Along with being CEO of Apple I will discuss the many challenges he encountered in founding Apple and other companies and his rise to the top of the companies and industry. I will discuss his leadership styles such as his unconventional tactics and is unusual involvement in every aspect no matter how small of Apple.
The attention to style and design placed in to every product and his aspiration to be the forefront of is industry. He was also not considered by many to be philanthropist. I will also cover his challenges with environmentalist groups and his ways of overcoming these challenges to raise his company to be the first to provide some of the most environmentally friendly devices. Steve Jobs was a businessman, designer and inventor. He was best known for coffining Apple Computer, Inc which makes the popular phone and pod as well as the Macintosh line of computers and the pad.
He also expounded Paxar Animation Studios and when Disney acquired Paxar became a member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company. Before helping found Apple, Steve Jobs took a job as a technician at Atari, Inc in Los Gatos, California in 1974. He worked with Steve Waking who he met in 1971 through a mutual friend. Waking help Steve Jobs create a circuit board for Atari. In 1975 he started attending meetings of the Homebred Computer Club with Steve Waking. A year later Steve Jobs and Steve Waking along with Ronald Wayne founded Apple Computer, Inc after Waking invented the Apple I computer.
Steve Jobs did not initially serve as the CEO of Apple. Steve Jobs lured John Scullery away from Pepsi-Cola to be CEO. He faced many challenges with running Apple. Some of Apples employees from that time described him as erratic and temperamental. This along with weak sales caused the working relationship between Scullery and Jobs to deteriorate. This eventually led to a power struggle between Jobs and Scullery. In May of 1985 Scullery called a board meeting to resolve the matter between Scullery and Jobs. The board sided with Scullery and in return Steve Jobs was removed from his duties as head of the Macintosh Division.
Five months later Steve Jobs resigned from Apple and founded NeXT Inc that same year. Steve Jobs in a speech in 2005 said leaving Apple was the best thing that could have happened to him. NeXT was founded by Steve Jobs in 1985 with $7 million. Although he already helped found Apple computer 10 years prior, there was still many challenges that he faced with NeXT. A year after founding he still had no product and the $7 million was almost gone. To overcome this challenge he reached out to venture capital for assistance. He was able to attract the attention of billionaire Ross Pert who invested in the company.
In 1986 Jobs took on other challenges with the purchase of The Graphics Group from Localism’s computer graphics division. It was later renamed Paxar. Steve Jobs’ company NeXT finally released the NeXT workstation in 1990. This was not the last challenge for Jobs. The first workstation was released at a price of $9,999. Even though the NeXT workstation was technologically advance it was considered to expensive by the educational sector which it was designed for. He released the second generation NeXT cube later that year. A few years later after only selling 50,000 machines, NeXT changed to a fully software development.
It wasn’t until a year later that the company reported its first profits . In 1996 Apple purchased NeXT for $427 million bringing Steve Jobs back to Apple, the company he helped found. In 1997 Steve Jobs became the interim CEO of Apple after the then CEO was ousted. Jobs concentrated on turning the company around and becoming profitable again. He terminated many projects Apple was working on. Many employees started to fear they would lose their jobs as well. Jobs took many of NeXT products and integrated them into Apple products. The most notable was Inexistent which became Mac SO X.
Under his leadership Apple sales increased significantly with the release of the Imax. With this improvement Apple began to branch out and began to change the digital world as it was known. They released the pod along with tunes software and the tunes store. This also changed the way the music industry distributed music. In 2007 Apple introduced the phone forever changing the view on what capabilities smartness should do. Steve Jobs was an unconventional leader. He was a perfectionist who wanted to be the lead of the industry and set trends in innovation and style.
Steve Jobs was deeply involved in the design of Apple products. He was always on the quest to perfection and as such controlled every aspect of the business. He was listed as the inventory or co-inventory in 342 US patents. They ranged from computers and portable devices to every part of the product. This included touch screen interfaces, chargers, keyboards and even speakers. With the leadership of Steve Jobs Apple has become the largest biblically traded company in the world, as well as the largest technology company in the world by revenue and profit.
Apple in worth more than Google and Microsoft combined. Apple was campaigned against by Greenback for various environmental issues. Apple did not have an end of life take back plan as well as there were non-recyclable hardware components and toxins in its phone hardware, specifically the use of PVC and Bars in their products. In response Steve Jobs announced its plans to eliminate PVC and Bars by the end of 2008. Apple has done this and became the first laptop maker to do so. Steve Jobs also responded to the campaign by also introducing an pod take back program for free at its retail stores.
They still received criticism saying they should recycle all e-waste. In response Apple expanded its recycling program to include all US customers who buy a new Mac to have their old systems disposed of environmentally. Although Steve Jobs’ wealth was estimated in 2010 by Forbes to be $8. 3 billion, making him the 42nd wealthiest American, he was not known for his philanthropic causes. When he first took over as CEO of Apple in 1997 he initially need all corporate philanthropy programs. Jobs once said he does charitable acts privately. He later turned around and Apple signed to participate in the Product Red program.
Apple became the single largest contributor to the charity. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary philanthropy is defined as goodwill to fellow members of the human race. By this definition many of Steve Jobs supporters say that his contributions to society reside in the quality and innovation of Apple’s products. Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple in August 2011 due to his deteriorating health. He remained with the company as chairman of the company’s board. On October 5, 201 1 Steve Jobs died due to complications with pancreatic cancer. References “Apple Improves Recycling Plan”.
