Steve Jobs management style - Essay Example

Steve Jobs’s Management Style Steve Jobs is frequently described as a visionary particularly when his performance and style of leadership and management is analyzed in context of his career at Apple. Steve Jobs was the founder of the Apple Company that he established together with Steve Wozniak in the year 1976. He was fired from the company in the year 1985 and was rerecruited in 1997 as he carried a rejuvenated sense of purpose. Steve Jobs was a very unconventional type of leader. The management style of Steve Jobs was quite different from what is traditionally taught through the university textbooks.

Unlike most successful managers, Steve Jobs was not famous for his approach of consensus building or consultation. For the most part, he could be defined as a high-maintenance coworker that required the staff to show excellence in their work. Steve Jobs was famous for offering blunt criticism. The sheer genius of Steve Jobs together with his skill of bringing the investors, customers, and staff members on the same journey and of articulating a vision as well as the lessons he learnt from a main setback in his career took his management style to a level where it has gained global recognition for success.

The main qualities that helped Steve Jobs achieve a unique style of management and leadership included but were not limited to vision-mindedness, drive for innovation, foresightedness, passion-mindedness, and drive for engagement and excellence. In order for a company to be successful, it is imperative that all of its employees are well-versed with the vision of its management. Steve Jobs placed emphasis upon recruiting innovative people who had a drive to create something out of nothing. Steve Jobs selected applicants for their willingness to create.

Apple’s employees are driven by the vision of the leader. Each employee is owner of the market’s future because of their knowledge of their ability to create it. Steve Jobs looked for passion-mindedness in the employees. “Applicants who do not demonstrate a genuine passion and “love” for the company’s purposes and business philosophy will never make it” (Valtin, 2012). Jobs placed a lot of emphasis on excellence. One very important lesson that can be learnt from Steve Jobs’s style of leadership and management is that one should never give up no matter how hard the circumstances.

Rather than being affected by his getting fired from Apple in a negative way, he drew positive lessons out of it as it reflects from this statement that he made, “I didnt see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life” (Jobs cited in Palis, 2012).

Concluding, in order to be successful as a manager and a leader in the contemporary business environment, innovation and creativity are two of the main drivers that should be concentrated upon. Steve Jobs’s leadership and management style has many lessons for the contemporary businessmen. References:Palis, C. (2012, April 18). Steve Jobs In Unheard Interview: My Model Of Management Is The Beatles. The Huffington Post. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/18/steve-jobs-the-beatles_n_1434108.html. Valtin, P.

(2012, Aug. 1). The Steve Jobs Way. Retrieved from http://www.sbomag.com/2012/08/the-steve-jobs-way/.