#4: Leadership and Innovation Lessons
With Steve

In business, we usually hear stories from leaders and experts after the fact. “Here’s how I increased my revenues 10X and you can too.”

But what was cause and what was effect? It’s a common mistake to confuse them. How much was due to luck rather than to people and process? It’s easy to explain success after the fact, while misunderstanding how to repeat it.

It’s rare that we can hear somebody explain – in great detail – with incredible candor… their philosophy and approach, and then see the spectacular results that follow. Due to an odd twist of fate, one such opportunity is now available.

We all know the story of Apple, today the most valuable company on the planet. But it grew from a company that was in ruins, just 90 days away from bankruptcy. And it turned on just a single person, a guy named Steve Jobs.

But before anyone, including Steve Jobs, thought he’d rejoin Apple, let alone spark perhaps the most incredible turnaround in the history of capitalism, Steve sat down with BBC interviewer Robert X. Cringely for a no holds barred 64-minute discussion.

It was the best interview Steve ever gave, full of countless leadership lessons and tremendous business takeaways. Yet only a few minutes of the interview made it to television, and then only in the United Kingdom … and then the master tape was lost forever. Somewhere between London, England, and the PBS station in Portland, Oregon, it went missing.

For 16 years, that was apparently the end of it. Then, a few days after Steve Jobs died in October 2011, as reported on Robert Cringely’s blog on October 21, 2011: “Two weeks ago, Talk of the Nation director Paul Sen found a VHS copy of the Jobs interview stored in his UK garage. This is undoubtedly the only surviving copy of the best TV interview Steve Jobs ever gave yet nobody ever saw.”

Join Dave Nelsen in parsing this lost interview and extracting the leadership, innovation, and life lessons of Steve Jobs. After all, he took an almost bankrupt company and made it the most valuable company on the planet by doing… fewer things… better! You can put these same game-changing ideas and practices to work in your business as soon as tomorrow.

Page 17 of the workbook/handout: