Two of the greatest leaders in the technology industry, the late Steve Jobs of Apple and Jeff Bezos of Amazon build their companies around great products and customer service, and based their companies’ values on delivering to these expectations.
Steve Jobs built a company focused on end to end control with hardware and software fully integrated to create the most beautiful designs and perfect customer experience. His intense focus on perfection and his inspiring vision of creating products that would ‘make a dent in the universe’ changed the world, and I strongly recommend reading his biography by Walter Isaacson.
Steve Jobs never focused on money and profit as a motivator, but on doing something that’s great, and I believe he best said it with ,being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me… going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me’. Too many companies fail to have a compelling vision, and if they do, they fail to follow and deliver to it, and they just end up designing products or offering services with the goal in mind to make profit and gain market share. They don’t build products that they would enjoy using themselves, or offer services that they would love to experience themselves. How often do you feel your company is run by the numbers and politics, and that decisions are being made for the wrong reasons? Steve Jobs was known for his brutal honesty and that you were either ‘a hero or a shithead’ and sometimes both on the same day, but he was always clear about what he stood for, and never held back giving feedback and did not accept poor performance or product quality. While his leadership style was often criticized for being too harsh, people wanted to follow him because they believed in his compelling vision and understood that he was only trying to push his people to achieve what they didn’t know that they were capable of.
Jeff Bezos, while completely different compared to Steve Jobs in his character and leadership style built another great company with Amazon that’s second to none (Jeff’s leadership tips on Forbes.com). His intense focus on customer service made Amazon what it is today, a company with over 90 thousand employees that beats profit expectations again and again, but more importantly a company that’s known for its great service and obsession with customers.
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