We are strong believers that many stories make up your personal brand or company brand …not just one. It is a subject I explored in a previous post ‘The Yeti and the Brand Story’ and was reminded of again when I read a recent Smart Company article on ‘The Five Best Steve Job Anecdotes’.
This article recounts five anecdotes from Steve Jobs that collectively show you the type of man he was.
Such as this one when Jobs was shown a prototype of the iPad and complained it was too big.
“After the engineers said they couldn’t make the device any smaller, Jobs took the iPad over to an aquarium, and promptly dropped it in. “These are air bubbles,” he said. “That means there’s space in there. Make it smaller.”
To this story that showed Job’s attention to detail:
“Google senior vice president of social business Vic Gundotra wrote recently on Google+ that once in 2008, he was sitting in a religious service on a Sunday when he received a call from an unmarked number. It was Jobs, leaving a message saying he had something urgent to discuss. When he called him back, Jobs said the issue was urgent, and that he needed it addressed right away. In fact, he had already assigned someone on the task.
“I’ve been looking at the Google logo on the iPhone and I’m not happy with the icon. The second O in Google doesn’t have the right yellow gradient. It’s just wrong and I’m going to have Greg fix it tomorrow. Is that okay with you?”
To this story about the issues with Mobile Me which was Apple’s first venture into the cloud.
“It didn’t work properly and didn’t deliver as promised. Jobs was unimpressed. According to a Fortune article published earlier this year, Jobs gathered all the people responsible for Mobile Me at the company’s Town Hall, and told them they were “tarnishing Apple’s reputation”. He even said they “should hate each other for having let each other down”.
“Can anyone tell me what Mobile Me is supposed to do?” he asked. When someone answered, he said, “So why the f&*% doesn’t it do that?”
“Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering,” he said.
Hearing one of those stories in isolation would give you a limited insight into Steve Job’s the man, Steve Job’s the professional CEO and Steve’s Job the entrepreneur. It is the combination of not only these three stories but all the stories being shared that create the Steve Jobs brand.
All of us and the world are diminished by his passing.
