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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Can you stand one more Steve Jobs retrospective?

I’m not sure I can either. But as so much of what I’ve read seems to have missed, not just the point, but both of the points (there are two) … well, what the heck. And so, let’s try to answer the question, why did Steve Jobs matter?

What Answer #1 isn’t: He started it all. He didn’t. Not even he and Steve Wozniac together get the credit.

Jobs and Wozniac (note to Apple: Aren’t you embarrassed that “Wozniac” doesn’t pass an iPad spell-check?) (10/11/2011 note to readers: Yes, this was my mistake – “Wozniak” passes the spellcheck just fine! – Bob) were part of a thriving community of people fascinated by the potential for personal computers. They built, not the first PC, but the first commercial PC … the first that could do something useful for mere mortals right out of the box.

Why this doesn’t matter all that much is that, had they not done so, someone else would have before much more time had passed. They got there first, and deserve credit for it. But it isn’t why Steve Jobs matters.

What Answer #1 is: He made the user interface important. As you have to know, Jobs had nothing to do with the invention of the graphical user interface. Douglas Engelbart did most of that work, with a team at Xerox PARC labs finishing things up.

But Engelbart lacked influence, and Xerox lacked interest. Jobs saw the result and had the key insight: The user interface, all by itself, mattered, independent of the specific use to which anyone put it. This led to the Macintosh, which led to Windows, making the graphical user interface ubiquitous.

The notion that making computers easy for humans to figure out should be the centerpiece of the design effort was uniquely his.

Or, if you’re more cynical, Steve Jobs was partially responsible for the ongoing dumbing down of the American public. The downside of an immensely friendly user interface is that the user has less learning … and thinking … to do.

Think of the GUI as the automatic transmission of computing, encouraging more drivers, including worse drivers, to share the road.

What Answer #2 isn’t: Solving hard problems. Don’t get me wrong – smartphones and tablets matter, and while Jobs no more invented these than he invented the PC, without him they’d be a whole lot less interesting and transformational. But nothing about them was hard.

Apple has nothing that corresponds to the old Bell Labs or IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Apple won’t invent the next transistor or scanning tunneling electron microscope, nor will it discover anything as consequential as the cosmic background radiation.

Heck, iOS doesn’t even provide e-inking as an operating-system-level service, let alone something as important, relevant, and difficult as handwriting recognition.

Apple takes on the easy problems. This isn’t an indictment. Figuring out new and interesting things you can do with what has already been solved is tremendously useful. It shouldn’t be confused with doing something hard, though.

What Answer #2 is: Providing a leadership model lots of companies should follow. From what we know, Jobs didn’t lead as CEOs should lead. He was an autocratic micromanager, unable to delegate and deeply involved in the details of product design. Let’s hope, for Hewlett Packard’s sake, that Meg Whitman doesn’t follow suit.

But, and these are crucial, Steve Jobs focused on potential, and he insisted on excellence.

Nothing about the iPod, iTunes store, iPhone, or iPad was safe. Jobs focused on upside potential, not downside risk. Like the great generals in history he preferred offense to defense.

As for excellence, he insisted on it in the technical as well as general meaning of the word. Technically, “excellence” refers to the presence of desirable features people want to buy, as opposed to “quality,” which refers to the absence of defects … a characteristic Jobs didn’t particularly care about.

Under Steve Jobs, every Apple product had to be so desirable that its customers were willing to pay premium prices for its designs while forgiving it for serious lapses in quality.

So pay attention, because this is why Steve Jobs mattered most: He had no obvious interest in “maximizing shareholder value” or increasing Apple’s profits. He was far from the highest-paid CEO in America and never seemed to worry about that, either.

Along with Bill Gates and almost nobody else at the helm of a corporate behemoth, he personally loved his company’s products.

Like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs demonstrated that if a company’s CEO focuses on building products people want to buy, the rest will happen.

Imagine if General Motors had been run like that.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

IT governance is a bread-and-butter topic for consultants like me. Relatively few companies are happy with how they go about deciding:

  • How much to invest in information technology.
  • Where to invest it … what, that is, IT ought to be working on.
  • How much financial benefit its investments return.

More often than not, the process (if you can dignify it with that name) is contentious, confusing, and surrounded by complaints that have all the subtlety and emotional maturity of “Mom likes you best” expressions of victimhood.

The solutions are rarely difficult to design. That isn’t where the challenges lie. For example, the answer to how much a company should invest in information technology is pretty simple: Nothing. What companies should invest in is revenue enhancement, cost reduction, and risk management. While these investments often require new or modified information technology, that’s a different matter.

Companies that recognize the distinction between investments in information technology and investments in revenue, cost, and risk that require information technology can have just as much contention, confusion, and complaining, but at least the arguments are about the right subject.

It’s a start. Next comes the hard part: Getting the execs beyond their own silos so they think like leaders of the whole company.

Go back to the how-much-to-invest question. The answer is straightforward in concept if hard to calculate: Enough to use up all of the company’s capacity to absorb change and not a penny more.

Or less.

Imagine a company perfects this approach. Its decisions are about revenue, cost, and risk. It expends the right amount of effort and money in them. It has optimized its investment in the future, making it a fine, rare beastie.

And it’s still missing a critical piece of the puzzle, because if this is as far as “IT governance” (actually, business planning) goes, it leaves out one of IT’s most important but too-often ignored responsibilities — providing technology leadership, something that’s easy to recommend but hard to accomplish.

The principle isn’t complicated. My major premise is that new technologies can represent threats or opportunities — the two reasons businesses have to be different tomorrow than they were yesterday. My minor premise is that the company’s best expertise in information technology resides in the IT organization (I hope, and if not, what’s up with that?).

My syllogistically inescapable conclusion: IT is responsible for recognizing technology-driven opportunities and threats to the company’s business model and bringing them forward into the company’s business planning process.

Sounds neat and tidy in theory, doesn’t it? If only it were neat and tidy in practice. Sadly, as is so often the case when the subject is the future, neatness and tidiness … and even more, predictability … aren’t going to be part of the picture.

But before we get to why it’s going to be messy, let’s put a spotlight on something that might have escaped your attention: IT’s job isn’t to highlight threats and opportunities to make sure someone knows and decides to do something about them. It won’t work, because it can’t: As already mentioned, if you take this approach the company will completely saturate its capacity to absorb change before anyone starts looking at the threats and opportunities you’re bringing to their attention.

Decisions commit or deny time, staff and money — otherwise they’re nothing but empty talk. And as there won’t be any time, staff or money left to commit, the threats no matter how dire, and opportunities no matter how attractive, will just have to wait around gathering dust until the company’s next planning cycle begins.

Which is why IT’s job isn’t to merely highlight threats and opportunities. It’s to bring them into the company’s business planning process so decision-makers can integrate them into the company’s strategic and tactical plans.

Now we’re ready for the messy part, as if it weren’t messy enough already: You have to be in a position to recognize technology-driven threats when they’re small enough to be manageable, and opportunities before they’re apparent and obvious to your competitors.

Which is why you and everyone else in the IT organization has to understand how the business works and where it’s headed; need insight into your suppliers, competitors and business partners, how they work and where they’re headed; and have to stay aware of new industry developments.

Have to understand, that is, at a deeper level than vague, generic words like “the cloud” and “tablets,” digging to the level of specific new capabilities that can make a difference to your specific business.

Because threats and opportunities are never in general. It’s always the specifics that tell the tale.

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