Prophetic Interview

Some interviews tends to be prophetic. They list down the paths for future. Similarly, interview of Steve Jobs by David Sheff was very prophetic. Interview was titled Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (February 1985).

Bold ones are my questions /  musings today 32 years post the interview and in italics are portions of the interview as answers for them.

Birth of Imac, Iphone, Tablet was inevitable

“It’s often the same with any new, revolutionary thing. People get stuck as they get older. Our minds are sort of electrochemical computers. Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them. It’s a rare person who etches grooves that are other than a specific way of looking at things, a specific way of questioning things. It’s rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing. Of course, there are some people who are innately curious, forever little kids in their awe of life, but they’re rare.”

Why start ups were required?

"Ten to 15 years ago, if you asked people to make a list of the five most exciting companies in America, Polaroid and Xerox would have been on everyone’s list. Where are they now? They would be on no one’s list today. What happened? Companies, as they grow to become multibillion-dollar entities, somehow lose their vision. They insert lots of layers of middle management between the people running the company and the people doing the work. They no longer have an inherent feel or a passion about the products. The creative people, who are the ones who care passionately, have to persuade five layers of management to do what they know is the right thing to do.

What happens in most companies is that you don’t keep great people under working environments where individual accomplishment is discouraged rather than encouraged. The great people leave and you end up with mediocrity. I know, because that’s how Apple was built. Apple is an Ellis Island company. Apple is built on refugees from other companies. These are the extremely bright individual contributors who were troublemakers at other companies."

About his exit from Apple?

"You know, Dr. Edwin Land was a troublemaker. He dropped out of Harvard and founded Polaroid. Not only was he one of the great inventors of our time but, more important, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that. Polaroid did that for some years, but eventually Dr. Land, one of those brilliant troublemakers, was asked to leave his own company—which is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard of."

What’s missing in Indian companies?

“..the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that..”

 If we can inject that liberal-arts spirit into the very serious realm of business, I think it will be a worthwhile contribution. 

What Warren Buffet should have known prior to investing in IBM?

“If for some reason, we make some giant mistakes and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter sort of a computer Dark Ages for about 20 years. Once IBM gains control of a market sector, they almost always stop innovation. They prevent innovation from happening.”

“I think there will be lots of innovation in the areas of software but not in hardware.”

What changed Jobs?

“That’s not quite the way it happened. I was walking around in the Himalayas and I stumbled onto this thing that turned out to be a religious festival. There was a baba, a holy man, who was the holy man of this particular festival, with his large group of followers. I could smell good food. I hadn’t been fortunate enough to smell good food for a long time, so I wandered up to pay my respects and eat some lunch.

For some reason, this baba, upon seeing me sitting there eating, immediately walked over to me and sat down and burst out laughing. He didn’t speak much English and I spoke a little Hindi, but he tried to carry on a conversation and he was just rolling on the ground with laughter. Then he grabbed my arm and took me up this mountain trail. It was a little funny, because here were hundreds of Indians who had traveled for thousands of miles to hang out with this guy for ten seconds and I stumble in for something to eat and he’s dragging me up this mountain path.

We get to the top of this mountain half an hour later and there’s this little well and pond at the top of this mountain, and he dunks my head in the water and pulls out a razor from his pocket and starts to shave my head. I’m completely stunned. I’m 19 years old, in a foreign country, up in the Himalayas, and here is this bizarre Indian baba who has just dragged me away from the rest of the crowd, shaving my head atop this mountain peak. I’m still not sure why he did it.”

Why Japan is struggling today?

“Japan’s very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor. Out of that understanding, they will reinvent it in a more refined second-generation version. That strategy works only when what they’re working with isn’t changing very much—the stereo industry and the automobile industry are two examples. When the target is moving quickly, they find it very difficult, because that reinvention cycle takes a few years.”

The Core truth

“And I’m not sure. I’ll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I’ll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I’m not there, but I’ll always come back. And that’s what I may try to do. The key thing to remember about me is that I’m still a student. I’m still in boot camp. If anyone is reading any of my thoughts, I’d keep that in mind. Don’t take it all too seriously. If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away. What are we, anyway? Most of what we think we are is just a collection of likes and dislikes, habits, patterns. At the core of what we are is our values, and what decisions and actions we make reflect those values. That is why it’s hard doing interviews and being visible: As you are growing and changing, the more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you that it thinks you are, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to go, “Bye. I have to go. I’m going crazy and I’m getting out of here.” And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently.”

I have not read Steve Jobs by Walter Issacson. To know Steve Jobs philosophy I will advise to read this interview.

Interview source: http://reprints.longform.org/playboy-interview-steve-jobs

Learnings

Learning from Harvard Business Review (May – June 2017)

Recruitment Procedures

“SAP uses a metaphor to communicate this idea across the organization: People are like puzzle pieces, irregularly shaped. Historically, companies have asked employees to trim away their irregularities, because it’s easier to fit people together if they are all perfect rectangles. But that requires employees to leave their differences at home—differences firms need in order to innovate. “The corporate world has mostly missed out on this [benefit],” Anka Wittenberg observes.

This suggests that companies must embrace an alternative philosophy, one that calls on managers to do the hard work of fitting irregular puzzle pieces together—to treat people not as containers of fungible human resources but as unique individual assets. The work for managers will be harder. But the payoff for companies will be considerable: access to more of their employees’ talents along with diverse perspectives that may help them compete more effectively. “Innovation,” Wittenberg notes, “is most likely to come from parts of us that we don’t all share.”

Neurodiversity as a Competitive Advantage by Robert D. Austin and Gary P. Pisano

Data Management

Single Source of Truths (SSOT) i.e. Master Data

Multiple Versions of Truth (MVOT) i.e. Extracts from the Master Data

Data was once critical to only a few back-office processes, such as payroll and accounting. Today it is central to any business, and the importance of managing it strategically is only growing. In September 2016, according to the technology conglomerate Cisco, global annual internet traffic surpassed one zettabyte (1021 bytes)—the equivalent, by one calculation, of 150 million years of high-definition video. It took 40 years to get to this point, but in the next four, data traffic will double. There is no avoiding the implications: Companies that have not yet built a data strategy and a strong data-management function need to catch up very fast or start planning for their exit.

What’s Your Data Strategy? By Leandro DalleMule and Thomas H. Davenport

Business in Africa

He went for a five-day visit. “Immediately all these poor people were asking for money,” he told me. “But then I realized there are a lot of rich people, too, and although it’s hard to make it in this market, it’s just as hard for everyone else as it is for me.” Back in China he called an acquaintance at the customs authority and asked him what was the heaviest, most expensive to ship product being exported in large quantities to Nigeria. The answer? Ceramics.

Qi’s story is an example of how Chinese companies are patiently forging a new institutional reality in Africa. Perhaps because government agencies and other institutions are very much under construction in China itself, Chinese companies are unafraid of incomplete and evolving institutions. They make things up as they go along—pivoting toward different local partners and adapting their plans to changing conditions. They are open to the ideas of their African counterparts. At once relentlessly realistic and irrepressibly optimistic, they act without waiting for conditions to be perfect, and in so doing, they alter those very conditions.

As Ron Bloom, President Obama’s onetime senior counselor for manufacturing policy, put it, “If you get an auto assembly plant, Walmart follows. If you get a Walmart, an auto assembly plant doesn’t follow.

The World’s Next Great Manufacturing Center by Irene Yuan Sun

Stress Management

HBR has run articles showing that you can cultivate personal resilience by taking some downtime, via scheduled or unscheduled breaks, or by cutting yourself off from technology.

Grant: A lot of evidence speaks to that. But I think we tend to define breaks too narrowly. Kim Elsbach of UC Davis has done research showing that one of the best ways to give people a break is to assign them mindless work. Rote tasks can free up your mind to think creatively. As people advance and develop more-complicated skills, we make the mistake of taking repetitive tasks off their plates. Switching between challenging, creative problems and, say, entering data into a spreadsheet for a few minutes can help us recharge.

“Above All, Acknowledge the Pain” by Adi Ignatius

Learning to Manage

“I understand that when people don’t know how to cook, it might be hard to imagine making three meals out of one expensive chicken. But it’s not difficult to learn, and it’s a pleasure. If we all learn basic cooking skills, we can make extremely affordable food.”

Life’s Work: An Interview with Alice Waters by Alison Beard

Stop Toleration

Unofficially everyone knows that Hindi Film Industry is plagued by Casting Couch or the Directors/ Producers/ Actors Cut.

Ashley Judd, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie these are big names who spoke against Harvey Weinstein. Around 50 actresses have spoken about it.

The outcome Kevin spacey, Ben Affleck, Stevan Segal all these names tumbled out of the dark corners.

Removing Kevin spacey from a completed, ready to release movie and replacing him with Plummer by Ridley Scott is not bold but a strong message about not tolerating the intolerant.

When will the Bollywood actresses come forward and speak about their sexual harassments.

Are they still afraid to speak against the heavy weight directors / producers / actors?

".....it was prevalent that a married actor would have a discreet affair with the young heroine he was working with and expect the girl to show no emotion or sign of involvement. And if, God forbid, she did indicate any of those in a weak moment all hell would break loose She would lose her films with the co-star, not be spoken to by the hero and his camp, be removed from whatever movies she had with “his people”. - Raveena Tandon.

What is required is someone to stand up and speak about one industry veteran and others will get the courage to speak.

Hope some actress speaks and the Paper Gods of Screen are brought down to lick dust.

Let’s remember:

“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. [...] We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.” - Karl Popper.

Bollywood Actresses stop tolerance and drag out the Harveys’ of Bollywood.

References:

http://www.elle.com/culture/a12838402/a-full-list-of-harvey-weinsteins-accusers-and-their-allegations/

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/nov/09/kevin-spacey-cut-out-of-film-and-replaced-by-christopher-plummer

https://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/raveenatandonblog/the-power-men-of-bollywood-and-how-social-media-has-evened-the-scales-2/

http://www.wiseoldsayings.com/tolerance-quotes/