Successful Entrepreneur and His Entrepreneurial Traits

STEVE JOBS

Steve Jobs has been our generation's quintessential entrepreneur. A man who was visionary, inspiring, brilliant and mercurial. Through his incredible vision and drive, Steve Jobs forged together what is today the most valuable company in the world, and, along the way, he revolutionized many industries and facets of how we live. And, for his many accomplishments, his name is often synonymous with the words "entrepreneur" and "visionary". So, it should come as no surprise that he was rightfully named the #1 entrepreneur of our time ina list put together by Fortune. Perhaps the most astonishing fact about Jobs was his view that market research and focus groups only limited your ability to innovate. Asked how much research was done to guide Apple when he introduced the iPad, Jobs famously quipped, "None. It isn't the consumers' job to know what they want. It's hard for [consumers] to tell you what they want when they've never seen anything remotely like it." Instead, it was Jobs’ own intuition, his radar-like feel for emerging technologies and how they could be brought together to create, in his words, “insanely great” products, that ultimately made the difference. For Jobs, who died last year at 56, intuition was no mere gut call. It was, as he put it in his often-quoted commencement speech at Stanford, about “connecting the dots,” glimpsing the relationships among wildly disparate life experiences and changes in technology.

There were many traits that led Steve Jobs become the most successful entrepreneur of all time. His personality traits are role model for us in every way to achieve unimaginable success. A few of the traits that all the individuals, entrepreneurs and business owners can opt are:

1. VISIONARY

His vision for Apple was to develop products with simple user interface and elegant design would please greatly to all age groups. He saw how companies such as Microsoft were able to dominate the software market by developing and then licensing their operating system to run on multiple platforms. He was strongly against that approach. He wanted entire control over the user experience which he achieved by reducing his software to run on Apple products and gained full control over user experience in hardware and software. 

2. TEAM ORIENTED

One of the things that Steve Jobs was able to do very well was to create a beyond reality field, both in positive and negative ways for him. It helped to motivate his team to finish projects by desired deadlines (regardless of how impossible they seemed). He did this by addressing people passionately and having them see things from his eyes. He conveyed his vision repeatedly and had others believe in his mission. The way he stood by his vision inspired his employees and granted great respect from his business partners and competitors. When he formed Apple in 1997 and the company was in financial crisis, he knew exactly how to get rid of almost all but a few of key products and projects that matched his vision. That led the resources and funds for Apple to survive and turned its finances around. Steve Jobs did not invite users into his design studios. He never depend on market research and never crowd-sourced the ideation process. Rather, he invited top designers (incl. Pixar’s John Lasseterand Apple’s JonyIve) who admired his moderate aesthetics and followed his design’s simplicity. He and his team were dependent on themselves and their intimate feeling to develop products that users did not even think they needed such as the revolutionary iPod or iPhone.

3. OUTCOME ORIENTED

When Jobs returned to the U.S. from his tour of India, he renewed his friendship with Wozniak, who had been trying to build a small computer. To Wozniak, it was just a hobby, but the visionary Jobs grasped the marketing potential of such advice and convinced Wozniak to go into business with him. In 1975, the 20-year-old Jobs and Wozniak set up shop in Jobs' parents' garage, dubbed the venture Apple, and began working on the prototype of the Apple I.

4. PROACTIVE

At a time when personal computers were becoming more and more popular and standardized due to the popularity and user friendliness of Windows Operating Systems, Steve Jobs saw opportunity to innovate. Apple’s ideas and designs were far less popular initially than Microsoft and their market share reflected that. Jobs continued to tweak products and started to add small features and attractive designs that began to demand more attention. Now Apple is the leader in OS market (PC, Tab, Mobile) and Microsoft is trying to catch up.

“Your time is limited; don’t waste it living someone else's life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinion drown your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”-Steve Jobs.

5. FAILURE IS AN OPTION

After Steve Jobs built up Apple to be a multi-million dollar company, he was kicked out of his own company by the board over disputes on how he was running the company and his own personal visions. Therefore, after he got kicked out, he ended up starting NeXT—a new start up computer company which developed a next generation operating system (which was eventually used in OSX), and then he soon became the CEO of Pixar, which turned the small animations studio into a global animation behemoth with massive fame.

Eventually Jobs redeemed control of Apple, but his failure of getting kicked out of his own company helped push him to gain more experience at other companies, and make Apple an even great company.