Lessons next great innovator should learn from Steve Jobs

“Three apples touched the World in a most remarkable way. Eve ate the first apple in the Garden of Eden. The second one hit Isaac Newton when he was resting one sunny afternoon. The third came to us incomplete; Steve Jobs version 1.0 had a piece of it.”

That’s how one of the bloggers chose to remember Steve Jobs when he died on October 5 last year.

Born Stephen Paul “Steve” Jobs, in 1955, he was an inventor and entrepreneur. He was co-founder, chairman and CEO of Apple Inc.

He also founded Pixar Animation Studios before becoming one of the largest individual shareholders and member of board of directors of the Walt Disney Company.

As the Apple CEO, he revolutionised the tech market with his i-inventions — the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad.

To many, he ranks as one of the greatest CEOs who ever lived and correctly so. His death created a vacuum so huge that many pundits were quick to argue that there would never be another Jobs.

But I beg to disagree. The world is a system ran on the Japanese Kaizen model –it becomes continuously better and better personalities always emerge.

It is a world of successive succession. As the wise adage goes: “You are not successful until your successor succeeds.”

I submit, therefore, not only will the world breed a new Jobs, but I dare say, it could produce a better version — in tech mumbo jumbo Steve Jobs Version 2.0 – and it could be you!

So what does it take to make a Steve Jobs Version 2.0? I hereby offer guidelines based on Steve Jobs version 1.0 mantra of life and leadership:

Dare be unreasonable

George Bernard Shaw quipped, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the World. The unreasonable man attempts to adapt the World to him. All progress, therefore, depends on the unreasonable man”.

Similarly, Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result every time.

Steve Jobs version 1.0 was the quintessential unreasonable genius.

Back in the 1970s, when no one seemed to see the commercial viability of computers, Steve Jobs version 1.0 had the vision to prove the world wrong, which he did.