I just finished the book Inside Steve’s Brain by Leander Kahney.  It’s a bit of a fluff job that dismisses a lot of the long held criticisms of Apple CEO Steve Jobs as intentional and strategic ploys, but the point of the book isn’t to psychoanalyze him but to understand his thinking process and how it affects business.  It’s a terrific read and makes a lot of good points, and of course Jobs is one of the great leaders and success stories who has transformed society.  It’s worth checking out.

At the end of each chapter Kahney sums up the strategy of Jobs as a take away for any leader or business person.  It got me thinking about the average guy.  In the chapter titled Elitism he describes efforts to find the best and brightest for Apple.  Of course, this isn’t a new strategy invented by Jobs but he’s done a particularly good job (so to speak) and it’s greatly impacted Apple.  However two particular items stuck out.

First, one of his biggest moves was in 1983 when he brought in John Scully to run Apple alongside Jobs.  At the time Scully was the president of PepsiCo and he had engineered the campaign that unseated Coke as number one for the first time ever.  He was 30 when he was named Vice President at Pepsi and 38 when he was named President.  Yes, he attended very prestigious schools and yes he had some great connections.  But, what kind of guy can go from graduating college to VP at a company like Pepsi in five or six years?  Certainly not the average guy!  That’s someone who is exceptional.

The other point was one of Jobs strategic points: Partner only with A players and fire the bozos.  When you read something like that you tend to think of yourself as the hirer and firer.  I’m only going to hire the best!  Or you might think of yourself as the A player.  In reality most of us are the bozos.  Would it have been fantastic to be a part of the early days of Apple?  Absolutely!  Would I have been able to cut it?  I have my doubts.

I am in the middle of leaving my current job and a part of it is that I was the bozo.  That’s really not a fair representation; I wasn’t really a bozo, just perceived as one.  The circumstances weren’t my fault and my response was very appropriate.  But, if I were really an A player would I be in a position that anyone wants me to leave.  No.

The question I am wrestling with is not how do I become Steve Jobs or John Scully.  Ain’t gonna happen.  I just don’t have the tools.  But, can I move from being a bozo to an A player?  That’s the question.

Inside Steve’s Brain and “Vectors going in time.”

I read Inside Steve’s Brain this weekend.  It was a quick read, although the book isn’t one that I would recommend to most of my friends (except the extreme Mac-heads out there).  However, there was one point that I wanted to explore further — Kahney discusses how Steve Jobs pays keen attention to the convergence of various technology trends (which Jobs calls “vectors going in time”) to do things that were not possible previously.  

The iPod was made possible by cheap, small storage (1.8 inch drives from Toshiba), the proliferation of digital music (ubiquitous PC CD burners helped to make that possible), broadband penetration in the home, and advances in the manufacture of plastics and later metals.  YouTube was made possible by ubiquitous availability of Flash in the browser, cheap storage and bandwidth, and broadband penetration in the home and workplace.  

So what are some interesting “vectors going in time”?

There are a number of interesting trends that have the potential for major disruptions.  Here are a few that come to mind (please contribute your thoughts in the comments of this post):

+ Cheap and portable storage.  

Flash memory is going to change the game — by both reducing the space required for storage and because flash memory is so durable.  What devices can be re-invented by leveraging Flash memory?  On the other end of the spectrum, storage capacity (of the spinning disc variety) is growing at such a rapid pace that it’s just about free.  What can you do with infinite storage capacity?

+ General purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU).

GPUs are brilliant at offloading (from the CPU) highly intensive graphics tasks.  Graphics is an inherently parallel task (every pixel is separate), so using many GPUs to handle computation is a superior solution to jamming everything through the CPU.  With data volumes exploding, are we finally ready for parallel computing?  Are there more tasks ideally suited for this technology?  Will something emerge that offers a layer of abstraction that allows the massive investment in existing programming techniques to be sent to a cloud of GPGPUs?

+ Distributed file systems + MapReduce.

Projects like Google’s GFS/MapReduce and the open source Hadoop are frameworks for running applications on highly distributed commodity hardware.  Google’s entire search index was rebuilt on GFS/MapReduce as soon as the software was ready.  These frameworks are critical in order to process petabytes of data.  They are also relatively new and improving at a rapid clip.  How can we take advantage of Hadoop to do cool stuff with huge data volumes?

+ Machine learning.

With infinite storage capacity and compute cycles, what can we do with all of this data?  Kevin Kelly wrote a great piece called The Google Way of Science.  Machine learning is going to evolve beyond it’s limited use today in bio-informatics, web search, and anti-virus products.  What really hard problems can we attack today with machine learning which were previously impossible?

+ Ubiquitous wireless access + AJAX.

Just as fixed-line broadband created many new opportunities, so too will the ubiquitous availability of wireless — 3G, GPRS, CDMA/GSM, WiMAX, Wifi, or Bluetooth.  This plus the move to AJAX (asynchronous Javascript and XML) will finally allow server-side computing to own the planet.  What applications benefit most from mobility?  

+ GPS everywhere.

GPS will soon be a default in all phones.  The cost of GPS will eventually be low enough to embed it in all devices.  With wireless everywhere, devices will both be able to tell us where they (and we) are AND communicate that information to server-side services real-time.  What services would be dramatically better by having locational information?

+ New human-computer interfaces.

A friend of ours picked up a new iPhone — her four year old daughter picked up the phone when she wasn’t looking and started using it.  Not the way a four year old uses a Blackberry, but really using it like an expert.  The touch screen interface is such a natural way for humans to interact with machines.  

The Wii has taken the lead in the console wars with inferior graphics processing capabilities — the reason because Nintendo is innovating on a different vector — human-console interactions.  The Wii controller’s gyroscopic interactions with the console and Wii Fit’s accelerometer has a nailed virtual reality.  How can we use these emerging interfaces to build better web experiences?  The iPhone also has an accelerometer.  Hmm….