Steve Jobs is perhaps one of recent history’s most enigmatic figures. Despite the pivotal role he played in connecting people – via computers, smartphones and tablets – he was himself curiously detached as a person. During his many years of declining health, nobody really knew his status, mainly because that’s exactly how he wanted it. A private man who just happened to stumble into a public spotlight, Jobs only showed people his business side. The rest he kept to himself.
When it comes to explaining the success of someone like this, most people would be at a loss. After all, much of what we know about Jobs arises out of something like modern mythology: second-hand accounts of his unorthodox leadership style and hearsay testimony about his supposed egomania. In reality, Jobs should not be seen as a mythical figure, but instead someone who was deeply – and ultimately tragically – human.
As Walter Isaacson points out in his biography of the Apple pioneer, Jobs evinced a regrettable naivete toward his progressive pancreatic cancer, choosing to rely on magical thinking and outright denial instead of pursuing a reasonable course of treatment. In this way, Jobs fell back on wishful instead of analytical thinking. According to many sources, the failure on his part to be proactive about treatment hastened – if not directly led to – his death. Yet for everything that made him human, there was also something truly exceptional about him – a quality perhaps innate in his being, something that drove him until he became a tech titan. At a recent World Business Forum in New York, author Malcolm Gladwell summed up that quality with a single word.
The power of urgency
The word Gladwell used was “urgency,” and it was a term he didn’t just apply to Jobs, but also to successful people in general. So just how exactly does urgency galvanize success? Well, as Gladwell pointed out, it’s not just that urgency has to be applied to intellect and creative ideas, but also to business. Take Steve Jobs, for example. In addition to being a visionary and an tech artist, he was also a shrewd businessman who operated, above all, with an urgency beyond compare. When, for instance, Jobs became aware of one of the first prototypes of the computer mouse, he immediately became transfixed by the technology.
“Oh my god,” Jobs was quoted as saying. “This is going to transform personal computing.”
But other developers alongside Jobs weren’t so convinced that the technology was worth getting so ecstatically excited about. Therefore, Jobs had to push against a current of resistance from his peers in order to push for mainstream mouse development. In this instance, it wasn’t only Jobs’ predictive intelligence that played a role in his ultimate success, but also his great sense of business urgency. Significantly, the idea of the mouse didn’t originate with Jobs, but with Xerox. What Jobs did was apply a great business logic to it: He learned how to make it, but for a significantly cheaper price.
“Is Steve Jobs smarter than the people at Xerox PARC?” Gladwell continued. “No. They’re smarter. They invented the graphic user interface. He just stole it. ”
But it wasn’t stealing, really. Instead, Jobs’ attachment to the mouse evolved into a desire to modify and refine the technology and make it applicable for general use. This all boiled down to – you guessed – Job’s sense of urgency.
“Jobs has a sense of urgency,” Gladwell said. “He wants to do it now. He speeds to Cupertino and says, drop everything, we’re doing this at this very moment.”
