Business Failure and Sucess (Essay Sample)

Business Success and Failure
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Business failure and success
Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Inc.
Starting a business is a difficult task. It involves long working hours, a lot of sacrifices, and new problems and challenges every day. Evidently, entrepreneurship is not for everyone. But how does one determined whether it meant for him? People should start by asking themselves what it takes to be a leader because for a business to succeed one should lead it together with the employees through growth to success. The manager should coordinate the different departments of his/her business in order for it to be successful. Steve Jobs is one of the successful entrepreneurs. There are many personality traits and skills that enabled Steve Jobs become the most successful entrepreneur and business leader of our time.Although he was fired by the management of the company, which he had been involved in its establishment. He did not lose hope but remained a focus. Focus was inbuilt in Jobs’ personality. Before returning to Apple in 1997, the company was producing a wide range of random array of computer peripherals and computers. The company was at near bankruptcy. But after returning to Apple Inc., he and his team focused on only four computers and the company started making profits. He also uncompromisingly filtered out what he considered interruptions. Jobs had that character of simplifying things by concentrating on their essence and getting rid of unwanted and unnecessary components. Jobs aimed for the simplicity that was produced through conquering complexity. Through simplicity, jobs went ahead to come up with a machine that deferred to users in a friendly way. Jobs and Apple took responsibility for their products user experience. Every aspect of the customer experience was tightly connected. From the performance of the microprocessor in the iPhone until it is sold in an Apple Store. Jobs' urge to take responsibility came up from his personality, and passion for making good elegant products and passion for perfection. Jobs' personality of being aggressive and demanding made him successful in his business. He was also a demanding perfectionist and he always aspired for his company and its products to be the leading technology industry, through this he foresaw and set innovation and style trends.
Steve Jobs concentrated on making great products without paying much attention to profits. He was also impatient and tough on people around him, and this was because of his passion for perfecting and desire to work with the best. Through this, he instilled Apple employees with an abiding passion to come up with great products, and the belief they had of achieving what seemed impossible, the trait annoying as it might be, enabled them to perform extraordinary accomplishments. Jobs firmly believed in face-to-face engagements. The other Jobs’ noticeable feature was his ability and desires to visualize an all-embracing strategy while also focusing on the smallest aspects of design (Isaacson).Steve Jobs had a strong vision for Apple to come up with products that had a simple user interface and elegant design that would appeal to all the age groups. He was against the approach that companies such as the Microsoft used, where they developed and licensed their operating system to run on multiple platforms. He achieved the entire user control of the user experience by making his software run on Apple products, and he gained control of the user experience both in hardware and software.Steve was a very strong leader. He was inspirational to his employees and was respected by his business partners and competitors. Although his company was in financial crisis, he knew how to overcome the challenge. He never considered the market research. But he and his employees were dependent on themselves and their intuition to develop their products. Job was also a great thinker. Though people were doubtful of his ideas, he went ahead to uncover and demonstrate his inventions and intentions for the people to understand his vision. He admired whatever he was doing hence known for his great presentation and public messages. He was so influential, and this helped him motivate his employees to work and finish products in time no matter how difficult it appeared. He achieves this through passionate addressing. He was persistent in his vision and made others believe in his mission. Jobs also persevered a lot. Even after being sick of cancer he managed to attend both the board meetings and Apple product launches. Though being terminally ill in the hospital, Steve Jobs continued sketching new devices that supposedly hold the iPad while in a hospital bed. Apple products were due Jobs’ aesthetic design that was prejudiced by the modernist architectural style. His industrial designs were influenced by Braun's Dieter Rams, and this made his products unique, thus standing out in the market.Steve Jobs embraced failure and even after being kicked out of the company he founded he went ahead to come up with other companies such as NeXT and he ended up being the CEO of Pixar. At last he regained the control of Apple, and he went ahead to make a very successful business.Steve Jobs was also a serial reformer; he used the existing products and concepts to come up with phenomenal products. Steve Jobs was a person had a sense of urgency that drove him. On many occasions, he spoke of life and death; and time to being the greatest tools for success. (Namin-Hedayati, 2015).Steve Jobs had an unbelievable imagination trait that made him successful. Through this, he envisions a company that would produce products and services that will change the world through the ways people communicate, work and live their lives. He was also extremely passionate and fearless. He acted controversially on many occasions in his career. He even risked the future of the company. Steve Jobs had good public relations skills, and when he interacted with potential customers or an existing one, he convinced them to acquire Apple's products or services. He was the decisive salesperson (Himmel, 2013)
In conclusion, Steve Jobs was character traits such as being focused; self-motivated, visionary and influential led to his achievements. Also, his skills such as good public relations and ability to work with his employees led to his success in business. Being a serial reformer, he came up with great concepts that improved the existing products hence making his company competitive in the market. Jobs took responsibility for every decision he made and the products that his company produced. Passion and need of perfection also made Jobs to successful establish his company even after failing. Jobs was more concerned with the products of his company rather than the profits. The urge to succeed and that courage to take risk also made him successful leader and entrepreneur.
Business failure
Business failure is a situation whereby a company is forced to close down as a result of its inability to command sufficient revenue to meet its expenses or make a profit. Business failure can be as a result of poor management, high taxation, wars, excessive regulations or insufficient marketing. The management may decide to close the business if they predict failure in the future. A research conducted in 2014 showed that most failures result from the mistakes of a top management team. Improper strategic plans often made due to lack of sufficient consultation can impose a risk on the company's market financial position. Opinions given as to why businesses fail include, failure of the management to understand fully what their business actually is about, most entrepreneurs fails when introducing new products since they do not actually understand their customer’s needs, cost management inability and lack of experience and knowledge to run business. Failed businesses may be purchased by new owners who introduce new tactics to control the collapse, or merged with other performing companies that will take control of its operations (Smart Company, 2013).
John Rigas of the Adelphia Communications Company
Rigas started his company in which he was named the CEO of Adelphia Communications company in1952. The company had grown since that time and was once ranked the 5th largest cable TV business in the United States. He developed an interest in the business after he lost the sales from the movie theater he owned before. The company by late 1990s had almost five million subscribers to its services and had dominated in 30 states providing its cable TV services. However, the company later in 2002 went bankrupt as a result of fund embezzlement by Rigas administration to support other businesses of his family members.John Rigas was born in a humble background family of a Greek immigrant that had moved to United States to search a better life. He had his first job at the age of nine in busing tables. He completed his secondary education from Wellsville high school and later joined the U.S Army where he was involved in the France combat in 1943. After the war, he then joined the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York where he earned a degree in management engineering. He then after schooling acquired job in the Sylvania Corporation.Rigas had interests in business and in the year 1951 he bought a movie theatre as his first business in which he lost a lot of sales. He, however, didn’t have enough capital to venture into a new business. He and a few of his partners acquired starting capital through loans from his friends and family members to purchase the theater. He used to operate the theater in the evenings only. John Rigas teamed up with his b...