One Lesson Startups & Universities Can Learn from Steve Jobs

How can the right brain/left brain integration that helped make Steve Jobs so successful drive the future of the tech industry – and universities?
Tim Kobe, founder and CEO of design firm Eight Inc., believes that Steve Jobs succeeded in part because he so effectively integrated the left and right sides of his brain. Kobe worked closely with Jobs for years, beginning in 1997 when Eight Inc. was hired to produce Apple product launches. A few years into his work with Apple, Kobe wrote a white paper about why Apple should create retail stores. The rest, as they say, is history.

“A lot of people have discussed what Steve was like as an individual and how difficult he may have been,” Kobe said, but Jobs was extremely comfortable looking at problems and new products from first an analytical perspective, and then an emotional one. “It was very frustrating for people to work with him because you were managing both sides of this personality. But I think that’s what gave him incredible strength and incredible vision. The logic piece had to be right, but the emotional part had to be just as right.”

The right/left brain balance is one that Kobe looks for in his own employees (there are currently over 200) and one he recognizes in other entrepreneurs who have become household names, including Virgin Group Founder Richard Branson. Tech companies can’t afford to ignore the humanities, Kobe said – after all, what does a scientific breakthrough mean if the human component is removed?

Kobe believes that studying the humanities can help build empathy. A lack of empathy often goes hand-in-hand with a lack of awareness about the human experience that a particular piece of technology creates, which will restrict its widespread adoption, thus preventing true innovation. Tech companies and products, even entire countries, Kobe said, need to be designed with human experience in mind.

At Apple product launches, according to Walter Isaacson’s biography Steve Jobs, Jobs ended presentations with street signs illustrating the intersection of technology and the humanities. At Job’s last launch, in 2011, Jobs concluded: “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields results that make our hearts sing.”