Steve Jobs Research Essay

Leadership as a concept has been universally accepted to play a great role in the success of the most high-ranking organizations in the world. Ideally, every business needs to have an organizational structure from bottom to top to succeed. This is done by prioritizing the hierarchy, identifying the guidelines, and identifying certain policies and procedures needed for a company to achieve goals and objectives. The organizational structure also depicts levels of management from the top-down model. According to Principles of Management (2015), Achievement-oriented leadership refers to a certain style of leadership in which the leader sets goals that are challenging for the staff. The person who sets these standards most likely has high expectations for his/her staff. Moreover, the leaders exhibit a high level of confidence that the subordinates will assume total responsibility for the assignments and work to complete these assignments. As a result, the staff will put forward extraordinary effort to get the job done. Steve Jobs was well known for exhibiting various leadership elements. Steve Jobs was also largely recognized as a visionary leader who had a brilliant mindset. His entrepreneurial mindset allowed him to create one of the most successful businesses known to mankind. Apple is one of the leading technological producers and billions of consumers possess Apple products. Jobs was able to understand how to apply certain leadership techniques and understand all the aspects of the business while working towards understanding how to be an achievement-oriented leader who is self-reflective and can make the necessary adaptations.

Steve Jobs was considered a visionary leader because he empowered his employees and inspired them to achieve greatness. Steve Jobs was considered to be a designer, thinker, and evolutionist by many. According to “Decoding Leadership: How Steve Jobs Transformed Apple to Spearhead a Technological Informal Economy,” Steve Jobs “created an ecosystem that allowed other entrepreneurs to thrive. By seizing the intersection between art, technology, and business, and channeling Apple to reflect that, Jobs reconceptualized how the consumer electronics industry should be organized and brought on board numerous start-ups to develop applications.” By doing this, Steve Jobs accelerated innovation which has gone above his original vision. Steve helped to establish Apple Inc. with his great companion Steve Wozniak in 1976. They started small and were working out of Jobs’ parent’s garage. Just four years later, Apple Inc. became a publicly-traded company and in 1984 they released their first Macintosh computer. During this time, the board of director’s focus became profits rather than quality (Steve Jobs Biography, 2015). Unfortunately, Steve Jobs was fired in 1985 because he had a very high objective voice and opinion toward management and elements of leadership within the company (Transformational Leadership, 2002). They were able to release products and keep their heads above water; but just barely. It wasn’t until his return in 1997 that a vision was restored to the company (Steve Jobs Biography, 2015). Job’s strategy was simple. The company was designing several different products, but none of them were any good. They needed to focus their efforts and create something great. So, Steve Jobs decided to build machines and frameworks that were not well suited to other systems (Yu, 2013). Throughout time, Jobs demonstrated his leadership ability by fighting through many obstacles imposed by his lower subordinates by going against traditions and presenting new innovative policies. What made Steve Jobs special in terms of his leadership capability was that instead of following certain company traditions, he pushed the company towards experiential learning which went against most of his subordinates. Steve Jobs was known to be one of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs and innovators. Even though Steve Jobs had his setbacks, he fought until his vision became a reality.

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In the early stages of Apple, Apple designed its products from scratch using unique chips, disk drives, monitors, and so on. During these times, Apple exported the Macintosh to other firms which resulted in them producing clones. Jobs did not like this and started his initiative to end this practice. According to the article “Decoding Leadership: How Steve Jobs Transformed Apple to Spearhead a Technological Informal Economy,” Jobs stated that “It was the dumbest thing in the world to let companies making crappier hardware using our operating system and cut into our sales.” Jobs was once fired for reasons like this because he had a very high objective voice towards management but Jobs came back stronger later and started to create products that were not compatible with competitors such as Microsoft. His long-term goal was to remodel Apple’s infrastructure to cater to his needs. One of the things that Jobs did which went against his organization was avoiding the judgments, and opinions of low-level managers when it came down to resource competition, and protecting Jobs’s original strategic vision that went against the mission statement of the firm. Jobs also implemented a forced problem-solving routine regimen among his lower-end managers which proved to not work and the organization disagreed with much of what Steve Jobs wanted to do. Other than this, Steve Jobs was overall considered a corporate leader, innovator, idealist, and one of the most successful entrepreneurs known to man. Because of his stubbornness and progressive way of thinking, Apple became what it was destined to become; A Fortune 500 Company.

If Steve Jobs left the organization, it would dramatically affect Apple for many reasons. One of the reasons is that Steve Jobs was the first one to fight against cloning Macintosh systems. He was right in doing that because he didn't want other companies to steal and reproduce the same type of hardware. Moreover, Apple is only compatible with Apple products which makes the company unique in its way and it was a result of the initiative that Steve took. This is why Apple makes billions. Some consider Steve Jobs to be a narcissistic CEO but sometimes a strict achievement CEO is needed for a traditional company to progress. One of the initiatives that Jobs undertook was creating an easy-to-use music-playing marketplace which turned out to be a success. Another initiative that Jobs undertook was a great number of radical changes that positively changed the company. Under Jobs, Apple has become a “platform architect” according to the article “Decoding Leadership: How Steve Jobs Transformed Apple to Spearhead a Technological Informal Economy.” Under the change that occurred under Jobs During these radical changes, apple became ahead of the game by introducing the app store which eventually became the largest mobile app marketplace. Under Steve Jobs, he refused to allow old practices to define Apple, and his innovative mindset has brought the company great success overall. On the other hand, Tim Cook was known to be Jobs’s successor and he took Jobs’s advice by implementing a secondary market to better serve the consumers and enhance business. If Jobs would have left, the company would have operated traditionally and conservatively. The reason why Apple became what it is now is because Jobs took a radical and innovative approach to make Apple stand out and manifest billions of dollars in revenue from his strategic implementations. Overall, Jobs was a great leader from the start.

One of the steps that Apple can take to ensure that quality leadership practices are developed and executed in the future is implementing a board of directors. Instead of having managers argue amongst each other in regards to pursuing innovation or keeping the traditional way, a board of directors of all levels can all think together and decide which leadership practice is best to implement. This idea would serve the company best. It would not be fair for one individual to give all the answers because a lot of people have an objective voice to give as well. Although Steve Jobs was not a perfect man and many considered him to be too radical, overall he was a great leader who left a legacy under his name. Another Step the organization can take to ensure quality leadership tactics are properly developed is by implementing a bottom-to-top-level organizational structure review process. This means that many levels of the company can review certain policies implemented by the other levels and can decide if the policy is of quality or not. I found it wrong to have Jobs fired from his own company because he had an objective voice. Instead of taking radical action, the levels of management should take into consideration what everyone says and collectively decide whether a certain policy should be implemented or not. Apple started in the backyard of someone's home and then eventually became a Fortune 500 company. Apple was a conservative company that did not change many internal or external elements. Once Jobs took full leadership, he made Apple into what it is now; a dominant technological marketplace that will always be the go-to product for phones, laptops, watches, iPads, speakers, headphones, drones, TVs, desktops, cases, and more.