Steve Jobs and lessons for newspaper leadership

"Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. He was, indeed, an example of what the mathematician Mark Kac called a magician genius, someone whose insights come out of the blue and require intuition more than mere mental processing power. Like a path find, he could absorb information, sniff the winds, and sense what lay ahead."

So Walter Isaacson describes Steve Jobs in the closing pages of his best-selling biography of the late Apple founder. After absorbing the book whenever I had a chance over the past week, I tore through the final 150 pages or so on Sunday. Many of the juicy stories from the biography have been released over the past few weeks, but it really was something to work my way though Jobs' fascinating life from start to finish.

As I flipped the final pages of the book, a thought started forming in my head. Steve Jobs took Apple to such ridiculous heights of success — why aren't more companies trying to emulate what he did? This thought quickly morphed into a topic that I hold very dear as I asked myself: What can the newspaper industry learn from Steve Jobs?

Steve Jobs was a visionary. A man who by Isaacson's count revolutionized at least six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing and digital publishing. Under Jobs' guidance, Apple was not a company that plodded along, adopting new strategies to take advantage of the latest trend. No, instead it was one of the most innovative companies the world has ever seen, creating products that people didn't even know they needed. Jobs liked to use the (possibly made-up) quote from Wayne Gretzky, telling people to skate where the puck is going, not where it's been.

Where are the visionaries in the newspaper industry? Yes, the New York Times has found some success with its paywall. And, yes, there are some newsrooms that have empowered people to explore new digital projects. But where is our Steve Jobs though? Look at the past five years of newspapers and what the current industry leaders have focused on. Layoffs. Furloughs. The bottom line. We've been faking the idea that everything is going to be OK by pointing at profitability — a profitability secured by cutting expenditures, not by allowing innovation to lead to solutions.


Craig Dubow recently stepped down from the CEO position at Gannett and was lavished with praise by some parties for his time in the position. "Gannett has been one of the companies that have been more aggressive in cutting its costs to right-size the business than many other companies in its industry," said Michael Kupinski, an analyst at Noble Financial. Cutting is not innovation. When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company was less than 90 days away from being insolvent. He laid off more than 3,000 people, but it was as a part of a refocusing of the company. It was part of a plan. Jobs took over a bloated company that had lost its sense of direction. He eliminated numerous products so that Apple could focus on a few core products. It was a reset that would allow Apple to launch into a huge streak of innovation. I've lived through several rounds of layoffs and furloughs, and never once did I have the confidence that they were part of a master plan. When jobs are cut in the newspaper industry, they're cut to reach a dollar number.

Imagine what the newspaper industry could be doing if it choose to accept lower profits to bring in talent and direct resources toward doing something great. The industry's leaders are so focused on budgets and savings that they're forgotten to look forward. After returning to Apple, Jobs produced the iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iPad. Good luck naming even one huge innovation in the newspaper industry from the past decade.

This is lesson No. 1 from Steve Jobs: A leader must have vision.

Why don't we have visionary leaders running newspaper companies? There must be people sitting in newsrooms with brilliant ideas and a sense of how to right the ship. Unfortunately, the newspaper industry isn't pulling its leaders from the newsroom. Jobs learned this was how a company can lose its way very quickly, and he learned the hard way. John Sculley was lured from Pepsi to become Apple's CEO in 1983. Sculley was an executive, a marketer and an advertising man. He wasn't a computer man. Under Sculley, not only did Apple abandon its innovating ways, but it expelled Jobs from the very company he created.

Looking back, Jobs offered Isaacson his thoughts on how a company declines:

"The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they're the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company. John Akers at IMB was a smart, eloquent, fantastic salesperson, but he didn't know anything about product. The same thing happened at Xerox. When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don't matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off. It happened at Apple when Sculley came in, which is my fault, and it happened when Ballmer took over at Microsoft. Apple was lucky and it rebounded, but I don't think anything will change at Microsoft as long as Ballmer is running it."

And nothing is going to change in the newspaper industry as long as people who aren't passionate and who don't have an deep connection with the product continue to steer companies. Dubow's background before becoming CEO at Gannett? Advertising sales and television. His successor? A financial background. Maybe they were successful in their previous fields but that shouldn't matter. You wouldn't go to a hospital in need of life-saving surgery and ask the head of medical billing to do perform the surgery, regardless of how talented she may be in her field. We need leaders who have been in the trenches, whose cars have been ticketed while covering a story, who have redesigned a front page on deadline, and who have worked the night shift.

When Apple was close to death in the late 1990s, the company realized that it shouldn't be turning to executives who had sparkling resumés but had no connection to what Apple represented. They realized they needed a leader who deeply loved what Apple was about. They turned to Steve Jobs.

This is lesson No. 2 from Steve Jobs: A leader must have passion.

It's clear that there are two very different groups of leaders in this world. There are the number-crunchers, the cutters, the leaders beholden to their stock price. These are the people who will earn the praise of those who profit from layoffs and furloughs. They may keep their companies afloat, but they will only be bleak, eroding shells of what those companies had once been.

Then you have the risk-takers, the innovators, the leaders who have the respect and loyalty of their workers and their peers. These are the people who will bet the company on that wild idea that just might turn everything around. They have vision. They have passion. And they are just what the newspaper industry needs now.