Occupy Something (just not your mind)

The Occupy crowds have been in the news for a couple months now. What started at Occupy Wall Street has spread to cities across America, most notably Occupy Oakland. Having to drive through Oakland to get to work for the past 4+ years, I can attest that no part of the city is known for its ‘fat cats’, who live and work in luxury while the 99% of the population suffers. So why Oakland? Well, that’s where professional protestors are readily available. It’s next door to Berkeley, which is the birthplace of free speech marches and ant-government protests. Not much is required to gin up a reason to protest. A stroll down Telegraph Avenue on any given weekend will reveal numerous opportunities to buy buttons, T-shirts, bumper stickers and even tattoos to shout out the whole gamut of causes, from legalizing pot to promoting communism to freeing so-called political prisoners you’ve never heard of. Protesting is the only activity that gives these people meaning.

They’re like that thirty-something guy living at home in his parent’s basement. He can passionately rail against society and government for their unfairness but is content to abdicate his personal responsibilities for food and shelter to others. He wants to have the car available for his use, but doesn’t want to pay for the maintenance or registration. He wants the hospital, police and firemen to be there for him, but feels someone else should pay. He wants to excuse his personal situation by blaming it on the cruelty of our social structure, the greed of others, or more popularly – the failure of government to provide for him. We all realize that a society made of these people cannot succeed. But somehow they seem to the rest of us owe them something. Victims get passes, the rest of us have to make our own way. Maybe that’s why we have so many victims in our society, and why we have so many government programs that keep them that way.

Steve Jobs – Not Just a Visionary

By now, even people living in caves know that Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, died of cancer. Few men in our time have left as large an impact on the commercial or technological world. The iPod forever changed the way we listen to music, the iPhone changed the way we communicate, and the iPad is yet another innovation in portable computing. All this is on top of the MacOS, which defined the way we interact with personal computers.

A few months back, some of my colleagues and I were sitting around waiting for a plane, and I posed the question: “Can you think of another single person who is so single-handedly responsible for their company’s success?” We were, of course, talking about major companies of $1B or more. A few names came up; Henry Ford, John Rockefeller, Bill Gates... but not a many. Larry Ellison is flamboyant and arrogant, but he’s not really an innovator. Richard Branson is adventuresome and eclectic, but also not an innovator.

Every eulogy we read about Jobs centers around the word ‘Innovation’, and nobody can deny this. But Jobs’ greatest skill was not his vision or creativity. Truth be told, the world - and especially the Silicon Valley – are full of good ideas. Billions of venture capitalists’ dollars go to entrepreneurs with great ideas. Few reach the kind of success Apple has, but not because their ideas are bad. The ability to turn a good idea into reality on a global scale is a far rarer gift than creativity. For many innovators, arrogance is their Achilles heel. Once they get a few million dollars, they morph from hungry innovators to the wealthy upper class they have idolized for so long. Maybe the most common flaw many founders face is the failure to recognize their own limitations. The skills needed to earn a company its first $10M are rarely the same as those needed to get to $200M, and those are different still from the skills required to manage $1B. Great ideas are nice. The ability to turn them into reality is a rare gift indeed.