Steve Jobs

 Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson, Simon & Schuster, 2011                    Steve Jobs is THE business book of the year, maybe the decade.  In 628 pages it is a surprisingly frank long look at Steve Jobs’ life and work.  The author honors our entire tech history by including great stories of Jobs’ frequently flawed interactions and the deals with his sometime competitors and sometime friends, as well as his family.  Further, the book leaves us with unanswered questions  - can the United States, given it’s current anti-business politics, ever hope to see more runs like that of super-entrepreneur Jobs?  How much time does Apple have, given Moore’s inevitable life cycle turning?  And if we had met Steve Jobs in his early days, say at NeXT after the Apple board fired him in favor of John Scully, whom Jobs had hired out of the beverage world, would we have praised or damned him?

I’ve still got my t-shirt and Jobs video “The Machine that Makes the Machine” from my visit to NeXT. And I recently ran across my Apple non-disclosure agreement when purging some old files. The company was still small and to outsiders its future was again uncertain.  I remember a design engineer pulling a small thin rectangular device from his pocket and whispering, “this is it - soon we’ll all be able to do more than talk on cell phones…”  Considering that my cell phone had the heft and feel of a gray rubber brick, what he was signaling left me intrigued, but we had to wait.

There are many stories in this book that manufacturing and supply chain pros will love – finally, the guys in white socks get the real recognition that is our due from the serious corporate contenders!  The best one appears toward the end of the book when Jobs was persuaded to meet with the President.  Looking back, one might describe the meeting as a well-intentioned but doomed attempt to influence current Washington politics.  This story has lessons for all of us in manufacturing and supply chain, but I shudder to think at what these lessons truly are.  The meeting lasted, according the Isaacson, forty-five minutes, “and Jobs did not hold back.  ‘You’re headed for a one-term presidency,’ Jobs told Obama at the outset.  To prevent that, he said, the administration needed to be a lot more business friendly.  He described how easy it was to build a factory in China, and said it was almost impossible to do these days in America, largely because of regulations and unnecessary costs.”

China, China, China

At a dinner that followed this shorter meeting, Jobs focused on a subject well-known to CEO’s struggling to hire scarce engineering talent. He made the point that “Apple had 700,000 factory workers employed in China, ….and that was because it needed 30,000 engineers on-site to support those workers.  ‘You can’t find that many in America to hire,’ he said.  These factory engineers did not have to be Phd’s or geniuses; they simply needed to have basic engineering skills for manufacturing.  Tech schools, community colleges or trade schools could train them.  ‘If you could educate these engineers,’ he said, ‘we could move more manufacturing plants here.’”

He got it – Jobs understood manufacturing, and why we still need it!

Post Script – When I asked Dick Morley, serial entrepreneur and wild and crazy investor, idea man, etc, a question about Apple –

“Does Moore's law apply to Apple, and how long do you think they've got?”

this was his one-line digital response:

 http://singularityhub.com/2010/09/28/ten-years-apple-infographic-moores-law-at-its-best/

Life and work, crazy creativity, innovation, being in a cult, manufacturing and supply chain, engineering, the tech timeline, the juncture of design and art.

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