Finally finished Steve Jobs in Exile

Loved it.

This is the stuff I like to see. You had a genius of sorts in Steve Jobs. Along the way, under Jobs 1.0, he had to be propped up in his deficiency areas by the hard tech and business people. Meaning, Woz, Mike Markkula, John Sculley and others had to sorta be his armor.

Moving on from Apple in the 80s and starting NeXT, Jobs didn't have that armor anymore. Effectively, he needed to finally become a full businessman.

This is the big journey a lot of us have to deal with when we move into higher levels of management. On the data side, you can't just be "the BI person" as you move higher up the chain. You need to learn how to communicate with people.

I kinda sneer at that question I always get at conferences: "how do you communicate your value?" I guess I had taken my strengths for granted. I feel like I often speak from a position of competence and authority because I inculcate that in myself. That's a Jobs 2.0 position, though. When you're hungry and have a great idea, but you conceptually just don't understand how a larger system works, that puts you in a Jobs 1.0 position.

Princeton University's mission is to advance "learning through scholarship, research, and teaching of unsurpassed quality, with an emphasis on undergraduate and doctoral education that is distinctive among the world's great universities, and with a pervasive commitment to serve the nation and the world."

I have no affiliation to that university whatsoever, but I have not been able to get the words "unsurpassed quality" and "pervasive commitment" out of my head. Those phrases are such interesting choices. I have also found that the second is what gets you to the first. Steve Jobs was successful because he believed deeply in the first thing, "unsurpassed quality." But it's the second thing, "pervasive commitment," that actually gets you the first thing.

Everything I've ever read about Jobs confirms that he tended to conflate obstinance with commitment. In business, you actually need to remain flexible; pliability doesn't change your end result, it just allows you to take open roads to your chosen destination. Jobs needed to go into exile and learn the basics of running an enterprise, so the second thing could create the first.

Along similar lines, I feel that breaking out of the “BI person” box will ultimately mean putting your own professional dukedom within the realm of what your organization is looking to do. The shortcut is to take a piece of your org’s strategic planning function and help scoot the business along to meet its goals.

Value is ultimately the thing you create and it requires holding yourself up to some higher ideal. If you’re gainfully employed, a good start might be your organization’s mission, vision, and values statements.