Business Lessons from sucessful entrepreneurs and business leaders: LunchLearning.com

Reading time: 2 - 4 minutes

Video Time: 15 minutes 5 seconds

No one can deny Steve Jobs has been an incredibly bold entrepreneur from the start. Co-founder and CEO of Apple Inc. and former CEO of Pixar, Jobs has continually pushed the limits of technological innovation and artistic creation. In this commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005, Jobs casually offers up three stories, loaded with important life lessons.

Jobs discusses his college days, in particular his decision to drop out, but then “drop in” on classes. Clearly a person who often took the path less traveled in life, the lessons he learned while “dropping in” on classes were invaluable and would contribute to his success later on in life. He says, “you can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards,” and encourages us to follow our hearts, to trust that one day it will all come together. As long as we are working towards what we are passionate about, it will be worth it.

Jobs talks about how he and Steve Wozniak built up Apple, starting out as just two guys in a garage. Not everything was perfect during his time at Apple. At age 30 he was essentially fired from Apple and didn’t know what to do with himself. But what he did know was what he was passionate about. Shortly after leaving Apple he created Pixar and NeXT Computer. Pixar needs no explanation of its incredible success, and NeXT was eventually bought by Apple, putting Jobs once again at the helm. This experience taught him a lot, and Jobs urges us to persevere in life, saying, “Do what you believe is great work…keep looking, don’t settle.”

At the end of the speech, Jobs discusses his recent health struggles. He urges us to use the knowledge of death to push ourselves to achieve what we want, to make necessary changes in our life and start doing what we love and what we feel is important, right away.

Don’t let the length of this video fool you, there’s plenty of knowledge and wisdom packed in! Happy Learning!

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Reading time: 4 - 6 minutes

Total Video Time: 53 minutes 36 seconds

The last few days, we’ve been looking at technological changes that can change the playing field that are just arriving or are on the distant horizon. Today, we’re stepping in a different direction and looking at something a little less physical and more conceptual: the transformation from push-based mass production to pull-based mass customization. Or, simply put, selling customers exactly what they want, not just whatever’s available.

Robert Brunner (@rdbrunner on Twitter), the former Director of Industrial Design at Apple and founder of ammunition, best known for designing the PowerBook, hiring his successor, Jonathan Ive, and winning 23 awards from the Industrial Designers Society of America speaks on the importance of the brand and how, more than ever, it’s defining your company. In this lecture piece, Brunner strives to drive home the impact of the brand. However, it’s a subtle, complex element. The brand is not a product, though it draws from it, and the brand is not advertising, though it’s often used in it. Brand is each individual’s emotions towards the company. Or, more generally and purposefully applied, the collective mood of the people. This becomes ever more important when increased customization increases the diversity in product style and thus diluting product recognition.

This power of the idea of the brand is especially important in today’s environment where the emphasis is not on mass production anymore, but mass customization. Businesses in all sorts of industries have adopted this position, whether exposing it openly or as one of their core elements. Burger King’s slogan, “Have it your way” and Dell’s built-to-order flexibility are two prominent adoptions of this concept.

Customization is a powerful element and people have already shown that they are willing to pay a premium to design things to their specifications. Whether it’s food, computers or even refrigerators or garage doors, if there’s an after-market customization available, it’s fully possible to modify it first. Why should somebody else benefit?

Think of the past, envision the future!

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Reading time: 3 - 4 minutes

Video Time: 34 minutes 59 seconds****Woz starts talking about 5:30****

Steve Wozniak (@stevewoz on Twitter) is best known for co-founding Apple Computer Inc. with Steve Jobs, and inventing the Apple I and Apple II computers. In this video, Wozniak appears at a National Kidney Foundation gathering in San Jose, CA to talk about his book, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. Wozniak speaks animatedly about his interest in computers at a young age, his attempts throughout high school and college to invent and create, and how he and his good friend Steve Jobs finally created their own groundbreaking business. Certainly, there are many lessons we can learn from Wozniak’s fascinating and often humorous story, especially if we are facing our own challenges in the business world.

Wozniak explains how very early on in life he had a keen interest in computers. He was so anxious to learn about them, that in high school he was already designing and building “mini-computers.” Not having a lot of money or even much information at his disposal, he consulted whatever manuals he could get his hands on, and simply built and rebuilt. At one point in the video, Wozniak implies that not having the money to build a computer was actually a blessing, because this gave him the motivation to build a computer that needed fewer parts to run. Wozniak stresses how he was constantly challenging himself, and used whatever resources he had at his disposal to learn and create.

Wozniak discusses his optimism for the possibilities of technology that continued to motivate him throughout his college years. Unable to take any undergraduate computer science courses because they were simply not available at the time, he enrolled in graduate courses. He was not going to let anything stop him from learning what he was most passionate about.

Wozniak ends the speech by touching on his eventual friendship with Steve Jobs and their business collaboration which, of course, brought about Apple Inc. Wozniak beams as he reminisces about the early days of Apple, remembering the exhilaration he and Jobs felt at the prospect of a business that was their very own.

In this video, Wozniak inspires us with his resourcefulness, motivation, and optimism. He asserts that the best kind of learning in life often comes from just digging in and getting hands-on experience. Let his enthusiasm and life lessons inspire you to achieve your own goals!