![]() Inspired by a simple question from Land's three-year-old daughter as to why she couldn't immediately view a set of pictures he had taken of her with his Rolleiflex while out for a family walk, it took years to realise and was the perfect embodiment of his maxim: "Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible." But it was by far its most enduring and most profitable. ![]() His company had already experimented with polarising filters to reduce the effects of car headlight glare and produced goggles for fighter pilots serving in the Second World War. The instant camera that Land, a Harvard dropout, had shown to the American Optical Society was not Polaroid's first innovation. The man's name was Edwin Land and his showpiece was the very first Polaroid image. By the following Monday it was picture of the week in The next morning a press photograph of the inventor, seated behind a table in a white shirt and striped tie, holding a picture of that very same scene ran alongside a glowing editorial in Once the clock had finished its countdown, he peeled one sheet away from the other and showed them a perfect sepia portrait of himself. He fired the shutter of an 8x10 camera, pulled out a sandwich of paper, ran it through a set of mechanical rollers, then set a timer. On February 21, 1947, a young man stood before a room and unveiled a brand new creation. Do they describe the culture of your organization? Please share your comments below.Sixty-five years ago Edwin Land launched the Polaroid camera, changing the way we think of both photography and technology forever. These are great lessons for other business leaders to take away as well. In other words, can Steve Jobs' successors hold true to what Jobs learned from Edwin Land? That will be a key leading indicator of Apple's continued success. What they can do, however, is to maintain the principles that Jobs believed to be fundamental to the culture, and therefore the success, of Apple. Asking "What would Steve do?" won't work, they will inevitably confront circumstances and market dynamics that won't match those that Steve Jobs deciphered. Likewise, to be successful, Apple's future generation of leaders will have to learn from Steve Jobs' games but make their own decisions. Instead, you have to learn the underlying principles that guided those games, like controlling space, structure and tempo. There are just too many board combinations. ![]() You can't become a great chess player by just remembering all the moves of all the games that a grandmaster has played. While this charter might be interpreted as teaching Apple executives to channel Steve Jobs in their future decision making, I think this would be a mistake. Podolny moved into the office between Jobs and Tim Cook, who would later replace Jobs as CEO, and was tasked to " help Apple internalize the thoughts of its visionary founder to prepare for the day when he's not around anymore." He recruited Joel Podolny, the dean of the Yale Business School, to establish Apple University in 2008. Reportedly, Jobs scolded the management for ejecting Land and called the company without Land "a vanilla corporation," meaning, "you've lost your way and don't matter anymore."įaced with a clearer sense of his mortality than most others knew, Steve Jobs worked diligently to help Apple avoid the same fate after his own departure. Unfortunately, I wasn't invited to the meeting, but I certainly heard about it. Here's how Johnson described a later visit that Jobs made to Polaroid: After the loss of Edwin Land, Polaroid went on a steep decline in the 80s and 90s, culminating in several bankruptcies and reorganizations.Ĭarl Johnson recently told me that Jobs predicted-to Polaroid's management-that this would happen. Companies quickly deteriorate after they lose leaders that define their culture. ![]() There's another lesson that Steve Jobs probably took away from Lands' experience at Polaroid as well, which might be phrased as:Ĥ. The third lesson reflected both of their relentless drives for perfection, which included taking a scientific approach to experimentation and market feedback. Land’s point of view saying he felt that the Mac too had always existed invisible to the rest of us, just waiting for Steve to come along and reveal it.Īs Michelangelo said, “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” Both Land and Jobs thought of themselves as master sculptors, and they wanted to make sure that their organizations were infused with other sculptors, too. Land’s observation, saying the reason he never did consumer research when he built a new product is he trusted his own instincts more than others who couldn’t see what he saw. Steve Jobs immediately connected with Dr.
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