Five of Steve Job’s biggest mistakes

The Harvard Business Review posted an article detailing mistakes that Steve Jobs made. The point they are trying to make? Even the most successful leaders have a string of failures during their career. They say “any entrepreneur who wants to invent, innovate, or create must be willing to be imperfect and make mistakes in order to learn what works and what does not.”

Steve Jobs was one of the most iconic company leaders, earning a reputation as being both ruthless and creative. While most people will remember his success stories, the HBR have listed five of his biggest failures as

1. Recruiting John Sculley as CEO of Apple
2. Believing that Pixar would be a great hardware company.
3. Not knowing the right market for NeXT computer.
4. Launching numerous product failures.
5. Trying to sell Pixar numerous times.

The product failures they have listed are the Apple Lisa, Macintosh TV and the Apple III. The PowerMac G4 cube also gets a mention. The website say “Steve Jobs was brilliant about understanding how technology vectors were evolving, yet even he screwed up royally, and often. Obviously Jobs had success with the iPad, iPhone and iPod but some of these products did not sell well, at all.

Author Peter Sims concludes “Even the great business visionaries and luminaries of our times often fail and have setbacks. Imperfection is a part of any creative process and of life, yet for some reason we live in a culture that has a paralyzing fear of failure, which prevents action and hardens a rigid perfectionism. It's the single most disempowering state of mind you can have if you'd like to be more creative, inventive, or entrepreneurial. The antidote is to try a small experiment, one where any potential loss is knowable and affordable.”

Kitguru says: Jobs had his fair share of failures.

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