Steve Jobs’ Influence in My Life

It’s Saturday morning, October 8, 2011 and two full days have now passed since the news of Steve Jobs death hit me like a train at my home office late in the day on Wednesday.  I’ve taken the news hard just as countless others are experiencing.  There are 10’s of millions of people like me, whose lives have been touched by Steve Jobs through his vision and work at Apple, Inc.   I don’t want to miss this chance to focus my heart and mind on what this means to me and how his life has influenced mine and what I am going to do next.

First contact.  My first contact with Steve Jobs’ work was in my math class during my junior year of high school.  That was in 1980.  My teacher introduced us to the Apple IIE and the basic computing language.  I learned what a computer is and got an initial understanding of what a computer program can do.

My second contact with Steve Jobs’ work came in 1989 in an unlikely place – Cologne, Germany.  It was an unlikely place because personal computers were not widely used in Germany at that time, but that was going to change rapidly.   I was recruited by Alcoa to assist in opening an engineering joint venture office with a division of the giant German company, Siemens.  My boss was an American named Herman, and he was absolutely passionate about Apple computers.  We started our office with the latest Macintosh equipment, including the Apple Macintosh Portable which was a remarkable piece of equipment but carrying it around was awkward.  I felt like I was carrying a big and heavy typewriter into each meeting (weight = 16 lbs and cost $7,300).

The machine did not have a back-lit screen and I used it for countless hours managing projects from old, dim lit hotel rooms while travelling.  Later we purchased Macintosh PowerBooks that were significantly smaller and even more powerful, and thankfully with brighter screens.  I learned here the versatility and power of portable computer equipment and then, with the Macintosh PowerBooks, the beauty of the Apple products.  I became a very big fan of Apple products.

Letting go.  A short while later, I was offered a job to assist another senior manager in executing the business plan that we had built to integrate a newly acquired German company with our American operations.  We closed our Cologne office and I moved to a small town near Stuttgart, Germany.  That was 1991 and Microsoft based, IBM and Compaq PC’s were being rapidly adopted by many German companies – including ours – and I had to decide what to do with my now beloved Macintosh equipment in order to avoid data and network incompatibility problems.  I let it go.  I learned to give up what I liked, to submit to the needs of our organization, and to gratefully work with the tools that everyone else had.  I learned also the significant impact that a new CEO with a vision and a plan (Mr. Paul O’Neil) would have on Alcoa, Inc. and how that can greatly impact the value of the company and dramatically lift share values.

Six years later, after many successes and challenges, I needed a change.   So I requested and was granted a leave of absence from Alcoa.  I left for a Christian missions organization called Youth with a Mission.  It was 1997 / 1998 and Steve Jobs was just back at Apple Computer through Apple’s acquisition of NeXt, Inc.  The Internet was just picking up steam and I heard in the news about Apple’s new iMac.  From my own modest experiences with organization change and leadership, I guessed that Steve Jobs was coming back a changed man and that he was going to try to prove something big with this new iMac.  I had learned the importance of the vision of a new CEO on an organization – and the possible great benefits that can have for outside investors as shareholders, if the organization is a publicly traded corporation.

In a future article, I will cover the details of the key elements to the Apple story that I could see and understand from the outside – and how to apply that same understanding again and again as a common stock investor.   We teach this method today at Stock Market Companion using the 15Minute Stocks program.

I put almost all my money into Apple Computer shares in early 1998 and essentially tripled my money as the iMac proved very successful.  From my early years as an investor, I had learned to detect possible “topping patterns” in a stock and to sell on strength – so I sold my Apple Computer, Inc. shares in the high $120’s at the time.  Of course I didn’t know it, but that would represent the top for Apple Computer shares for many years.  To my utter amazement the stock sank down into the low teens.

Steve Jobs’ vision and work at what was then Apple Computer, Inc. and the money I made as an investor with him and now many other companies using my “story stock” investing model, enabled me to leave the corporate world for what has become 14 years.  I was able to stay longer at Youth with a Mission, where I met a lovely woman named Dalene, who had the courage to say, “Yes” when I asked her to marry me after 4 weeks of courtship.  At the time, I lived in a shared door room with 2 other Christian men and all that I owned was a bicycle.  She had no idea of my investing background.  We have now have a delightful family with five children.

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