Image: Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (left) and New South Wales Minister for Transport Andrew Constance (right). Image: Paul Hemsley/GovNews.
Your friends might complain that Apple products are overpriced, but the company’s co-founder Steve Wozniak has some free advice for professionals in business and government.
Speaking to a captive audience at the New South Wales government’s Future Transport Summit in Sydney on 18th April, 2016, Mr Wozniak, often dubbed as the ‘godfather of the personal computer’, gave a very frank and candid talk on his views on technological developments and innovation that’s rapidly changing business, government and wider society.
One of the big themes Mr Wozniak touched upon was company culture, and his frustration at how companies have an attitude that if they’ve been doing things the same way, that’s the way it’s always been done and it shouldn’t change.
This all came from his experience at Hewlett Packard where the engineers had their way of doing things, which in his view were complex and cumbersome, prompting him to come up with easier alternatives, but being met with resistance from those who didn’t want to upset the status quo.
Relating to private enterprise and government, Mr Wozniak said the people who implement policy, strategy and programs don’t want to give up their established ways because it’s part of their income, their life and their reputation.
He described the process of moving to a new and easier methodology as “a very hard shift sometimes”.
What’s the solution? It all hinges on the the people who work in the organisation.
“It takes the sort of people who can clear out their minds, sit down and say if there’s a better approach, I’d want to get us headed on the better approach rather than keep going with my approach that I came up with before,” Mr Wozniak said.
He advised that you should “always go with the best you can”.
“Don’t say I’m going to fight the best because it’s not mine, my way. You’ve got to find those people that think that way,” Mr Wozniak said.
Mr Wozniak also touched upon the importance of collaborations between private enterprise and government, saying they are “almost essential to improving our cities”.
“We talk about innovation, even in transport, and sometimes it’s taking our existing transport systems and modifying them a little and making them a little simpler, easier for you to use, but not having a whole different structure to it,” Mr Wozniak said.
“Everything in life has that sort of collaboration, including government and private enterprise.”
To make it work, he said private enterprise can be encouraged to build certain devices that help the government do its job, such has installing sensors to measure road conditions so that someone in public transport “knows about those things better”.
