How Steve Jobs missed the real innovation opportunity: extended inventor responsibility

After reading Walter Isaacson's excellent biography of Steve Jobs. 

As someone interested in entrepreneurship, I was amazed by the brash, bold vision of Jobs, Wozniak, Ives, Schiller and the many others behind Apple's revolutionary products. There is a certain intellectual and emotional rush one experiences with such breakthroughs. Another business icon, Phil Knight, has said that "business is war without bullets" and in the Apple story the battles, victories, defeats, and triumphs are breathtaking. However, they happen within a context where the actors appear completely ignorant and uncaring about consequences. The will to win and to create overshadows all else.

As someone interested in products and business models that are respectful of people, place and provide employment, I can't stop wondering how Jobs missed the real innovation opportunity: truly revolutionary products as regenerative for the environment as they are for people's lives. But in his story, there appears very little consideration of the addictive nature of the technology or the electronic waste tsunami it represented for the planet.

In 2017, a decade after the first iPhone, Apple had ascended to the top of Greenpeace's list of the greenest tech companies. After years of media exposures, embarrassments and disasters from FoxConn suicides to conflict minerals and mines collapsing on children in the DRC, Apple improved its product and its practices. Why did it take so long and why did Jobs and those closest to him appear to never have considered these consequences. They would have been easily foreseen with the right advisors and the right scenario planning. This was a strategic, moral, and creative failure.

A Dent in the Universe

Steve Jobs was an adherent to the teachings of Zen Buddhism whose teachings of simplicity, non-materialism, care for all living things, and the intrinsic value of nature might hardwire against the design of a product narrowly aimed at satisfying material wants and dismissive of life cycle effects.  But in Jobs case, his deeply held beliefs were expressed only in simplicity and beauty. Left aside were values that dealt with a wider circle of responsibility. From his life, one sees a genius dead set on inventions that would "leave a dent in the universe" as Jobs liked to say.  He became more enamored with a narrow view of innovation:  creativity without responsibility, genius without generosity.  Overcome, as many before have been, with the strong emotional desire to conquer (in his case Microsoft, Samsung, Google and others) all other values were collateral damage.

It is concerning that many business schools now teach innovation in the shadow of Jobs.  We hold up new concepts like "design thinking" and "agile project development" and "lean start ups" and "fast failure". I taught entrepreneurship and created and taught a college course in social entrepreneurship. After hundreds of students and many hours of discussions with colleagues, I can tell you that these foundational concepts should be taught and caught with care.

• Design thinking puts the customer in the center but ignores the environment and equity. Upstream and downstream impacts and risks of design decisions are rarely if ever included. This is a huge failing of design thinking.
• Agile project management encourages an iterative approach with design sprints but the teams are so busy "sprinting" they rarely look up or get out of the building to consider the wider world and other perspectives. This is the opposite of agility: it is clumsy, stiff and inflexible management stuck in its own echo chamber.
• Lean start ups focus on a "return on learning" which sounds lovely but is focused only on customers and competitors (alternative and substitute products). Learning is not focused at all on unintended outcomes, waste, pollution, access, inequality. How will the product be made? By whom? How will they be treated? What happens with the product at the end of life? This is not part of "return on learning"...so what really is the return then?
• Fast failure is a nice sentiment for those who can afford failure but dangerous for those who cannot. We need more slow and thoughtful success and less accelerations to the unimaginative, the innane and the unnecessary (just look at all the apps in your nearest app-store created with a fast failure model resulting in nothing more than another rectangle for banner ads and click bait)

Extended Inventor Responsibility

We must teach that creativity without responsibility is depravity.  We must teach extended inventor responsibility where the entrepreneur is forced to consider the full effects--positive and negative--of her/his creation.

I don't criticize Jobs.  I didn't know him and his passing was a huge loss to his wife and children.  His legacy is amazing and he revolutionized many industries and inspired millions.  Still his story is a cautionary tale which, as I listened to it, was both filled with admiration and dread.  If today's students and entrepreneurs follow his model without much thought to consequence, we will be in trouble. The current debate about artificial intelligence (AI) will be a case study in creative with (or without) responsibility.