The biography of Steve Jobs is a book that is practically 4 cm thick.Having read through the entire book, my most significant takeaway was a quotation to be found in the very early pages of the book. For those who have read the book, you may remember a blank page with only this quotation right in the centre:
“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
And those of us who have seen the recent film on Jobs life which was simply titled “Job” would have noticed that the film ended with Jobs speaking into a microphone these very words.
The quote comes from Apple’s “Think Different” commercial in 1997. Way back then, Steve Jobs already had the drive and imagination to always come up with something that would change the world, at least at the time when he introduced it. It could be a “little” change to a beautiful font, which came about after Jobs was inspired by a calligraphy class he attended, or it could be “big” things like the Mac computer and, in succession, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad.
My challenge to you is whether you see yourself as a leader who seeks to change the “world” – not the whole big world as Jobs imagined, but at least the world immediately surrounding each of you, which you have influence or authority over. This “world” could be your organization, your family, your school, etc. As defined in my book, “The Leader, The Teacher & You”: “Leadership is making things happen, which on their own would not happen.”
This definition is obviously not good enough, because the head of a mafia would also be exercising leadership by making “things”, such as fights and robberies, “happen which on their own would not happen.” So I have to modify my definition of leadership to “Leadership is making good things happen which on their own would not happen.”
But the moment I introduce the word “good”, I have introduced a moral dimension, where the leader has to differentiate between good and bad, and between right and wrong. But this moral dimension is something the leader should never run away from. A leader has both the privilege and the responsibility to do good and to do right.
The leader thus has to answer the question “good in what way” and “good from whose perspective.” I put it as my view that “good” has to be from the perspective of doing good for others and, more specifically, doing good for society. “Good” simply in “self-interest” for the individual himself is unworthy, and can easily come down to being unthinking, misdirected greed. The world suffers from such self-interest every now and then, in all kinds of ways.
May each of us at least try to be aware of where we are not thinking in terms of the good of others and of society, and try to do better for the future of our children and grandchildren to come.