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- Which CEO and / or company most
successfully, consistently, and thoroughly embodies innovation to
maximize business results?
- Below is a response to the
above question which was recently presented on LinkedIn by Michael
Eisner, former Chairman and CEO of
the Walt Disney Company.
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- October 12,
2008
- By Eric M. Scharf
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- Mr. Eisner,
Steve Jobs – in tandem with his crack team of creative and dedicated
folks at Apple – have most successfully, consistently, and thoroughly embodied
innovation to maximize business results.
If there has been a person or a group that has consistently created
and delivered game-changing products (technological or otherwise) to market
– and life-changing
products to society – for the widest range of consumers (from
grandparents to grandchildren) in the way that Steve Jobs has, then,
please, point out that person or group.
There have been several suggestions in the list of responses to your
question that Bill Gates is the answer, which is appropriate in the
tied-to-the-hip history he shares with Steve Jobs.
Bill Gates – and his business software development team at
Microsoft – were originally in the business, however, of providing mass-market
software products that had customer usability and quality at the
very bottom of their priority list. It has taken Bill Gates and his crew
of thousands – with and, recently, without him – decades to get within
sniffing distance of Steve Jobs and Apple in the grand competition for the
hearts and minds of those who want superior technological products
for business, home, and leisure . . . that deliver equally on usability, quality,
and longevity.
Neither raw workforce expansion numbers nor philanthropy count in this
conversation, either, and Bill Gates has accomplished quite a bit in
those arenas.
While everyone else continues to (purposely?) flood global market places with
more average-and-not-nearly-as-good filler (in an attempt to force
competitors to lower their own prices), Steve Jobs and Apple
continue to hit home run after home run with technologically
superior products that continue to add gourmet, reasonably-priced
flavor to an otherwise bland-and-inferior group of consumer options.
Basic logic dictates that innovation by one company would encourage
others to raise the bar on their own products or even to create an
entirely new
product market from their own resultant innovations. And, yet, competitors continue to insist on manufacturing "better than nothing"
and "almost as good" . . . while Steve Jobs
and Apple simply continue to create and strive to create "the best."
History, of course, has shown that
allowing one person or company to do all the leg work and perform
all the research and development towards a particular idea or
consumer product can spare the competition from needing to be
entirely original with their own efforts. History has also
shown that – no matter how successful you become when riding someone
else's coattails – you will forever be remembered as a 4C (Creatively
Challenged Copy Cat) who can and will be passed over when the chips
are down and innovation is required to solve a major problem or
develop the next big thing. Only in a parallel universe will
this label ever be applied to Steve Jobs and Apple, and, even then,
with products so simple and slick, the label may never stick.
"O great and powerful Steve!" – Ozzie (William Shatner) in "Over the
Hedge" by DreamWorks.
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