Like probably hundreds of thousands of people yesterday, I watched a short video of Steve Jobs’ commencement speech st Stanford University in 2005.
What struck me was not really what he said – after all commencement speeches pretty much follow a typical pattern: be true to your heats; don’t compromise goals trust your gut; family is important etc. etc. In that sense Jobs’ words weren’t that original yet, nearly 20 years after graduating and hearing a similar message myself, i was hooked.
Why? Well, like with Apple’s products, it was not so much the content of the device but its appealing intuition, apparent customisation (“it does what I want it to do!”), personalisation (to wit stories from his personal life to underscore a point) and accessibility (he’s the guy that wears jeans to major corporate events and used to be a hippy).
Is that philosophy a recipe for business success, or is mere consistency of your philosophy with the corporate philosophy (even if that happens to be “evil”) what matters?
