You know, at one time there must’ve been dozens of companies makin’ buggy whips. And I’ll bet the last company around was the one that made the best buggy whip you ever saw.
Lawrence Garfield (“Larry the Liquidator”), played by Danny DeVito, Other People’s Money (read his speech here).
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In Joe Nocera’s column, Has Apple Peaked?, he clearly brings into focus the dilemma for great, successful companies. It is simply this: they have to invest their energies (their planning; their research; their meeting time) in protecting what they have built — which generates a lot! of money; so much money! — rather than pushing and pushing and pushing for the next leap forward. And when they do, then the next great leap forward will be done by some other company… And then, the long, slow decline begins.
Joe Nocera was a Steve Jobs observer for a long time. In Walter Isaacson’s biography, Steve Jobs, Isaacson includes this reflection by Nocera from the NeXT days.:
What particularly struck Joe Nocera was Jobs’s “almost willful lack of tact.” It was more than just an inability to hide his opinions when others said something he thought dumb; it was a conscious readiness, even a perverse eagerness, to put people down, humiliate them, show he was smarter.
This “willful lack of tact” led to humiliating putdowns by Jobs, but it also led to great leaps forward. In the Nocera column, he tells of the way Steve Jobs lambasted, and fired, the entire MobileMe team after putting out an inferior product. The specific column is about the iPhone 5, and the apparanetly-not-so-great maps app. (“Oh my god,” read one Twitter message I saw. “Apple maps is the worst ever. It is like using MapQuest on a BlackBerry.” MapQuest and BlackBerry. Exactly.) Mr. Nocera speculates that only Steve Jobs could have headed off this maps deficiency. Without Jobs, the “best days may soon be behind them.” From his column:
But there is also a less obvious — yet possibly more important — reason that Apple’s best days may soon be behind it. When Jobs returned to the company in 1997, after 12 years in exile, Apple was in deep trouble. It could afford to take big risks and, indeed, to search for a new business model, because it had nothing to lose.
Fifteen years later, Apple has a hugely profitable business model to defend — and a lot to lose. Companies change when that happens. “The business model becomes a gilded cage, and management won’t do anything to challenge it, while doing everything they can to protect it,” says Larry Keeley, an innovation strategist at Doblin, a consulting firm.
It is the nature of capitalism that big companies become defensive, while newer rivals emerge with better, smarter ideas.
I will pick up my iPhone 5 as soon as the lines go down (I’m not much of a fan of lines). I’ve got my iPad and my iMac, and I am a raving Apple fan. But I have read a lot about Steve Jobs, the frequently uncaring “jerk-like” leader who changed the world we live in. So, I’m not sure that I agree with Joe Nocera. Maybe the problem is not that big companies get too protective, although I suspect they do. Maybe it really is that there are just only a very few truly great leaders. And when one comes along, it really is a wonder to behold the result of his/her work.
(But/and, by the way, I sincerely and deeply hope that Apple’s best days are still ahead…)
Maybe this is something of a parallel: I don’t know who will win the election just weeks away. And I don’t know if history will prove President Obama, or maybe Mr. Romney, to be a truly great president. (History takes a while…). But I do know that there seems to be a long line of people who would like to vote for ”none of the above.” We are a country of now over 310 million people. We’ve only had 44 presidents in our history. This job beckons forth the greatest leaders among us. Quick, how many truly great presidents have we had? Pretty short list, isn’t it?
You see, great leadership may simply be very, very, very, very rare…
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Want a little more? Read Joe Nocera’s August, 2011 column, What Makes Steve Jobs Great., written just after Steve Jobs stepped down from Apple, not so very long before his death. He described Steve Jobs as arrogant, sarcastic, thoughtful, learned, paranoid and “insanely” (to use one of his favorite words) charismatic. And yet…
It is almost not believable that one person could have affected such a large swath of American culture and industry.
First Friday Book Synopsis 