By Thornton May, Futurist, Senior Advisor with GP, Executive Director & Dean - IT Leadership Academy

In just about every city in America you will be able to find, if you look hard enough, a comic book store. And in that comic book store, if you ask, you will be directed to the Batman section. Batman, of course being unique among superheroes in that he is “just” a human being1 – a hyper-focused human being able to do amazing things. In a similar manner I believe that in every major organization focused on designing differentiated customer experiences today you will find a section of the executive mind [both individual and collective] influenced by Steve Jobs and the Apple adventure. We frequently forget that Mr. Jobs too was “just” a human being. And that we, too, can do extraordinary things.

Cartographers of the mental landscape of business will confirm that independent of the products and services created by his organizational legacy, Apple Inc., Steve Jobs—the legend, the lore, the rich and seemingly inexhaustible source of lessons—was and remains a cottage industry of sorts. Guy Kawasaki has, for over two decades now, parlayed his time “in the presence of Steve” into a lucrative career on the rubber-chicken circuit. Carmine Gallo ably assists wanna-be moguls in perfecting their ability to craft and deliver a “Steve-like” presentation. Just about every national business periodical, most top-ranked business schools and a significant subset of name-brand consultancies devote significant attention to enumerating what we might learn from Steve Jobs.

A colleague from my days teaching at the “Managing the Information Resource” program at the John E. Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA, the preeminent figure in the strategy world, Richard Rumelt [author of Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters] believes that the most important strategy lesson we can extract from Steve Jobs is focus and—quite surprisingly—patience.

Professor Rumelt entertains earnest MBAs and seasoned executives alike in recounting the tale of Apple in 1996 when Mr. Jobs was brought back by Apple’s board of directors to serve as without-pay CEO. Wall Street believed the only way forward was to sell the company. The most likely suitors at the time were IBM, Sony and Sun. Silicon Valley boffins thought the best path forward for the company would be to license the Apple name or to develop a technological “Hail Mary” pass into the areas of voice recognition and/or 3D. Jobs did none of the above. He instead secured $150 million in financing from arch-rival Microsoft, based in no small part on that organization’s concern about the anti-trust implications of an Apple bankruptcy, and went to work.

Thanks to focused and severe CEO-mandated cost reductions [e.g., reducing the product line from 16 computers to one; reducing retailers from 5 to one; eliminating R&D and product development; slashing software and hardware engineer headcount and moving all manufacturing offshore] Apple had stabilized to the point that its short-term survival [it was only two months from bankruptcy when Jobs returned as CEO] was reasonably secure. It was at this point in time that Rumelt interviewed Jobs and asked him: “What is your long term strategy?”

Jobs responded, “I am going to wait for the next big thing.”

This is not a flippant answer. A review of the technology market space reveals that every market leader of every new technology era was the company who, upon identifying an inflection point, was able to jump full force and full focus into the window of opportunity.

Surprising to think that the secret ingredient of success of the business legend thought to be the most impatient [as it relates to interpersonal matters] was patience [as it relates to market timing and opportunity exploitation].

Gustin Partners and I welcome your thoughts on the lessons we should take away from Steve Jobs.