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By Ammar W. Mango
When writing about a business leader, it is important to highlight the "claim to fame". The problem with a person like Steve Jobs is picking just one to mention. The man who started Apple in the mid-1970s continues to provide technology breakthroughs and is still going strong. Jobs is currently the CEO of Apple, which he co-founded in 1976, and of Pixar, the animation studio which he co-founded in 1986. A trendsetter, Jobs gave the world the Apple II, Macintosh, and NeXT computers.
Jobs went to high school in California and attended after-school lectures at Hewlett-Packard Co. in Palo Alto, California, where he worked with Stephen Wozniak as a summer employee.
He ended up dropping out of college after one semester. It was not a complete waste of time for the innovator, as he later said: "If I had never dropped in on that single course (a calligraphy course) in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts," he said.
Imagine what would have happened if this guy had made it through the rest of his college years.
Jobs took a job as a technician at video game manufacturer Atari. His first business idea was to build "blue boxes" that allowed for free long-distance phone calls. Funnily, it was based on a discovery that plain whistles, given as gifts in cereal boxes, had the same frequency as the AT&T long- distance supervision tone.
When he and Wozniak founded Apple Computer Co. from his family's garage, they came up with their first personal computer, Apple I, followed soon by Apple II, which placed the company among the leaders in the personal computer industry.
Jobs was also among the first to see the commercial potential of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) and the mouse, both originally developed at Xerox's Research Centre in Palo Alto. He incorporated these features into the Apple Macintosh computer.
As Apple grew, Jobs looked for a competent CEO to run the company and handpicked John Sculley from Pepsi Cola to take the job 1983. He later regretted that decision, especially given that Sculley was part of a power struggle that overthrew Jobs and stripped him of his executive duties. In 1985, Jobs left the company but remained as chairman.
After leaving Apple, he founded NeXT Computer. The machine was a technical marvel but never became popular beyond narrow application areas due to its high cost. However, it was not a complete loss, as the technology was used in developing the World Wide Web.
Jobs went back to Apple in 1996 when the company bought NeXT for $402 million and used its technology in developing the Mac OS X. In the months following Jobs' return to the company, it was rumoured that his programme cuts led employees to be afraid to run into him. His rare but brute on the spot terminations terrorised the company.
But back at the helm, Jobs' guidance led to the introduction of the successful iMac. Since then, the company has consistently turned out products with appealing designs and powerful branding, a combination that works well for the computer manufacturer.
Most recently, the company again distinguished itself by beginning the pod-casting technology revolution in tandem with the successful ascent of the iPod on the digital music scene. Some 10 million are expected to sell this quarter. This helped Apple make its biggest market share gains in years, doubling the company's share prices.
According to Guinness World Records, Jobs is the "Lowest Paid Chief Executive Officer" at a salary of $1 per year. This can be seen as a symbolic gesture from the founder who makes money through the shares that he holds only if his company makes money. This is the opposite of what many technology firm executives do when they strip their companies of much needed cash in favour of their personal salary, regardless of how well the company is doing. Jobs has, however, received many "gifts" from the company in the form of perks and shares.
He also contributed heavily to the animated movie industry by confounding the Academy Award-winning animation studio Pixar, which introduced six of the most famous animated films of all times: Toy Story (I and II); A Bug's Life, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, and The Incredibles. The films have grossed over $3 billion to date.
Jobs is known to focus on innovation while insisting on delivering on promises to customers. His leadership skills include persuasion and salesmanship, and he has a very aggressive and demanding personality. An Apple employee came up with the term "Reality Distortion Field" (RDF) to describe Jobs' persuasion abilities. It was later used to describe other managers like Jobs who become "passionately committed to possibly insane projects, without regard to the practicality of their implementation or competitive forces in the marketplace."
It requires a skillful mix of charm and exaggeration to "sell" people on ideas that are against their better judgement or interests. This is not really meant as a compliment. At the same time that critics mention RDF, they also point out the unrealistic pricing of some of Apple products and unwise decisions by the company that included the elimination of the Macintosh clones.
There are many books about Jobs including an unauthorised biography published by John Wiley & Sons, which led Jobs to forbid all of the publisher's books from Apple retail stores.
Jobs married Laurene Powell in 1991 and they have three children. His last name, Jobs, comes from his adoptive parents who raised him from infancy. His biological mother put him up for adoption when he was one- week-old; his biological father was a Syrian political science professor.
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