Why Workday’s CEO studied the Steve Jobs playbook for returning founders

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Key takeaways

Aneel Bhusri returned as Workday CEO at the urging of cofounder Dave Duffield.
Bhusri studied Steve Jobs's return to Apple to help restore a startup mindset.
Workday cut its offered AI agents from 50 to 20 to focus on core priorities.

But these are not ordinary times. In the age of AI, Bhusri told me “all bets are off.” The top skill CEOs need today, he said, is the ability to innovate. Few leaders can do that better than founders. In February, at the nudging of his cofounder Dave Duffield, Bhusri reclaimed the CEO seat at Workday and began the company’s “refounding” chapter.

“Great companies are not built on one generation of technology. They pass the test of time,” Bhusri told me on the latest episode of the Fortune 500 Titans podcast. “I really wanted Workday to be one of those companies that was not just great in cloud but also in this next generation. I felt I had a role to play in getting us to be a leader in this new world.”

The Steve Jobs Playbook

There are not many examples of founders returning to bring their companies to glory twice. But there is one legendary success story: Steve Jobs. Pushed out of Apple in 1985, Jobs returned in 1997 to a company in a death spiral. Apple was so close to bankruptcy that it took a $150 million investment from its archrival, Microsoft. During Jobs’s second act, Apple became one of the most innovative and successful product-led companies in the world and, of course, introduced the iPhone.

Bhusri studied the Steve Jobs return playbook extensively before his February restart. He says he drove his management team crazy by sending them Instagram clips of the Apple cofounder. His biggest takeaway came from an interview in which Jobs described his ambition to make Apple the biggest startup in the world. For Jobs, that meant restoring a culture of ownership, accountability, speed, and focus. He slashed Apple’s sprawling product line to the few that mattered most. Similarly, one of Bhusri’s first moves was to cut the number of AI agents Workday offered from 50 to 20, while also eliminating projects that were not core to his vision of the company’s future.

Recreating a Startup Mindset

“Jobs wasn’t just a product genius. He was a management genius, too, in the way he organized Apple for success,” Bhusri said. “I’m trying to bring that same mentality of recreating a startup mindset with clear accountability.”

Bhusri has his work cut out for him. He doesn’t mince words about the massive impact he believes AI will have on jobs in the next five years; he’s already seeing AI capable of human-level work in HR, finance, and legal departments.

“I didn’t come back to run Workday better,” Bhusri said. “I came back to make sure that we are super innovative with the AI products, and that we do it responsibly. It’s an incredibly powerful technology, and we have to do it the right way. It’s a daunting but exciting task.”

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