Over the course of Fast Company’s Pivot series I’ve covered ad firms, media startups, retailers, search engines, dating sites and even musicians that have been forced to either change direction or face dire consequences. This week, though, I want to focus on just one man: Steve Jobs. Because like virtually everything else Jobs did, he turned pivoting into an art form.
One of the fundamental tenets of pivoting comes out of Eric Ries' Lean Startup methodology. The founder of a startup doesn’t simply tear up a business plan if things aren’t going well. Pivoting is borne out of data, of looking at what is working and what isn’t. The idea is to base pivoting on a specific testable hypothesis. You can, for example, do it by concentrating on a single feature in a product (Ries, the man who coined the term pivot, identifies that as a “zoom-in pivot”), attracting a different set of customers (a “customer segment pivot”), introducing a different monetization scheme (a “value capture pivot”), or changing the kind of technology you use (a “technology pivot”), and others. Steve Jobs, between the 11 years he was exiled from Apple and his return, tested all of these.
All of this is marvelously chronicled in “The Lost Steve Jobs Tapes” by Brent Schlender, who recently dug up a trove of recorded interviews he had conducted with Jobs over the years. It’s a fascinating collection that shows that in failure greatness can spring. As Schlender put it, “Steve Jobs did not wander aimlessly into the wilderness after being ousted from Apple in 1985.” Angry with those he believed had wronged him he set off to build a great computer to revolutionize education, and to do that he wanted to completely revamp the way a corporation would run. After raising $100 million in venture capital he started NeXT and, as it would turn out, he got a lot wrong.
Today I am learning a new word-pivot.And Steve Jobs has mastered the art of pivoting/What is it?Please read the article.Most people only know of his success stories but he had a few failures.IMHO,he derived his wisdom and strength from his lessons learnt from his failures.
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