Great Can Come From Anywhere

As I listened to David Senra's podcast on Steve Jobs, I couldn't help it but connect with this statement.

"Great can come from anywhere"

Steve Jobs’s legacy wasn’t just innovation—it was recognizing that greatness doesn’t have a specific origin. It’s an actionable leadership mandate.

In Make Something Wonderful, a curated anthology of Jobs’s speeches, notes, and letters, we glimpse how this mindset shaped his leadership philosophy. As edited by Leslie Berlin and unveiled by the Steve Jobs Archive, the book makes abundantly clear: rooting for ideas over pedigrees, openness over hierarchy, and curiosity over convention is the foundation of breakthroughs.

Here’s why “Great can come from anywhere” matters for leaders today.

1. Unlock Hidden Potential

Too often, organizations wait for greatness to show up dressed a certain way. They recruit from top schools, prize conventional resumes, and filter innovation out of existence. Meanwhile, brilliant insights emerge from unexpected places—your production team, your interns, your lost-in-the-middle-of-nowhere offices. Jobs built Apple by valuing creativity over credentials, giving space for surprising ideas to flourish.

2. Build Openness into Your Culture

Make Something Wonderful emphasizes the power of shared context—speaking directly, making ideas visible, and acting as the architect of collective ambition. When teammates feel their ideas matter, they experiment more boldly. When leadership listens beyond titles, innovation becomes distributed, not isolated.

3. Design Invitation Over Gatekeeping

Steve Jobs didn’t wait for ideas to come to him; he invited them. In the book, speeches and personal notes show him asking simple questions: “What feels missing?” “Where are we off track?” Questions that prompted game-changing contributions. Leaders don’t just evaluate ideas—they design conditions for them to surface.

4. Grow the Ecosystem of Ideas

When diversity of thought is welcomed, the ecosystem expands. A warehouse team member questions a process and sparks an efficiency breakthrough. A quiet engineer shares a bold idea on a whiteboard and ignites a product pivot. That’s the hidden profit of broad-sourced creativity. And leading teams that cultivate that energy is how you scale strategic advantage.

"Make Something Wonderful", isn’t nostalgia—it’s a playbook.

Make Something Wonderful reminds us: greatness is everywhere. Our job as leaders is to make sure we have the ears—and the context—to hear it.

Want to exchange leadership strategies that unearth hidden talent? Let’s chat — and yes, I’ve got books to swap.