Steve Jobs, Purdue, and the Best One Can Be
“Focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
So said the late Steve Jobs, CEO extraordinaire, way back before iPhones, iPads or much of “I” anything. Remarkably, in the same 1998 interview with BusinessWeek, Jobs outlined Apple’s comeback in a way that hardly reflects today’s reality: “Jobs is betting on the PC. Forget whizzy products, such as information appliances, multimedia players, or handheld computers. ‘We’re not going off into la-la land,’ he says.”
Of course, Jobs ultimately bet on much more than the personal computer (iMacs were Apple’s showcase product at the time). In fact, today it’s hard to imagine that Jobs were have ever said anything like that.
So how did Apple become the world’s best/largest/most wonderful/fanboy corporation?
By focusing on a small group of products and services and making them the best available. Better than world-class. Perhaps even galactic class.
Directly quoting Jobs, Apple’s first marketing brochure – printed in 1977 for crying out loud – said this: “It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions.”
Jobs knew the secret. We can’t do everything. But everybody can do something great.
Recently, Purdue President Mitch Daniels sounded a lot like Steve Jobs. I have been privileged to serve on the advisory council of Discovery Park, a billion-dollar research facility at Purdue University. Recently (in early September 2014), Daniels – the former highly successful two-term Governor of Indiana – was on campus to help dedicate a new $28 million drug discovery facility and a $15 million expansion to include the Bindley Multidisciplinary Cancer Research Center at Discovery Park.
In his remarks, the former Governor noted that Purdue was positioned “to do great things.” Purdue already had a global reputation when Daniels arrived a few years ago, but he challenged the faculty and administration in a Jobs-like way. While Purdue is known for many great things, what could Purdue specialize in – echoing Jobs obsession with the iPhone and mobile devices – that would truly make a difference.
The Purdue faculty, Daniels noted, came back with two things: first, perhaps not surprisingly, was in the realm of advanced agriculture. Second, and perhaps surprising, since Purdue has no medical school, was an all-new focus on drug discovery. Now, with the establishment of this new drug discovery facility, Daniels is again being bold, looking to make Purdue into a university leader in pharmaceutical development. Numerous of major life sciences companies have already been in contact.
Purdue’s “modest” goal for the drug discovery facility? “Addressing the World’s Most Pressing Medical Challenges.”
Why is Daniels confident this will succeed? For the same reasons as Steve Jobs was confident of Apple’s comeback from near-bankruptcy to the world’s best company: focus and simplicity. He, like Jobs, openly recognized that we all have the same hours in a day. We all have limited physical bandwidth. But using that bandwidth to maximum effect? The implication?
We must be relentless in choosing opportunities to be the absolute best at a few things, even one thing.
Clarity of thought. Simplicity. Powerful unrelenting focus. The best.
That is how one changes the world. That is how one moves mountains.
What are you focusing on?
By Michael Snyder, Managing Principal, The MEK Group
About Michael Snyder and The MEK Group – As the Indianapolis Star stated in 2014 profile coverage, “Michael Snyder knows brands.” Snyder today serves as managing principal of The MEK Group, an award-winning marketing, branding and PR firm. For more information, please visit www.themekgroup.com