CEO of the Decade

Recently Apple’s Steve Jobs was named Fortune Magazine’s “CEO of the Decade”. Fortune cited Job’s many accomplishments since re-taking the reins at Apple in 2001, including his successful shifting of Apple into new industries including Music, Video and Communications while still managing to introduce state of the art technologies in Computing. During the past decade I was fortunate to see Jobs speak and to participate in sessions where Jobs described the underlying “magic” that is Apple and the role innovation plays.
Jobs acknowledged the fact he has surrounded himself with very bright people who have a passion for “creating new futures”. His leadership team is not satisfied with the status quo and they constantly push the edges of businesses in which they are comfortable to find new less comfortable zones of business opportunity. The story of his introduction of Apple’s possibility to recreate the Music Industry by introducing the basis for the iPod and iTunes to his senior team is legendary. The idea was not met with typical skepticism or questioning (or, even more dangerous, the positive head nod masking underlying skepticism). The idea was met with enthusiasm, a sense of possibility and a keen interest in planning how the opportunity could be met.
Job’s sees his primary responsibility supporting innovation and business growth is to ensure the vision for new business opportunities is challenging his leadership team. He doesn’t leave the “wild ideas” to the R&D and product development organization alone. He knows that unless his leadership team is excited about creating new ideas the potential of profiting from new ideas is low. At Apple, creating the future is everyone’s responsibility, and the leadership team owns market sensing and new business creation activities. Jobs knows that if his leadership team is only focused on managing current business they would be stuck in the status quo and therefore barriers to new ideas rather than mentors of new ideas.
From the lessons of Jobs and our understanding of Apple’s practices, we at Launch have developed a tool to assess the degree of engagement of leadership teams in innovation and business growth. In 2010 you might want to ask your team to discuss the questions to give you a sense of how they see their role in innovation and business growth. You can access a questionnaire by clicking here:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/LeadershipforInnovation

We at Launch wish you a very successful and happy 2010.