I greatly admired Steve Jobs for his ability to innovate, but most of all for his view about how to live your life. The latter is captured in this quote from his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University:
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
Too many downtown organizations are staid and stale. A strong dose of Steve Jobs’s philosophy would do them a world of good. They need to follow an important Jobs dictum: Think Different! Also, they certainly could benefit from a Jobs-like fanaticism that their programs are well-designed and actually work, producing strong positive results. As a downtown business recruiter, Jobs, who strongly opposed asking consumers about the new products they wanted, would never ask local residents for the names of specific retailers that recruitment efforts should target.
These organizations also could definitely benefit from the kind of strategic vision that Jobs displayed since he returned to Apple’s helm.
And one more thing. In 2007, I bought an iMac and immediately had a lot of problems with it. On a whim, I emailed Steve Jobs and detailed my problems. In response, I received a call from Apple and about a week later a technician came to my office and completed a thorough overhaul of my iMac. Is there another CEO in the USA you can email and get a similar response?
