Two-time Apple software evangelist and multiple book author Guy Kawasaki recalls Steve Jobs as difficult, demanding - and fear-inducing.
"I lived in complete and utter fear of Steve because he would not hesitate to tell people in front of the whole division what a bozo clueless person you were," Kawasaki tells an overflowing theatre at the CeBIT 2015 technology conference.
Jobs, Kawasaki noted, also wasn't one for employee relations rulebooks. "All the great HR practices that you've all learned about meeting with your employees and developing goals and helping people reach their goals - Steve did none of that," he said.
"Having said that I would not trade working for Steve Jobs with anything in my past. Steve Jobs was a fantastic person."
Kawasaki took a number of learnings from his two stints working with Jobs and provided his top ten so you can learn from them, too.
1. Innovators ignore naysayers
Naysayers are "the clueless people, the people who are pessimistic, who tell you that it can't be done, it shouldn't be done, it isn't necessary," Kawasaki explains. Ignore them, and whatever they tell you - they're clowns.
2. Customers cannot tell you what they need
Kawasaki tells the story of Apple-2 customers in the mid-1980s wanting "a bigger, faster, cheaper" version of what they already had. Apple instead built the first Macintosh.
"If we had listened to customers, Apple Computer would simply have built a better Apple-2, and I believe Apple would have died," Kawasaki said.
"Great innovation occurs when you don't listen to your customers; when you use your passion, vision and insight and you create what you believe they will need, they will come to need - or that you can convince them they need, which is what Steve did. "
3. Innovation happens on the next curve
Kawasaki uses the example of ice harvesters. The next "curves" they could have aspired to were to become ice factories, or to make refrigerators.
"The very interesting fact is none of the ice harvesters became ice factories, and none of the ice factories became refrigerator companies, because most companies start on the curve and die on the same curve," he said.
"It's because they define their business as what they currently do. If you define your business as we harvest ice, then you continue to harvest ice until the ice factory kills you. You should define yourself in terms of the benefit you provide your customers."
4. Design counts
You might expect someone who worked at Apple to say that.
5. Democratisation is a good thing
"Working for Steve basically set my life in terms of wanting to help democratise stuff," Kawasaki said.
He sees Apple as democratising computers, Wikipedia (where he sits on the board of trustees) democratising information, and his involvement in a Sydney start-up called Canva as democratising design.
"This has been my life calling - I like to democratise things, I like to make power and functionality available to everybody".
6. Less is more
Kawasaki said this ethos applied to "design, presentations - just about everywhere you communicate". He noted Job's fondness for simple presentation slides - a large picture, large font, and few words.
"For those entrepreneurs out there, there's what I call the 10-20-30 rule of Powerpoint or Keynote," Kawasaki said. "The 10-20-30 rule is that the optimal number of slides in a Powerpoint presentation is 10, [delivered] in 20 minutes, and the optimal size font I think is 30 points."
Font size on slides should be determined by figuring out who the oldest person is in the audience you're pitching to, and dividing his or her age by two. "Pitching to 60-year-old people? 30-point font. Fifty-year-old people? 25 points. Someday - God help you - you may be pitching to a 16-year-old. That day use the 8-point font."
7. Changing your mind is a sign of intelligence
"You would think of all people in the world Steve Jobs would not prove this, but he absolutely did," Kawasaki said. "Many CEOs believe changing their minds is a sign of stupidity, weakness, cowardice. Steve Jobs taught me quite the opposite - changing your mind is a sign of intelligence and courage.
"That was part of the genius of Steve Jobs. When he found out he was wrong, he did not hesitate to change his mind and change the course of Apple."
8. Value is not the same thing as price
"Price is in terms of dollars, the value is the total impact," Kawasaki said. "Nobody ever bought anything from Apple because it was the lowest price. Apple sells connectors for $30 that it costs 50c to make, and we're thanking them for that privilege of buying that connector at $30."
9. A players hire A+ players
You've probably heard this before as 'hire people who are better than you'. Apparently Steve Jobs believed the mantra, too.
"Everybody you hire should be better than you. You want to be the second best person of all your direct reports because if you have a team like that they will carry forth the battle for you," Kawasaki said.
The alternative was a race to the bottom. "B players hire C players, C players hire D players, D players hire E players. If you start hiring E players you're going to wake up one day and be surrounded by Z players," he said.
"This is what we in Silicon Valley call the bozo explosion. You need to fight the bozo explosion."
10. Marketing = unique value
Kawasaki offers up his own version of a 2x2 matrix. "You need to be in the upper right-hand corner," he said.
The bottom right corner is reserved for those who create something valuable but not unique. "In that corner you've done something important, but if you slap the same operating system on the same hardware, you have to compete on price," Kawasaki said. "You can make a whole lot of money here - Dell did - but it's always about price because fundamentally you're selling the same thing [as everyone else]."
Less attractive is the upper left-hand corner. "That's where you create something truly unique - only you do this thing - but it is of no value," Kawasaki said. "In that corner you are just plain stupid."
The bottom left corner is also undesirable. It's what Kawasaki terms the "dotcom corner". "The dotcom corner is the worst of all because you've created something that's not valuable and it is not unique."
