WWSJD? Channeling Steve Jobs as Politician

WWSJD: What would Steve Jobs do?

This is the question I asked myself after reading Walter Isaacson's authorized biography, Steve Jobs. It's no secret that the Apple co-founder and CEO, who died in early October at age 56 from pancreatic cancer, was a brilliant, creative, and tough Apple executive who changed our world with some of the most cherished products to come out of America's nascent computer technology industries of California's Silicon Valley beginning in the 1980s.

Jobs' legacy — the first personal computer with a graphical desktop interface, WYSIWYG typefaces and printers that revolutionized publishing, the streamlined, user-friendly iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, and iCloud, and Pixar's groundbreaking digital animation studio — melded performance and style into an ecosystem of inventive genius that resonates in ways even 20th century science fiction hadn't imagined for the millennium.

Judge a book by its cover? For Steve Jobs and his magical Apple inventions, the answer was a resounding "YES!"

What if Jobs had applied his skills to running a city, state, or country? If he had lived long enough to become a public figure with political ambitions, as Ronald Reagan did once his acting career had run its course, what might a Steve Jobs administration accomplish? Are there lessons other politicians might learn from Steve Jobs' life story?

From what little political involvement Isaacson includes in the book, Jobs apparently never had much interest in public service, although at the height of his fame he met with Barach Obama and tried to offer some policy advice — an experience for which Jobs expressed frustration. From a young age, Jobs was a petulant perfectionist, often mean to even his closest family, friends and most productive personnel. Jobs didn't suffer fools or foolish ideas in the least. Not exactly fodder for a political career, it would seem.

While he was a proven success building teams of the smartest technologists and product designers and engineers, Jobs often ended up damaging his personal and professional relationships with them — again, hardly traits one would expect of an astute political operative.

Neverless, Jobs mastered some core attributes that would have been invaluable to whatever elected office he might have pursued. First, he was an astute observer of people, with an ability to quickly size up a personality and analyze the psychological motivations undergirding it, Isaacson writes — a fundamental skill of the political animal.

Second, he was a brilliant thinker with a courageous mind that allowed him to see reality in ways others around him could not (a prime example being his reaction to the computer "mouse" that Xerox had been unable to find marketable). School children around the world would embrace Apple computers and benefit from using them due to the intuitive design of their hardware and software. Because of that vision, Jobs as a political leader would surely have been willing to challenge the status quo in California or Washington, D.C., with new ideas that draw on user involvement and human-scale simplicity.

Third, Jobs was brought up to have a strong appreciation for craftsmanship, which invariably led to his brilliantly executed products appearing to be magical. His personal involvement sweating the details of Apple products until he was satistied caused much consternation among his managers, but even the most inured among them admit to Isaacson that Jobs was usually right, and that he not only pushed them to greater heights of achievement but also to their most satisfying life experiences. How many politicians today can say that?

Finally, Jobs had the salesmanship gene to go with his intellectual heft. Isaacson brings up numerous examples of Steve's ability to literally stare without blinking at someone, almost hypnotizing the person, thereby taking command and control in business negotiations unlike any of his contemporaries. Add to that his well-know stage-presentation wizardry and I feel comfortable predicting that Jobs could have, if he had set his mind to it, brought about fundamental change in America as a history-defining political leader.

As fate would have it, virtually no direct political impact came about via Jobs in his lifetime. Near the end of his 630-page tome, Isaacson reports that President Obama was strongly impressed with Jobs' suggestion, in a February 2010 meeting with Silicon Valley tech titans, that a way be found to train more American engineers. Reports Isaacson:

Two or three times over the next month [Obama] told his aides, "We've got to find ways to train those 30,000 manufacturing engineers that Jobs told us about."

Isaacson also mentions Jobs' desire to help the Obama campaign improve its 2012 political advertising, a wish that would never come to fruition as Jobs became increasingly incapacitated by his disease.

And so it is left to imagine what impact Jobs might have had on progressive politics if he had beaten cancer, left Apple, and lived to engage in political battle. For certain, Jobs would have been driven by the three fundamental marketing principles famously conferred to him by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Mike Markkula:

• Develop empathy for the customer. 
• Focus on a few important priorities.
• Impute desirable qualities in a creative, professional manner. 

Jobs met with President 

                                             Obama and offered some

                                             advice to find a way to train

                                             30,000 industrial engineers.

                                              

Without Jobs available to obsess over each of those points, I'll leave it to President Obama and others on his political team to find whatever advantage they might take from a philosophical shift that treats each voter with care and concern, that puts greater emphasis on the professional execution of the responsibilities of public office, and that trains a laser focus on those practical policies that are at the core of progressive political thought.

To reframe my original question slightly, what would Steve Jobs do if he were running Obama's reelection campaign? He would, I imagine bring his determination, magical enthusiasm, and stagecraft to the advancement of these six goals:

1. Push for state-specific jobs programs that create public-private partnerships, and share the details of such plans with voters in each state.

2. Promote simple, low-tax incentives tied to corporate behavior that creates good-paying jobs and returns profits from offshore tax-avoidance havens.

3. Fight for a nationwide union law giving workers the fundamental rights to organize and negotiate with employers, and for the end to right-to-work state laws that deny those rights. 

4. Threaten the bailed-out banks responsible for mortgage-repackaging abuses with Justice Department investigations unless they modify loans to reduce principal, and allow borrowers to remain in their homes without penalty until the economic picture produces a jobless rate under 6 percent.

5. Bring Justice Department voting rights action immediately to challenge Republican-initiated state laws that threaten to pervert voter access to the polls in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

6. Protect society's most vulnerable citizens by publishing and promoting information — in voter-friendly, plain English in a website easily found — on how the health care reform act, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid must be perfected as essential government programs that provide cost-effective services while saving taxpayers and private businesses from having to deal with these issues on an inefficient, piecemeal basis.


Exhibit empathy, focus, impute greatness. The bottom line on Steve Jobs: a passion to think different, execute beyond expectations and embody courageous leadership — valuable attribute for our next president.


Additional reading
Book: 
http://www.amazon.com/Would-Steve-Inspire-Anyone-Differently/dp/0071792740
Blogs:
http://www.nuvo.net/indianapolis/what-would-steve-jobs-do/Content?oid=2363991
http://www.fair.org/blog/2011/11/01/what-would-steve-jobs-do/
http://www.heliade.net/2011/12/10/1364/