How Would You Beat?

How Would You Beat Steve Jobs Using Jobs-to-be-Done?

• thrv • Season 2 • Episode 11

Share episode

Why was Steve Jobs so successful? He is a legendary figure in technology and innovation. He was the founder of Apple, he was famously fired, and went on to found Next Computers and then came back as CEO of Apple in 1997. He's widely considered to be one of the most successful innovators of all time. Depending on the day Apple is still often the most valuable company in the world. Throughout the history of Apple, he's been there for major three big changes: the arrival of the PC and the graphical user interface, the iPod and portable music devices., and then of course, the iPhone, and its cousin, the iPad. But he also brought Pixar to life. He bought the company but helped to make it a success. Apple also bought Next. So in a way Apple is Next, at its core, its foundation of the Macintosh operating system is actually a Next computer. So why was Steve Jobs so successful? And how can you and your product team emulate Steve Jobs with Jobs-to-be-Done? Let's answer this question today!

✅ Download our Executive White Paper: "How to Use JTBD To Grow Faster" 👉 https://www.thrv.com/jobs-to-be-done-white-paper

Key moments from today's topic on how you would beat Steve Jobs:

00:00 Steve Jobs intro and why he was so successful

02:35 Steve Jobs' empathy towards customer experience 

11:28 Steve Jobs as a creator using Jobs-to-be-Done 

15:31 How Apple was able to fulfill multiple "jobs" with their computers and phones  over the years

28:14 How Dapper Labs channeled their inner Steve Jobs for NFTs 

30:30 Are there opportunities for jobs to get done better without a phone? 

33:09 What would Steve Jobs say about the state of technology today? 

✅ Download our Executive White Paper: "How to Use JTBD To Grow Faster" 👉 https://www.thrv.com/jobs-to-be-done-white-paper

Learn more about JTBD: https://www.thrv.com/jobs-to-be-done
Youtube: youtube.com/channel/UCEKeVWAeyQeMPzq9HfbUa5w
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thrv-com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/thrvapp
Follow Jay Haynes on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayhaynes/
Follow Jared Ranere on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaredranere/

Jay Haynes:

Welcome back to How would you beat where we discuss how you can use jobs to be done innovation methods to beat your competition. Remember to subscribe and like this podcast. In this episode, we will look at how you could beat Steve Jobs. Why was Steve Jobs so successful, he is a legendary figure in technology, and innovation. He was the founder of Apple, he was famously fired and went on to found next computers and that he was came back as CEO of Apple in 1997. He's widely considered to be one of the most successful innovators of all time, depending on the day Apple is still often the most valuable company in the world. And he was at the addcom at Apple. And throughout the history of Apple, he's been there for major major changes, three big ones, obviously, just the arrival of the PC and the graphical user interface, the iPod and portable music devices. And then of course, the iPhone, and its cousin, the iPad. But he also brought Pixar to life. He bought the company but helped to make it a success. He had just a remarkable team there. And Apple also bought next. So in a way Apple is next, at its core, its foundation of the Macintosh operating system is actually a next computer. So why was Steve Jobs so successful? And how can you and your product team emulate Steve Jobs, Jared? So why was he so successful?

Jared Ranere:

Well, I think that the myth out there is that he was a brilliant individual, who knew a lot, you know, had a background in liberal arts, studied a lot of different disciplines and brought them all together to create genius ideas and didn't care what the customer said they wanted didn't care about market research. He knew what was right. And told his team that, that that's what you hear about Steve Jobs. To what degree do you think that's true, Jay?

Jay Haynes:

Yeah, I think that first of all, he never said that. He never said customers don't know what they want. He said, You have to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the product, not just starting with the product idea. And it really foundational ways, if you look at what he was doing throughout his career, and you know, of course, he died very young and 56, from pancreatic cancer, but you can look at his career app through Apple next and Pixar. And what he was doing was very empathetic with customers like really understanding what they wanted to do, rather than just using the product. Even if you go back to the Apple two plus, which was their first real successful product, and I remember it because my, my dad bought one in 1979. And it was my first experience of computer, it was a it was a really high powered computer because it had dual floppy drives and 64k of RAM. Those were the days, but it was a remarkable product, you you you did just start typing in BASIC programming language directly on to the screen it loaded up with this with this interface was really nice for computer, you know, you remember you're competing with PDP elevens, and, you know, machines that cost $250,000. And he brought to market a $2,500 computer that, you know anybody can learn and fool around with. So I think even even in those early days, you could see, I'm going to make it easier for people to now what we would say get jobs done. But in starting with the Apple two, I'm gonna make it easier for people to program computers. And then in that course it moved on to the graphical user interface. And I think that's what's amazing. He didn't really invent everything. Famously, he didn't invent the graphical user interface. It was, you know, developed at Xerox PARC. But he immediately saw its usefulness. So that's such an example of where he empathized with people who were trying to get things done. We just now call them jobs to be done. He was very good at that empathetic with customers and realizing that they were going to use stuff that was easier to use.

Jared Ranere:

Right? Yeah, I think that that recognition of things that could be useful. As far as I understand through a book I read about the development of the iPhone. He didn't he wasn't the one who said a touchscreen would be a great thing to do. There was a team that was working on, you know, experimental interfaces for inputting information into a computer. They identified the touchscreen, they started developing a prototype. Eventually he looked at it and was like, Oh, this is hard to use. I don't think I've really figured it out yet. And then they kept working on it. Eventually a phone project came to Apple and that's where they started to connect the dots. And it seems to be what Steve Jobs was really good at and the development of that was figuring out What What would all this technology be useful for? For a customer? You know, customers don't want to input information into a computer, they want to get some job done out of that. And so he figured out, you know, the, almost a marketing angle, you know, why are customers going to care about this new technology we're developing in the iPhone is really brings together a lot of new technologies that touchscreen, small chips that made it possible to, you know, have memory connected to Wi Fi, there's a lot of different technologies that came together to make the iPhone possible. And he saw why it could be useful to people.

Jay Haynes:

Yeah. And there's, there's so much to talk about, it's amazing. But on the touchscreen stuff, what I think's amazing is the for so long as Steve Jobs kept the mouse on the Mac, even before the touchscreen, just a single button. And the reason he did that, apparently, was not because he couldn't put two buttons or three buttons, or you may remember these Logitech mouse's that literally, like every part of your finger and your knuckles, and you can scroll and touch and multi click, you know, just this incredibly bizarre, you know, object, he kept it to a single button, because he recognized that the software engineers should be pushed to make it so easy to use a software that all you had to do was click a button. And the reason I bring that up is, you know, when we work with companies, we do this a lot. But this is the way you should think about your customers, you want them in order to get the job done, whether you know, when it was using the Mac, it's like drag a file, or copy a file, or move a word or draw something. All those basic functions, were just literally clicking a button and dragging them out. So very, very simple gestures. If you think about your product development, this way as well, it really focuses your team, because you want to imagine that all your customer has to do to satisfy one of the needs you're targeting or a step and the job or even the job itself is to click a button. And if they have to do more, there may be reasons why there may be really complicated technical reasons, jobs can be very, very complex. The technology is not always there today to be able to do it. But if you track okay, it took us 12 steps or 12 clicks, for example, on software in order to satisfy that need. Well, can it take 10 and then seven, and then three, and then one, because your customers do not want to be clicking around. And that's what I think really, Steve Jobs recognized that people have lives, they're not building computers, so that you can use the computer, you have to accomplish things, you have to get jobs done, you have to achieve goals. You know, that's basically what a job is. So that the simplest path to do that wasn't is incredibly important. And I remember reading about a discussion he had when, in the days when Apple had iTunes and people remember rip mix burn was their campaign, they needed to get people to take their CDs and put them onto their iPods. Because an iPod without music was useless, right. And they didn't have the store initially. So the iPod initially was a way to tape it was a tape recorder basically in digital form with 1000 songs. So rip mix burn, and then people would burn a CD because they would also make a you know, version of their CD because people still had CD players and their cars, or whatever. And you had CDRs you know, which were rideable CDs. And and the team was trying to figure out how the interface should work. You know what they should do to burn it. And he just looks at him. He said, here's what they're gonna do. They're gonna grab the songs and drag them onto the CD on the desk. That was it. That was one gesture. And then that force the technology team to go figure that out, that was not a non trivial problem they did. They definitely have to write code and develop it. But now they know what to focus on. And this is such a good example of speed and accuracy. It's why we use speed and accuracy to measure everything. Because if it takes 12 minutes to rip your CD, or burn your CD, whatever the terminology of the day was. That's that's not good enough. How about one second? How about I just do one thing and it's done. Right? This goes this goes back to the Kodak Brownie, right? We've mentioned this before, but the the Kodak brand was the first camera where all you did was click a button and take a photo. And it was dominant camera for 60 years. Same with Pandora, you click a button now you have mood for music and like really successful innovations take this kind of Steve Jobs approach to getting the job done.

Jared Ranere:

Yeah, and I think what's interesting about that story as well is it leads to another myth that I think exists about him which is that he's this singular individual that has all these ideas As and gets other people to implement them. Where when you read about the development of a lot of these products, you see him more in the position of being a tremendous editor. Right. So not the originator of all the ideas, but the selector, oh, I can see how that's going to work with that. And if we bring them together in a certain way, and position them in a certain way, the market will get really excited, and customers will flock to it. And Hebrews, very lions on brilliant people on his teams, to come up with those ideas, and to explore a lot of things that one of the things that was very surprising to me, about this iPhone book, is the way it's described multiple teams off on their own talking to him once a month, once every two months, sometimes once every three months, just exploring how they might solve various problems. And he would come in and give them guidance about you know, what they need to fix and what the problems really were and give them precise inputs. But he wasn't hovering over them every single day being like, I'm the person who knows everything and you don't know anything, even though sometimes he was rumored to have said things like that. And I think that that's often overlooked when people think about great leaders and visionaries is they think that they are the originators of everything where he was very clearly had a lot of people doing a lot of things in a lot of different spaces and went around choosing what was going to work for the customer.

Jay Haynes:

Yeah. And he famously said, he was proud of the things that he said no to as well as what he said yes to. And I think that is a good summary of what you just said, which is editing is creating, he was an editor. And there was a lot of output. You know, as, as any company, any product team, you know, anybody listening to this has been our product. Ideas are not a problem. People have a ton of ideas, they got whiteboards have posted notes, it is knowing which one of those ideas should be prioritized. It is it is a prioritization, which is an editing game, focus, whatever you want to call it, to really get at the core problem that people struggle with. And and just identifying that problem is hard. How do you know what the problem really is? Now, Steve Jobs did have a really good instinct at that kind of market research, I think along two dimensions, which are really important. One is the just first and foremost what what the job was. So a good example of that is famously, when he came back to Apple, he even brought Bill Gates in, and unfortunately put him at like, on a 50 foot screen in the middle of this apple meeting. And people were like, boo, it looks like you know, so 1984, like Big Brother coming into the apple meeting. Because Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were obviously you know, factually enemies for a long time. But they became friends and but more importantly, from a business standpoint, Steve Jobs recognized that, and he said this for Apple to succeed does not mean Microsoft has to fail. So what he was able to do is focus Apple really intensely on digital media, he recognized so he was very good at saying people need to get digital media jobs done, in essence, and they're going to do it on computers, everything's going to be streamed, everything's going to be digital, whether it's audio books, TVs, movies, home movies, you know, people, your your media life is going digital, right. You know, I mean, he grew up in the era, you know, a little before I did. But you know, still in the same record collection era, I mean, just just moving a record collection was like a serious endeavor, just the amount of ways you know, and then you had to clean the records, it was always staticky. And, sure there's some beautiful analog tone, but like the trade off, like having every song available to you in your phone, you know, 24 hours a day is just incredible experience. So he just he recognized that he was very, very good at this, just kind of seeing where the market was gonna go. And then the other thing is, who was the customer? This is what I think, you know, now we look back and it seems obvious, but remember, the technology world wasn't targeted at consumers at any point along in his career. First of all, there was no consumer computer before the apple two. I mean, there was the Altair and I believe some other like homebrew stuff, and then there was the trs 80. And, you know, the Atari but they he really him and Steve Wozniak really pioneered and said, Oh, we're going to sell these things directly to compute consumers. We're not going to sell them to businesses. That was a that was a weird concept. But in now, we would explain it using jobs theory that he's targeting the job beneficiary, not the job executor. And you can see that that's just taken over in so many markets. and will continue to take over markets. Like SAS. SAS is a great example in b2b enterprise applications now you don't need an IT director or IT manager because you log into the app, right? You've cut out that middleman he, Steve Jobs famously called them orifices. But that's because he wanted people to have an experience with the technology that really helped them get jobs done. And why would I need another person there to figure out technology for me? Shouldn't the technology just work?

Jared Ranere:

Well, its mission, the idea that he was targeting job beneficiaries, yes. And then on top of that, a different set of jobs than the b2b jobs, right. So and it's, it's an interesting story, when you think about how he was able to make that happen. So you know, our first computer was the original Mac. And I used it to learn how to type and to play fight flight simulator and other games, and to write homework, write papers for school. And those are not the jobs that a white collar professional is trying to get done. They are very different. And the reason why Mac Apple was able to do that with their PCs was because they were so easy to use, I didn't have to learn how to code. In order to write a paper for school, I just had to like sit down on a word processor and type, it was extremely easy to do. So the what were the previous computers, like any IBM computer was totally opaque to me at that age, like it was such a high effort to try to use it to do any of those consumer jobs I wanted to do, I wouldn't bother, it wasn't worth it, it'd be faster for me to write it down on a piece of paper and hand it in than to sit at a computer because of the of having to basically code my way into any application.

Jay Haynes:

Well, and I don't, I don't want to forget that Apple did succeed in those early days to have the Mac with desktop publishing, you know, being able to create newspapers, newsletters, magazines, layouts, you know, in the print world, you know, the Apple was really dominant for a long time, but because they took the same approach, even in b2b, you can consumerize or whatever, you know, terminology you want to use, for b2b markets, where you can make the end user or the job beneficiary who is using the product to publish a newspaper, for example, and make it really easy to publish a newspaper, because we looked at laying out a newspaper on a Mac versus, you know, a dedicated, I don't even know what the competitors were at the time, but some sort of, you know, I'm sure very hard to use sophisticated, you know, layout system, but you anybody can learn to do it on a Mac, you literally just you know, if you wanted to publish something, you could do it on a Mac, and then that led to the same kind of consumerization of, you know, whether music production, you know, they bought a company that became logic and GarageBand their foundation of like, you know, consumer facing, and prosumer and Pro as well, you know, pros use those those applications to make a living. But even with Final Cut, Final Cut, and then iMovie, you know, he famously got up and said, like, I asked one of my colleagues to make a home movie on a Mac, about their vacation in 10 minutes, and they couldn't do it. So you know, they created iMovie. So this, this ideas continue kind of theme is get the job done faster, and more accurately, it doesn't even matter. They chose to go after obviously, mostly consumer markets, but next didn't. And remember, he spent years building next for businesses and colleges. But ultimately came back to the consumer market.

Jared Ranere:

Right. And I think there's an interesting discussion to be had about platforms here and getting a lot of jobs done with one platform. You know, you think about this idea that apply a technology to a job that's always been trying to get done. Other people haven't applied technology to it yet, you're likely going to make it faster, more accurate. You see that happened with you know, apply the PC, to newspaper publishing, people were publishing newspapers for hundreds of years before the PC came around, apply that technology to it. IBM hadn't done that yet. And you can make it faster, more accurate. You see that all over the internet, right? Turn, turn anything into a web enabled application. And it makes it faster and more accurate because internet is an application. Steve Jobs looks at things seemingly a little bit different. If you look at his output, where he's saying, I want to host the new technology and in own the platform that's going to enable all these jobs to get done. I think the iPhone is a good example of that. It's not just he moves from making a music player, which is what the iPod was to. I'm going to have a platform that not only makes it really easy to to play music but enables mobile computing and streaming for getting many, many, many jobs done in the App Store, you know, was the true combination of that. So it's interesting to think about how do you take this insight that there's a collection of jobs that aren't being touched by certain technology? And decide, do you create the application for that, or the platform to host? All the enabling of many people getting many jobs done?

Jay Haynes:

Yeah. Yeah, it's such an interesting question. And, you know, this is, I think, part of the benefit of being early on in the PC revolution is he was always thinking at the operating system level, which is the ultimate platform, you know, saw software hoppings. That's why, you know, Apple and Microsoft, you know, and effectively, Google, Google is really a cloud operating system, certainly for search, but also just for their applications. That, that being in the operating system, business is a good business, when everything's going digital, because as you say, you know, jobs are just inherently going to get done faster and more accurately, in, in software, and an operating system is, you know, essentially software. And this is the, you know, we've talked about this before, this is why software eating the world, Marc Andreessen phrase, if you look at what a job is, A, what is a customer trying to do, it's some goal they're trying to achieve, whether it's getting a baby to sleep through the night, you know, creating a mood with music, you know, restoring artery blood flow, you know, ensuring aircraft airworthiness across business, you know, consumer and medical markets, a job to be done is a goal. And it requires information inputs, requires planning, it requires decision making, you know, assessment, monitoring, revising, you know, concluding, etc, all the kind of categorical job steps. And that's because you're essentially trying to solve a problem or get a goal done. So computers are going to be much faster than humans, they already are, and you connect them to a network of other computer computers and information sources. And you build decision making algorithms, they're just going to be really, really faster and more accurate. So if you're gonna create a platform, you then want to make sure that that platform, like iOS, or Android, or Windows or Mac OS, you know, is enables developers to then quickly and accurately build applications that create value for customers.

Jared Ranere:

I think it's the timing of his career is an interesting thing to look at, as you brought up, you know, he was early on in the computing revolution. And so he thought of things at the OS level. And I don't know enough about the development of the apple two to know this, or the apple one. But, you know, was it that he thought, gee, people should be able to use this to publish text like a newspaper. And I tried to do that with the Windows system, and it was a terrible experience. So I can't create an application for Windows, I need to create a new platform that does can actually enables me to use a computer to get this job done a lot better. That seems to be what he did with the iPod, right? You know, I want to listen to music out of my pocket, doing it with the existing mp3 players is a terrible experience, rather than making, you know, another version of Winamp, which was an mp3 player software element at the time, I'm going to create a new platform that the called the iPod, he did that with the phone, right? So he takes big bets, right? Because he could have said, like, let's create a word processing application for Windows. But he said, That's not good enough. And so I do know anything about the history of that. And it's a difficult decision to make, I think, and I think we see it today, playing out when it comes to web three, you know, Blockchain, I call it AI. And other things, you know, is the AI good enough for you to build the application, you want to make it super performant? Or you have to create a new AI platform in order to utilize that technology to get some narrow job done?

Jay Haynes:

Yeah, I think there, there's a couple things. I do know a little bit about the early days of Apple, I'm sure that we could have an apple expert, Apple historian, tell us more about it. But you can even see it in just the way he talks about computing. Remember, his famous phrase was a computer was a bicycle for the mind, which is pretty amazing. It's an incredible metaphor. Because you can take a bicycle anywhere, right? You could just say, Oh, I'm using my bike as I'm exercising, but I don't think that that's how he meant it. I think he meant it. It's just a beautiful way to explore the world and so he was always kind of thinking like that. And you know, he's got to give a lot of credit to Steve Wozniak, who was really, you know, a hardware genius as well, who could put all the pieces together to make a computer. That wasn't Steve Jobs as skill. So, again, there were more people, more people than just Steve Jobs working on this, as you said, Yeah. And so I think that that kind of idea that the bicycle of the mind, combined with, it just has to be much better than what exists today. Because I think the iPod is an example of where the iPod had an operating system, but it was dedicated to playing music, the iPod, I mean, later on, you could watch some little videos on it. And I think you could use it as a hard drive. But it was it was a music device. So that was very, very specific. And I think where there were similarities there is he wanted to do stuff that was super high quality. Now, the way that we would explain that in jobs to be done is don't launch the product until it creates enough customer value. And that's really, you know, Apple is not known for being first. I mean, they did, obviously, the Apple two and the apple one, were really kind of the first pioneering of the personal computer in the Mac was the first kind of popular implementation of the DUI, you know, but they didn't create the DUI, the iPhone certainly wasn't the first mobile phone, even the first kind of, you know, early smartphone, I mean, the BlackBerry was very sophisticated, smart device, right? So I think if you if but what they do is make sure that it is going to create value. And you know, we say this entrepreneurs or even teams at big companies that are trying to launch products, you know, MVP is a way that like venture in the entrepreneurial world thinks, which is minimum viable product. That's a horrible phrase horrible, because viable just means it works. Now, if the implication is what's the value of it, so is it a minimum valuable product, like the Zune Zune was viable, they launched it, and they thought it was good, and people would use it, and it was unbelievably huge market failure. Viability just means like, it's, it's, it works, it doesn't mean it's valuable, right. So minimum valuable product is what Apple always does. Now they've had their failures, they've definitely, you know, apples had failures. And my friends know, they still have bugs, and I complain about them all the time to my friends. And seriously, like I did not to go off on their bugs, but they have, you know, $200 billion of cash, and they're using a huge chunk of it to buy back shares that should just be illegal until they fix all their bugs, like spend $50 billion, fixing the bugs, because that makes your use of the Mac and iOS slow and less accurate. When you when you have crashes, and they're back to the quality of Steve Jobs, there wasn't an era about about a decade, you know, after os 10 came out and a few versions in where it was just unbelievably stable. You never saw a crash. Remember that people would joke least Mac users would joke about the blue screen of death and Windows, which he saw all the time. I have applications crashing the Mac a lot. Now. We're more frequently than that kind of decade of Steve Jobs.

Jared Ranere:

Yeah, I think this idea that like the product you launch has to be really, really great. And if you can't do that, on the platforms available to you, you have to create a new one. There's a really interesting analogy to this in a company called dapper Labs, which operates in web three crypto, whatever you want to call it, where they they saw the potential in the blockchain, to enable some jobs to get done, namely around connecting with athletes. You know, that you really like that, you know, they they're, they're creating the analogy for the trading card industry through NF T's. So they did a partnership with the NBA, they have this product called the NBA Top Shot, where it's a short video that you can buy and own. And it has interesting information about the moment that you purchased and now own as an NF. T. And so they're getting this job done of Kinect with an experience of an athletic event that you love and like know more about it and, you know, show the world that you were there and you know about it, etc. There's there's a lot of emotional jobs in there. And they realize that the blockchain is at its current state, you're doing this with Aetherium was not easy enough for consumers to use it to get this job done. And so they created a new platform called flow that developers can use to create these NF T's transact them create wallets that are really, really easy for consumers to use. I think it's a really interesting example. It's very similar to Steve Jobs saying you know what, the mp3 players aren't good enough for Apple to create a piece of software to integrate with an existing mp3 player that stinks, you know, I want to create a new iPad that consumers can use very well to get an old job done. So I think we're in a world right now where these choices are being made. And the principle of it's not easy enough for consumers to use to get their jobs done is a good guiding principle to help you make that choice. Do you need to invest in a new platform? Or couldn't you use the existing ones available to you to try to get the job done better?

Jay Haynes:

Yeah. And you know, we don't have to get out in the crypto web three holes too much. Right. So there could be other ways you could do that kind of, you know, sports experience without without blockchain. I mean, like to use blockchain. Now, there's a lot of developers working on whether or not it's, you know, going to be a good thing over the long term or not. That's a separate question. But I think you're right that the, anytime you see a job, and it's a struggle to get it done with existing platforms, and what I think is kind of fascinating to look at is, were getting jobs done with an iPhone or an Android, just using a phone is still not a great way to get the job done. We all have these phones with us, you know, all the time. And are there opportunities for new platforms that aren't based on a phone. Now, SaaS applications are kind of a good example of that they work on phones, you know, but they really exist in the cloud, rather than like native applications on your phone, right.

Jared Ranere:

And you know, you do with your family, or jobs that could be better done without a phone, literally. Or a pet, for that matter. Like, I cannot tell you the number of times where I tried to do something with my kids using a phone and it turns out horribly. Because the phone becomes the center of attention instead of our relationship. Any activity, you're trying to build a relationship with your kids that you do with them. And if the if something takes away from that attention, it makes the job go worse. And there, there's a great series of videos on YouTube that you can look up where its pets irritated at their owners. That's funny, too much where the pets are just like trying to bite the phone, get it away, nudging them, it gets in the way of jobs related to relationships.

Jay Haynes:

Well, I think that's an interesting kind of final point to conclude on, which is really a question that we could we could chat about a lot. But what would Steve Jobs think of the state of the iPhone and its application ecosystem and what people are using the iPhone for today? That's interesting, because if you remember, he died. Unfortunately, you know, way too young, but the iPhone was a huge success. So he was there, obviously, to help create the iPhone success with the Apple team. The what he didn't see was the emergence and dominance of social media. Right? He was not I forget, what year did he die? If he was?

Jared Ranere:

I can look real quick. Right? It's 11.

Jay Haynes:

Yeah. So 2011, which was still before the kind of explosion of social media, I would say, and, and the, its dominance. And of course, before, you know, that was 11 years ago. So it was before we knew about all the algorithms and the problems with you know, the, the theories, the big problems with algorithms and dopamine and, you know, Facebook, creating genocide, and, you know, spreading false information about COVID, and, you know, politics, etc, etc. So, what would he What would he think today, and I think your, your pet example, and your kids example, are a good one, because I think at his core, he was very empathetic with humans. And he was really in excited about the future where the computer, you know, was a bicycle for the mind, where it was the intersection of Liberal Arts and Technology, it was not just for technology on its own, and, you know, had this very hopeful vision of making a dent in the universe, you know, as you said, that would make the universe a better place. And it's interesting to see what's happening today in the world and our expectations about where we should be now, you know, based on all this incredible technology, you know, that we all have in the palm of our hands, you know, all day long, and what's going right and what is not going right? And yeah, can we do to fix it?

Jared Ranere:

And I I very much agree with that. And one final anecdote. I got an Apple watch a few months ago, because it made it easier to communicate with my family when I was holding both my kids hands crossing the streets, right? Yeah. tend to my phone and pull it out. But lately, I found myself in my head, when I put it out in the morning thinking, I've got to put on my tether. My tether to the technosphere, which is just like going to be monitoring me and keeping me connected to people all the time and giving me no peace. It vibrates all the time, I've limited a bunch of notifications. And that's, it's not only not getting some jobs done, it must be getting in the way of some jobs for me to meet for me to have that subconscious thought, you know, I didn't think too hard about it, just like I started calling it a tether. And I don't know why.

Jay Haynes:

Yeah, that's interesting. I've had a different perspective on it, too. I definitely understand that. I've had an Apple Watch for a while. But one of the things I liked about the Apple Watch is I don't have to pick up my phone. Yeah, like I can. And, you know, both of us are parents, like a lot of people. And so you know, you just you do have to be connected. You know, you have two kids, I have four, there's just there's logistics. And you know, you're always on parodied duty, it's a 24 hours a day, seven day a week job. So some of it is liberating, like it does tell you but at the same time, I don't have to worry, am I out somewhere, and I'm not looking at my phone. And if something happened to my kid, right? We've had, we've had to take them to the emergency room more than once. Right? So there's a there is a that's a great example of where the watch is, obviously, new platform, and what can things like the watch evolve into what is coming next, that's going to help us get jobs done, that ultimately get back to connecting with other humans in really positive way. That's the goal. That's the ultimate job. And, you know, we got to do a lot these days to, you know, make money and get through life and stay healthy, and you know, all the things that ultimately lead to meaningful connection with other humans. And it's a good question our phones and technologies, these platforms now making us less connected as humans and making the world you know, sub optimal.

Jared Ranere:

Yeah. And to go back to your original question of how would you emulate Steve Jobs? I think we're coming to an answer that you would be looking for the next platform that can get these other jobs done much better than the ones he created.

Jay Haynes:

Yep, I think that's a great place to end. Well, thanks for listening and remember to subscribe and like this podcast. If you want to learn more about jobs done innovation methods, visit us@thrv.com