Eric Siu reviews a rare $500 business book with interviews from Steve Jobs, Adobe, HP, Intuit, Dell, and AOL founders. Four lessons: leaders set culture (Apple's decline after Jobs left), engineers must talk to customers directly, one great person can do the work of a hundred, and there's no single way to run a company.
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This business book over here cost me $500 and includes legendary interviews with Steve Jobs and the founders of Adobe, HP, Intuit, Dell, AOL, and more. Here is what I learned. Lesson number 1, although Apple today is a multi-trillion-dollar company, everyone left Apple for dead in the '90s. That's because after Steve Jobs was fired, the Apple CEO focused the company on profits and they lost their way. They focused on buying private jets, company cars, they started buying a bunch of lavish things and the company lost its way because they lost its visionary founder. So for better or worse, the CEO sets the tone of the culture and oftentimes it's the founders that drive the real energy behind the company. Lesson number 2, you got to talk to your customers. Intuit's early engineers, over 80% of them talked to their customers all the time. In fact, when the co-founder was being interviewed at their company, He called out to one of their CFOs and asked him how often he interviewed the customers. And the CFO said, all the time. And lesson number 3, it's all about the people. People make up your organization. Steve Jobs once said that one engineer can be a 100x engineer. And today's day and age with AI, one person can even become 1,000 people. And then lesson number 4, there's no right way to run a business. Computer Associates, for example, acquired over 60 companies, and they're doing over $3 billion in revenue. They laid off a bunch of people each and every time, and the press quoted them as being very brutal, very heartless, but ultimately, they did what they thought was right for the company, and that's what worked for their business. So there is no right or wrong way to run a business, it's just whatever works for you. So,