Much was written about Steve Jobs's managerial and creative brilliance in the days after he announced his resignation from the helm of Apple, but the best I saw was by Cliff Kuang, editor of Co-Design. I was quite taken by the managerial lessons in this paragraph:
Of course, when Steve Jobs has fancied himself the chief creator, disastrous failures often ensued. His instincts were often wrong. For example, his much ballyhooed Apple Cube, which was in fact a successor to the NeXT cube he'd developed during his Apple hiatus, was an $1,800 dud. He was also openly disdainful of the Internet in the late 1990s. And before his hiatus from Apple, in 1985, his meddling and micro-management had gotten out of control. But the years away reportedly helped him begin ceding more responsibilities to others, and become less of a technology freak and more of a user-experience savant. A reporter who asked Jobs about the market research that went into the iPad was famously told, "None. It's not the consumers' job to know what they want." Which isn't to say that he doesn't think like a consumer – he just thinks like one standing in the near future, not in the recent past. He is a focus group of one, the ideal Apple customer, two years out. As he told Inc. magazine in 1989, "You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."
You can read the full article on the fastco-design.com website.
One of the new elements of job hunting these days is facing a preliminary interview on Skype. Like a movie director, you now have to think about lighting, background, proper costume, and other issues, as Alyssa Martino writes on Brazen Careerist.
Harvey Schachter