OB & HRM

Assignment 2

Question: In the reading, “Real leadership lessons of Steve Jobs”, share the key idea and
then briefly explain following three points: put products before profits, impute, and know
both big picture and the details?

Ans: Steve Jobs is an inspirational and one of the highly followed leaders. He possessed unique
characteristics and capabilities such as guide, direct and shape his vision including his
employee’s vision. His leadership skills are followed by many other individual’s ton achieve
success in life. Isaacson Walter narrated the real leadership lessons of Steve Job and wrote about
his creative and innovative skills with examples. Steve believed in hard work and thus pushed his
workers to go beyond their limit to produce things which will change the way of living. Walter
listed 14 principles of leadership given by Steve Jobs.
1. Focus
2. Simplify
3. Take responsibility end to end
4. When behind, leapfrog
5. Put products before profits
6. don’t be a slave to focus groups
7. bend reality
8. impute
9. push for perfection
10. tolerate only “A” players
11. engage face-to-face
12. combine humanities with sciences
13. stay hungry, stay foolish
14. know both the big picture and the details.
The brief idea of this reading would be that Steve Jobs wanted perfect innovation and focused
on Reality Distortion Field which says to refuses to accept the limitations that came in the way
of innovation.
put products before profits
Steve is the one who puts product before profit because he thinks that perfectly innovative and
great products will be followed by profit. Steve always wanted to give customers a fine product
for which customers are willing to pay. Steve did not compromise on innovation.
Impute
This characteristic focuses on the attribute and the presentation of the product. As Steve believed
that customers before buying a product create an image in them after looking at the outside
appearance. He believed in creating extra-ordinary perception of the product in the customers
 OB & HRM
Assignment 2
mind that’s why he focused on the covering of a product because it is the first stage of shaping
perception of an individual.
know both big picture and the details
Steve had a detailed oriented vision. He identifies the problem and bridge the gap between
problem and customer’s needs. Steve Job being a visionary, innovative, detail-oriented and
motivating individual in nature pushes his fellow colleagues to achieve these characteristics as
well. One of the examples, in which Steve put forward the problem and motivated employees to
develop the best solution from the present problem, he put the IPOD in the fish tank and said that
air bubbles inside the tank points out that space inside can be compacted and this resulted in a
tiny sized first versions of IPOD. This illustrates the big picture and the details.