“We’re Not Building a Phone”: Steve Jobs’ Leadership Lesson for Reframing the Future

The beauty of this moment is that every one of us gets to be a leader of what’s next.

Why now? Because the only playbook that exists is for yesterday. There is no playbook for tomorrow. No proven answers. No “best practice” to copy and paste. No “quick win” use cases that unlock new value. And that’s exactly the point.

Right now, I define leadership in a simple (and slightly uncomfortable) way: a leader is someone willing to think differently and ask different questions. Because when you do, you don’t just predict the future…you create a future that otherwise wouldn’t exist.

There’s a story from Silicon Valley that I shared in Mindshift. When Steve Jobs was finally convinced to pursue the iPhone (and he had to be convinced), he gathered his inner circle and asked: Who should we bring into this project?

Naturally, the team responded like experts, they brought forward the “smartest people” in the industry.

Jobs exploded.

“I don’t want anyone to work on the iPhone if they’ve worked on a phone,” he said (minus the expletives). “Because we’re not building a phone.”

Of course it became a phone. But before the breakthrough became the device we all know, the first breakthrough was the mindset. It started with him and spread through the team. That was a beginner’s mind at work: refusing to inherit the assumptions of an industry…so you can reinvent what the industry makes possible.

For the last 15 years, many companies chased “digital transformation.” But if we’re honest, most of us didn’t transform, we digitized. We took analog processes and made them digital. We moved pieces to the cloud. We modernized within silos. We upgraded the present…instead of redesigning the future for a digital-first world. Now we’re moving to an AI-first world with a similar mindset.

The mindset isn’t “be like Steve.” The mindshift is stop building tomorrow using yesterday’s thinking.

What’s your “iPhone” moment?

What are you “building” that you’re treating like the old thing…just faster, shinier, and more efficient?

Where are you hiring for expertise when you actually need imagination?

What would change if you led with beginner questions instead of expert answers?

Because in a world without a playbook, the leaders who win aren’t the ones with all the answers. They’re the ones brave enough to ask new questions.

Please watch and share your stories

This is a snippet of my keynote at Integrated Systems Europe (ISE). You can watch the full keynote here.

Booking: Steven Weinreb: [email protected]

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