Cited: Fortune magazine

steve-jobs-3Who does this describe?

A youthful company founder who gets booted from his company in the 1980s then comes back in the 1990s only to survive two brushes with death in the next decade, a securities-law scandal, an also-ran product lineup and his own often unpleasant demeanor to become the dominant personality in four distinct industries. Oh, he is also a billionaire many times over and CEO of the most valuable company in Silicon Valley.

If you answered Steve Jobs, you would be correct. This is the real-life story of Steve Jobs and his impact on everything he touches in a nutshell.

The past decade in business belongs to Jobs. What makes that simple statement even more remarkable is that barely a year ago it seemed likely that any review of his accomplishments would be valedictory. But by deeds and accounts, Jobs is back.

It’s as if his signature “one more thing” line now applies to him as well. After a six-month leave of absence in the early part of this year, during which he received a liver transplant, he is once again commanding a 34,000-strong corporate army that is as powerful, awe-inspiring, creative, secretive, bullying, arrogant — and yes, profitable — as at any time since he and his chum Steve Wozniak founded Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) in 1976.

Superlatives have attached themselves to Jobs since he was a young man. Now that he’s 54, merely listing his achievements is sufficient explanation of why he’s Fortune’s CEO of the Decade (though the superlatives continue). In the past 10 years alone he has radically and lucratively reordered three markets — music, movies, and mobile telephones — and his impact on his original industry, computing, has only grown.

Remaking any one business is a career-defining achievement; four is unheard-of. Think about that for a moment. Henry Ford altered the course of the nascent auto industry. PanAm’s Juan Trippe invented the global airline. Conrad Hilton internationalized American hospitality.

In all instances, and many more like them, these entrepreneurs turned captains of industry defined a single market that had previously not been dominated by anyone. The industries that Jobs has turned topsy-turvy already existed when he focused on them.

He is the rare businessman with legitimate worldwide celebrity. (His quirks and predilections are such common knowledge that they were knowingly parodied on an episode of “The Simpsons.”) He pals around with U2’s Bono.

Consumers who have never picked up an annual report or even a business magazine gush about his design taste, his elegant retail stores, and his outside-the-box approach to advertising. (”Think different,” indeed.)

It’s often noted that he’s a showman, a born salesman, a magician who creates a famed reality-distortion field, a tyrannical perfectionist. It’s totally accurate, of course, and the descriptions contribute to his legend.

Yet for all his hanging out with copywriters and industrial designers and musicians — and despite his anti-corporate attire — make no mistake: Jobs is all about business. He may not pay attention to customer research, but he works slavishly to make products customers will buy.

He’s a visionary, but he’s grounded in reality too, closely monitoring Apple’s various operational and market metrics. He isn’t motivated by money, says friend Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle (ORCL, Fortune 500). Rather, Jobs is understandably driven by a visceral ardor for Apple, his first love (to which he returned after being spurned — proof that you can go home again) and the vehicle through which he can be both an arbiter of cool and a force for changing the world.

The financial results have been nothing short of astounding — for Apple and for Jobs. The company was worth about $5 billion in 2000, just before Jobs unleashed Apple’s groundbreaking “digital lifestyle” strategy, understood at the time by few critics. Today, at about $170 billion, Apple is slightly more valuable than Google (GOOG, Fortune 500).

Its market share in personal computers was plummeting back then, and the cash drain was so severe that bankruptcy was a possibility. Now Apple has $34 billion in cash and marketable securities, surpassing the total market cap of rival Dell (DELL, Fortune 500). Macintoshes make up 9% of the PC market in the U.S. today, but that share is increasingly beside the point.

With 275 retail stores in nine countries, a 73% share of the U.S. MP3 player market, and the undisputed leadership position in innovation when it comes to mobile phones, Apple and its CEO are no one’s idea of underdogs anymore.

In 2006 Disney (DIS, Fortune 500) paid $7.5 billion to acquire Pixar, the computer animation film studio Jobs had nurtured and controlled. Jobs, in turn, became a Disney director and the blue-chip company’s largest shareholder. His net worth, solely based on his stakes in Apple and Disney, is about $5 billion. Other executives have had stellar decades but none can compare with Steve’s.

With Jobs back at the helm of his company, plenty of challenges lie ahead. Will the Goliath role suit him nearly as well as playing David clearly has? How will he respond to the competition he has awakened, particularly in smartphones, even as the personal computer fades in relative importance? Has he fashioned an organization that can succeed him? Can he possibly be as dominant in the decade to come as the one that is ending?

The “decade” of Steve actually began in 1997, when he returned to Apple after having been ousted a dozen years earlier. That was a year of triage, of a humbling investment from Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500), of paring Apple’s product line to a bare minimum of four computers.

By the following year Steve’s regime had kicked into gear. Jobs completed the hiring of a new management team, which included several executives from his previous company, Next. Those top players would form the nucleus of the Jobs brain trust for nearly 10 years.

Then came the first Macintosh after Jobs’ return, the iMac, a breakthrough all-in-one computer and monitor that heralded Apple’s return to health. The success of the pricey iMac, coupled with drastic cost cutting, allowed Jobs to build a cash cushion. By repairing Apple’s balance sheet, he prepared the company for big investments to come, a shrewd business move if ever there was one.

Jobs laid the foundation for Apple’s leap from stable to stratospheric when things looked darkest. In 2000, Apple missed its financial targets in a September earnings announcement, sending its stock price plummeting in subsequent months to the equivalent of $7 in today’s prices. Yet Jobs by this time had set in motion the key elements of Apple’s rejuvenation.

Over the course of 2001, as global markets fell and the world headed into recession, Apple launched the iTunes music software (in January), the Mac OS X operating system (March), the first Apple retail stores (May), and the first iPod (November), a 5GB model that Apple bragged would hold 1,000 songs.

The market didn’t catch on quickly to the significance of those events. iTunes was just music-playing software embedded into Macs and lacked an online store that sold music. The new operating system, though impressive, powered a niche product. The iPod was a snazzy MP3 player in an established market.

As the company’s stock languished, takeover rumors appeared from time to time. What was never reported was that Jobs seriously contemplated taking the company private with the help of newly formed buyout group Silver Lake Partners. An Apple buyout would have been the deal of the century, but according to people familiar with the talks, Jobs ultimately shut them down. That was actually the second serious proposal to buy Apple.

Financing was lined up to take over the country on the assumption that jobs would run it in 1997 by jobs friend Ellison later became an Apple board member. Recently, also stated that jobs didn’t like the idea of being “second guessed” if it looked as if he was just going to come back because the money. “He explained to me that with the moral high ground, he thought he could make decisions more easily and more gracefully,” said Ellison.

How Steve Jobs Transformed American Business Part 2

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My Take: This man has an envious life! Everybody wants to be Steve Jobs. I would just like his business ability and money. That would make me very happy. But, he is also very lucky man where his health is concerned. At least he had the financial ability to cover his medical expenses.

He runs a company that has Hollywood by coattails. Most editors and video nuts used a Mac or Apple computer to do most of their work. I understand that a West Hollywood DVD replication can meet made faster on the iMac than any PC. However, I do think they are comparable when it comes to a Los Angeles CD duplication. The Apple Computer is the best computer for animation, graphics and movies.

What does this mean for Steve Jobs; he has got a better mousetrap. It is known to all business professionals that if you want to succeed you have to build a better mousetrap and he has done it.

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