Steve Jobs often appeared as a highly irrational person. Capable of an all-encompassing inspired grand vision and at the same time focused like mad on tiny implementation details that nobody before him saw. What is it that may lie behind such an impossible mixture of traits?
We normally look at innovating as an external, objective process and refer to it with a view to managing it. Could we take a corresponding perspective from within, whereby the inner setting of individuals is what makes innovation happen?
The classical school of thought separates macro- from micro-levels. Well-established in economics, it has also led firms to specialize in their staff.
There used to be a time – for instance, in the 1970s – when IBM trusted its 120 high-profile planners to think of the next product lines, each in his or her own business domain. They were each locked in safe rooms and were continuously amassing enormous amount of data and information about their own ongoing business, from which they drew intelligence about the next phases. At the same time, thousand of developers and implementers focused on the nitty gritty level of operations.
The division of labor is no new thing. But it has percolated the granularity levels too: those who think big and those who think small.
Jobs was a well-known template for crossing the macro-, meso- (the middle level where we find our neighborhoods) and micro-levels at any rate. Possibly in the future, scholars will find that, in order to understand Steve Jobs, they had better study quantum physics. Why is this so?
First, because he navigated his firm and markets by zooming in and zooming out incessantly. Finding resemblance in micro details and macro-visions: as above, so below. His mind was not the mind of a Westerner only. In his youth, he was attracted to oriental thinking and made his way to India in search for wisdom. He did not find it there, but he gradually developed a dual approach from within: a left brain hemispheric view for analysis and a right hemispheric glance for synthetic vision. All in one, about anything, anytime.
Tracing back to history, we find similar traits in a few characters. One of them was Leonardo Da Vinci. Strange parallels can be found in Jobs’ and Da Vinci’s lives. They were both vegetarians, one was an abandoned child, the other was an illegitimate child. Leonardo was both an artist and a scientist. A most creative mind and an acute engineer. He usually wrote from right to left, and it has been suggested he was left-handed. Jobs declared himself ambidextrous (as suggested by example in an interview with Newsweek in 19841), indirectly recognizing the symmetric activation of brain hemispheres in his staff too. Of all the peculiar traits, Leonardo and Jobs indeed have much in common. They are:
We have studied Leonardo at length over the past few years [COR, 10], and could notice a “Leonardo method”. Three common features among others stand out are:
The above denotes an unleashed systemic thinking. When Jobs repeats his well-known “connecting the dots” mantra, we visualize Leonardo glaring at birds to invent the helicopter and so on. Countless examples are found in both biographies. Leonardo did not hesitate to dissect corpses in order to draw better models for his design from biology. Moreover, this was seriously heretic activity during his time.
A famous artist who connected the dots in special ways was Maurits Cornelis Escher. He customarily designed spaces that loop onto themselves, thus creating scenes where things become circular, instead of remaining linear as per a traditional depiction. No past and no future, just a universe where “things are instantaneous”. And this exactly expresses one basic quantum property. By working linearly, we presuppose a total order on things, hence past then future. But here, everything we do modifies the future. You bring your ecosystem with you in the change. And this is what we see with Apple: only one perduring ecosystem that renews onto itself.
Look at Apple product interfaces: they do not contain things that are ordered linearly (take e.g. iTunes). The interface that you are given understands the general concepts far better, which guide you toward a pseudo-linear action. Not a side instruction manual, but your own desire. In doing so, the interface contains no slowing content, no thinking brake.
Someone who spans not less than personal computers, animation films, the music industry, smartphones, tablets, retail stores and digital publication by: (1) systematically reinventing a fresh identity for each of them, and (2) connecting them seamlessly into giant ecosystems, is the mark of an adventurous systemic mind. How many core products churns an Apple? Less than 10 (iMacs, MacBooks, iPhones, iPods, iTunes (and Store), Apple Store, App Store and OS X. Each is a leader on its own. How many mature paintings made a Leonardo? Arguably less than ten. Each being top of the line...five centuries later. Both in subject matter and in the fabric, including the technology used.
Yet, the drawings, the sketches and the blueprints are innumerable for each. As Jony Ive, Job’s sister soul for design, once said “we would be ashamed to say how many prototypes we make” before a product.
In a nutshell: to understand Apple, scrutinize Steve Jobs. And to understand Jobs, investigate Leonardo Da Vinci. Appendix 3 provides an original and thorough analysis of the way the Maestro thought and worked. We believe this becomes of key importance for inventing new ways of doing business in the next future.
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