01. Richard Branson
Founder, Virgin Group
“I recently experienced one of those fortunate coincidences that makes life interesting. Around the same time that I was starting to look forward to the release of Virgin Produced’s new film, Jobs, which depicts the Apple founder Steve Jobs’ life as an entrepreneur, I had dinner at my good friends Jerry and Gina Murdock’s home with a wonderful group of entrepreneurs, including Nest’s Tony Fadell and Dave Morin of Path. Tony and Dave both worked at Apple earlier in their careers, so of course I asked to hear more anecdotes about Steve, the entrepreneur I most admire.
Tony was the man behind Apple’s revolutionary iPod. Early in his career at Apple, Tony approached Steve with the initial concept, and then worked on building and developing 18 generations of iPods and three generations of iPhones.
Tony talked quite a bit about Steve’s leadership style and how it affected the company. It’s well known that Steve pushed his employees to achieve stunning results, demanding perfection, and that he was quick to criticise when things didn’t go right. And his people met that challenge: Things went very well with the iPod, which transformed the music industry.
Tony felt that no matter how good a product was, Steve never thought it was perfect. Part of this drive to perfection meant that Steve did not back down: You couldn’t win an argument with him unless you could back it up with cold, hard facts. And Steve won almost all arguments based on opinion.
If Tony and his team needed to win an opinion-based argument, the team would plot together before the meeting with Steve, wait until the critical moment during that meeting, quietly utter the word ‘now!’ and then all lean forward at the same time and push against his wishes.
The belief that you can always do better is something that sets great entrepreneurs apart, and helps drive them toward future successes. Creators are never fully satisfied. They can always do better.
Steve’s vision and commitment to it resulted in the iPod teams’ developing a huge number of products and versions before they felt they had attained their goal and could go ahead with a launch. This is a long and lonely process at any company — as Dave said: ‘Nobody could remember when we couldn’t sell iPods and we gave every student at Duke University one to get it going. It can take a long time to build a company.’’’