When I heard that Steve Jobs had died, I felt terribly sad. Although I never met him, his ability to create one category-defining product after another made him one of my personal innovation heroes. The scope and effect of his creations showed him to be a modern-day Edison, and we can all learn from the beliefs, mental models and processes he used.

To excel, focus

One of Jobs’s favorite mantras was: “Focus means saying no.” When he returned to Apple in 1997, Jobs cut the number of Apple’s products from 40 to only four: two desktops and two notebooks. This intense focus meant saying no to many ideas. As Jobs said, “We look at a lot of things, but I’m as proud of the products we have not done as I am of the ones we have done.”

On each individual product, Jobs insisted on a tight focus to avoid “feature creep,” in which unnecessary features are added to products.

Pursue excellence

Concentrating on a few products enables Apple to spend its resources perfecting those products. Jobs pushed everyone to excellence. He said, “Be a yardstick for quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”

Only ‘A’ players; no bozos

Jobs believed that innovation is a team sport, and he recruited the most talented people he could find: “I always considered part of my job was to keep the quality level of people in the organizations I work with very high. That’s what I consider one of the few things I actually can contribute individually to — to really try to instill in the organization the goal of only having ‘A’ players. In everything I’ve done it really pays to go after the best people in the world.” The flip side of this was getting rid of the underperformers he called “bozos”: “It’s painful when you have some people who are not the best people in the world and you have to get rid of them; but I found that my job has sometimes exactly been that — to get rid of some people who didn’t measure up and I’ve always tried to do it in a humane way. But nonetheless it has to be done and it is never fun.”

Design is sexy functionality

When Jobs returned to Apple, he asked, “Tell me what’s wrong with this place?” His answer: “It’s the products. The products suck! There’s no sex in them anymore.” Jobs found ways to give Apple’s products sex appeal. “We made the buttons on the screens look so good you’ll want to lick them.” But his understanding of design went beyond appearances. “Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although it was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that.”

Don’t settle for the first good solution

Great design requires deeply understanding the problem, and not stopping at the first solution. Jobs said, “When you start looking at a problem and think it’s really simple, you don’t understand how complex the problem really is. Once you get into the problem, you see that it’s complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That’s where most people stop, and the solutions tend to work for a while. But the really great person will keep going, find the underlying problem, and come up with an elegant solution that works on every level.”

Collect dots, and then connect them

Steve Jobs thought that “Creativity is just connecting things.” The more dots — things to connect — you have, and the more diverse those dots are, the better your creativity and solutions will be. “When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”

Trust yourself

Jobs relied on his own research and intuition more than focus groups. “We have a lot of customers, and we have a lot of research into our installed base. We also watch industry trends pretty carefully. But in the end, for something this complicated, it’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” When asked what market research went into the iPad, he said, “None. It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.” Guy Kawasaki, the former Apple “evangelist,” commented that “Steve Jobs doesn’t do market research. Market research for Steve Jobs is the right hemisphere talks to the left hemisphere.”

Be passionate

Jobs believed that “the only way to do great work is to love what you do.” He made those around him believe that unlike the “bozos” all around them, the people at Apple were changing the world. They were making “insanely great” things and making the world a better place; the money came second. As Jobs said, “I was worth about over a million dollars when I was twenty-three and over ten million dollars when I was twenty-four and over a hundred million dollars when I was twenty-five, and it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money.” Rather than focusing on making money, Jobs and his team focused on making meaning. “The older I get, the more I’m convinced that motives make so much difference. And our primary goal here is to make the world’s best PCs — not to be the biggest or the richest.”

Do it now

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life,” Jobs told Stanford students in 2005. A few months earlier, he had been treated for pancreatic cancer, which made him aware of how short life is, and how little time there is to do what you love. Looking at his accomplishments since then, it’s clear that he always pushed hard for the excellence in innovation and design that he loved. “Almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

© Dr. Detlef Reis 2011. This article was published in parallel in the Bangkok Post under the title “From one ideator to another: Learning from the man who inspired Apple” on 13 October 2011.