedly sticking to one idea despite criticism has worked out spectacularly well for Apple.
Picture by Diana Walker/The Bigger Picture Gallery]
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.