by Anthony K. Tjan | 12:12 PM September 12, 2011
In the wake of his recent retirement, much has been written about Steve Job’s peerless leadership and how he transformed not just his company, Apple, but the way we interact and live with media and technology. However long Apple manages to stay on top, there is no doubt that Jobs, with his angular genius, relentless quest for perfection, and industry-changing products, will go down as one of the greatest iconoclasts of business.
But this is less a piece about Steve Jobs or Apple than it is a question followed by a short rumination. Is there a single trait that distinguishes the world’s great iconoclasts? Yes. In one word, it is nuance. More precisely, it is the nuance of the heart.
Over the past two years, my colleagues and I have been researching the qualities that make up truly great entrepreneurs and business builders. We identified four key traits: heart, smarts, guts and luck. More than 60 percent of the 200-plus successful entrepreneurs and business builders in our research sample manifested what we call a “heart-dominance” in their entrepreneurial profile.
It’s easy to tell when you’re in the presence of heart-dominant entrepreneurs. They exude an infectious, almost missionary passion. They convey their ideas as the concrete iteration of a calling, one they genuinely believe can reshape the world. But lots of people want to change the world. What makes those who actually succeed different is not just their excitement around a big idea, but their obsession with the idiosyncrasies and details embedded in the more nuanced folds of the story. The heart is a source of both the more obvious inspirational energy and the more nuanced mystery of what distinguishes those who fall in that small category of unique and iconoclastic.
Only a handful of Fortune 500 CEOs could truly be dubbed iconoclasts, leaders who have — via their purpose and passion, conviction and authenticity, integrity and vision, and, not least, industry-busting ideas — had a profound impact on their industries and on society at large. Henry Ford, Walt Disney, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Katherine Graham, and Ralph Lauren are (or were) more than exceptional business figures — they have also reshaped our culture. Iconoclasts also exist, of course, outside the business world, among them Nelson Mandela, Coco Chanel, Reggie Jackson, and Andy Warhol. Each one is a game-changer who has altered the way we perceive and interface with the world. And in doing so, they share a common bond in that they are the best at something in their field.
What does it take to be the best? The answer in all cases lies in nuance. Nuance stems from an undisguised enthusiasm (from the heart) for doing what one does, mixed with the capacity to discern and express what would otherwise be imperceptible to most. The heart-led nuance of iconoclasts derives not from the 99 percent of items that can be functionally learned and perfected by others through time, but rather from the 1 percent of items that no one else on earth can replicate. Which is as good a definition of nuance as any — those subtle, barely discernible differences that are virtually impossible to see, but can be disproportionately felt.
In business, nuance is that “something” or “pixie dust” that creates the unique differentiation of a business, a product, or a brand. Consider a symphonic score played by two different orchestras — both performed to technical perfection but one coming across, somehow, as tonally different, more soulful, more connected. Or think about the ability of certain wine makers and sommeliers to perceive on a blind basis the differences between a vertical of wine (a series of the same wine from different vintages). Put the wines in different types of glasses and the differences become that much more pronounced for them. And finally, a more prosaic example: I once had a meeting with a former protégé of the designer Tom Ford (himself an iconoclast), who commented on the one luxurious piece of clothing I was wearing that day — a pair of dress pants made by the independent Italian family-brand Brioni. He was instantly able to identify their maker by the precise charcoal hue of the fabric, the visual weight and texture, and the herringbone pattern that he informed me could have only come from this artisanal producer. I was blown away.
Which — add me to the chorus — brings me back to Steve Jobs. Apple’s nuance shows up in the intersection between the company and its customers. Nuance is what coalesces a thousand points of invisible light into the visible, the tangible, and the extraordinary. For its customers, the seamless Apple experience is hard to put into words. It is a “show don’t tell” strategy that is the sum total of the company’s art-gallery-like stores, its highly designed products with precision in curvature and sharpness of edge, its white coolness, its joyful cartoonishness, its proprietary i-language, and its packaging with pre-charged, ready-to-use goods that makes unwrapping a new Apple product like unsealing black-boxed treasure from the bottom of the ocean. The late writer John Gardner once described a great piece of fiction as “an uninterrupted dream.” The same can be said of what Apple has accomplished. And how has the iconoclastic Jobs made this happen? Yes, with passion and famously maniacal attention to detail, but also through the nuance of his heart. This nuance separates what might have been merely transactional to what becomes experiential and relational with a brand, something multi-layered and truly differentiated.
For Jobs and other iconoclasts, nuance is an inborn gift, a sixth sense emanating from the heart that we can try to understand, but may have some larger mystery that we should just come to accept. Uniting what would otherwise be invisible particles on their own, iconoclasts synchronize and reveal those elements for us in a way that is uniquely theirs and yes, beautiful.
ANTHONY K. TJAN
Anthony Tjan is CEO, Managing Partner and Founder of the venture capital firm Cue Ball, vice chairman of the advisory firm Parthenon, and co-author of the New York Timesbestseller Heart, Smarts, Guts, and Luck (HBR Press, 2012).
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