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Steve Jobs, Apple founder – 1955-2011

I will always remember Steve Jobs for his ability to design a vision of the future that differs from the present – he never settled.

Steve Jobs 1955-2011

A story about Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs has always been known for his attention to detail – insisting on beautiful typeface and fonts from Apple’s beginning.

Paul Sakuma/AP

Vic Gundotra — the man behind Google +, posted a story about an interaction with Steve Jobs.

He writes that on a Sunday morning in 2008, he received a call during a religious service. He didn’t answer, but Jobs left a message saying he had something “urgent to discuss.” Gundotra returned his call almost immediately:

“Hey Steve — this is Vic,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t answer your call earlier. I was in religious services, and the caller ID said unknown, so I didn’t pick up.”

Steve laughed. He said, “Vic, unless the Caller ID said ‘GOD’, you should never pick up during services”.

I laughed nervously. After all, while it was customary for Steve to call during the week upset about something, it was unusual for him to call me on Sunday and ask me to call his home. I wondered what was so important?

“So Vic, we have an urgent issue, one that I need addressed right away. I’ve already assigned someone from my team to help you, and I hope you can fix this tomorrow,” said Steve.

“I’ve been looking at the Google logo on the iPhone and I’m not happy with the icon. The second O in Google doesn’t have the right yellow gradient. It’s just wrong and I’m going to have Greg fix it tomorrow. Is that okay with you?”

The CEO of Apple — the tech visionary who revolutionized personal computers, the way we listen to music and the way we think of mobile devices — was worried about the yellow in the second “O” in Google. Needless to say the problem was fixed, and Gundotra says it taught him a lesson on leadership and “passion and attention to detail.”

“It was a lesson I’ll never forget,” wrote Gundotra. “CEOs should care about details. Even shades of yellow. On a Sunday.”

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While no longer managing the day-to-day actives of Apple, Steve Jobs remains a great leader – one that all leaders, engineers and architects should learn to appreciate for his discipline, willingness to take risks, execution and attention to detail.

The Start-Up of You

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/13/opinion/13friedman.html

Web 3.0: The ‘Social Wave’ and How It Disrupts the Internet – Knowledge@Wharton

Web 3.0: The ‘Social Wave’ and How It Disrupts the Internet – Knowledge@Wharton.

The web has grown to the point where “there’s too much information,” according to Katz. “Finding ways to filter out information and find what’s relevant to you is getting harder and harder. The model of Google doesn’t work at scale — especially when it comes to things where taste matters.”

Katz predicted that the future of the Internet “is one where every page is going to be personalized. If you plan a trip to Paris, you shouldn’t see [search results listing] 900 hotels. You should see six hotels based on where you stayed before; the places you checked in at on Facebook and Foursquare, and the places where your friends have stayed. It’s not something that’s just relevant to travel; it’s something that makes sense for almost every part of the Internet.”

Building a Shared Mental Model to Rekindle Collaboration

Building a Shared Mental Model to Rekindle Collaboration.

The ability to develop an accurate mental model often separates successful companies from organizations that do not survive.

So what exactly is a company’s mental model? Simply put, a robust mental model eliminates internal confusion. The mental model is a framework that simplifies a potentially complicated strategy, allowing everyone in the organization to internalize the strategy and be guided by it.

Great companies build and share their mental model internally in ways that enable managers and employees to independently make critical decisions day in and day out that are aligned with the strategy. Without a strong mental model strategy can become open to interpretation, decision making can become bogged down, or both can occur at once.

The Only Way to Get Important Things Done

The Only Way to Get Important Things Done.

The answer, surprisingly, is not that they have more will or discipline than you do. The counterintuitive secret to getting things done is to make them more automatic, so they require less energy.

It turns out we each have one reservoir of will and discipline, and it gets progressively depleted by any act of conscious self-regulation. In other words, if you spend energy trying to resist a fragrant chocolate chip cookie, you’ll have less energy left over to solve a difficult problem. Will and discipline decline inexorably as the day wears on.

“Acts of choice,” the brilliant researcher Roy Baumeister and his colleagues have concluded, “draw on the same limited resource used for self-control.” That’s especially so in a world filled more than ever with potential temptations, distractions and sources of immediate gratification.

New Ways to Collaborate for Process Improvement

New Ways to Collaborate for Process Improvement.

This post is part of the HBR Insight Center Making Collaboration Work.

To make big improvements in productivity and customer service, people in an organization must collaborate across corporate hierarchies, functions, companies, and geographies. Emerging social networking technologies offer new ways to overcome these boundaries. Leading companies such as IBM, Ford, and Avery Dennison are making major improvements in key processes by creating online communities to share deep knowledge.

Solving Your Organization’s Open-Faced Sandwich

Solving Your Organization’s Open-Faced Sandwich

Here’s the problem: Our jobs are complex and interdependent, but our goals, objectives, and, most importantly, mindsets, are often siloed.

We each have a job to do — sell a service, design a product, address a customer issue — and the underlying mindset is: if I do my job well, and you do your job well, we’ll achieve our organization’s goals.

But it rarely works that way. People in one silo often have information needed by — but never given to — people in another silo, in which case if there’s a problem anywhere in the organization, everyone fails.

This is not a question of blame. It’s a practical reality of collaboration. And every organization of two or more is a collaborative effort.

How do we escape the silo mentality?

It helps if leadership is explicit about the cross-silo outcomes that are most important in the organization. It helps if each person is committed to a whole that is larger than their part and if leaders communicate, prioritize, and reward for that outcome.

It also helps if the organization’s structures and processes support collaboration. If people meet regularly to share what they are learning and are taught the skills to give and receive feedback. It helps if people are taught to communicate clearly, gently, and inoffensively with each other, avoiding blame and embarrassment, for the sake of cross-silo outcomes.

All that helps. But even with all that support, direction, and skill, it still takes one more critical ingredient. Perhaps the most critical.

Courage.