Today’s edition highlights key points from a Harvard Business Review article about Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, Jobs’ biographer. Jobs affected our lives profoundly by helping to transform seven industries: personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, retail stores, and digital publishing.

Isaacson identified 14 characteristics of Job’s leadership style in this article. Let’s consider four:

Focus: Jobs told Isaacson, “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.” Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.

Simplify: When Jobs evaluated new industries for Apple to attack, he asked which ones were making products more complicated than necessary. In 2001, there was no easy way to buy music online, leading to the iPod and the iTunes store. Phones followed soon after that with the introduction of the iPhone.

Don’t Be a Slave to Focus Groups: Jobs believed people didn’t really know what they wanted until they knew what was available. He would quote Henry Ford’s line: “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’” Jobs made products that he and his friends wanted. He was a music fanatic and made the iPod because HE wanted to be able to carry around a thousand songs in his pocket.

Tolerate Only “A” Players: He was famous for being tough on his people. He wanted an environment where mediocre employees weren’t comfortable sticking around. Jobs said, “I’ve learned over the years that when you have really good people, you don’t have to baby them. By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things.”

The entire article is well worth reading and available here .