In his biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Issaacson described a time when he and Jobs listened to a recording of the Beatles writing the song, Strawberry Fields Forever. The recording contained a dozen or so sessions of the Beatles writing and revising the song. It was one of Jobs’ prized possessions.
Jobs mentioned to Issaacson as they listened to the recording that he was fascinated by the way the song evolved and improved from one recording session to the next. Jobs felt even after the first few iterations of the song, the song was nothing all that special. Any ordinary musician could have written it. It was only after Lennon kept having the band go back time and again to improve different parts of the song that the song went from ordinary to extraordinary. Jobs told Issaacson, “They kept sending it back to make it closer to perfect.”
Jobs pointed out to Issaacson that Apple operated in a similar way. The company would take a prototype of a certain product and keep refining it. Jobs would tinker and tweak. He would change little elements of the design. He would change the way the functions worked. Each prototype would move the product a little closer to perfect. As Jobs himself put it, at some point along the process, people would say, “Wow, where did the screws go?”
Jobs, like Lennon, was a perfectionist. Everything had to be just right.
In, The All-In Super-Overachievers, we described how elite business leaders almost always have some sort of framework for creating value. In addition to seeking the type of structure that comes with a framework, elite business leaders also have a penchant for iteration and improvement. They are perfectionists and continually make little incremental improvements in order to get closer and closer to that elusive ideal. Elite business leaders, in short, constantly strive to get a little closer to perfect.
Leadership assessment is the great neglected element of investing today. Aligning with an elite business leader and doing so early in his or her career is a game changer for an investor. In looking for elite business leaders, we look for unique clues that emerge early in their careers. One such clue is the existence of a value-creating framework. A second is constant iteration and improvement. Small incremental improvements done repeatedly ad infinitum turn the ordinary into the extraordinary.
