On Steve
When I heard about Steve Jobs leaving yesterday, it was expected news but still sad.
In September of last year I was home sick for two days when I got an email stating that my former boss at Warners was leaving. I, like many were devastated by this news. It set in motion a series of other events which resulted in my decision to leave the company in January.
I have never worked for Apple, but I have worked with a lot of people at Apple. Jobs’ influence on the company was not something I ever saw directly, but you could feel if you talked to any of the 40,000+ people who work at the company. Good leadership is a positive virus, something which is a part of every individual who works underneath it. With everyone I worked with at Apple, there was always the undercurrent of Jobs: a focus on quality, perfection, disruption and the additive effects of technology on humanity.
On my former boss’ last day, I was not in the office. I was not there to give him a send off on the front stairs, and I left a few months later. But his vision remains with those who worked for him. A positive viral remnant.
The same will be applied to Apple. Steve Jobs is an outsized person, and someone who’s influence on society in the last 30 years will rank up there with Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, William Randolph Hearst and others. You can’t contain outsized influence in the frailty that is our human selves. Influence lives on and spreads so long as the virus remains intact.
I think the greatest thing that comes out of the legacy of Apple in the Jobs era is that he has put forth the notion in society that taste, design, aesthetics, simplicity and joy matter much more than technology.
Somewhere there is a kid thinking they can change the world. That “good enough” isn’t good enough. And that perfection is something to aspire to and exceed rather than relegate to an impossibility. Somewhere is a kid like I was at 5, realizing that I can make the turtle move, that these machines can respond to me.
And rather than thinking that building a life around this has to be relegated to the gray world of impersonal distance, thinks that technology is something that can be felt, touched, manipulated and make our lives better.
Thanks Steve. You’ve made this world a better place.