The Wisdom of Steve Jobs
Apple has topped Fortune’s list of the Most Admired Companies 2008. You can read that piece, as well as the story that’s generating a lot of comment - about the recent stock options issue and how Jobs hid his pancreatic cancer for several months and didn’t follow conventional treatments. But probably the most interesting part for me was a collection of Jobs aphorisms collected by Forbes. These aren’t specific prescriptions for public media but they are good competitors for ways to successfully run a business.
A few of my favorites:
- The connection with the consumer: “It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.”So you can’t go out and ask people, you know, what the next big [thing.] There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me “A faster horse.” ‘ “
- On what drives Apple employees: “We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? So this is what we’ve chosen to do with our life. We could be sitting in a monastery somewhere in Japan. We could be out sailing. Some of the [executive team] could be playing golf. They could be running other companies. And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it. And we think it is.”
- On his demanding reputation: “My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key projects. And to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better, coming up with more aggressive visions of how it could be.”
- On Apple’s focus: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.”
- On his marathon Monday meetings: “When you hire really good people you have to give them a piece of the business and let them run with it. That doesn’t mean I don’t get to kibitz a lot. But the reason you’re hiring them is because you’re going to give them the reins. I want [them] making as good or better decisions than I would. So the way to do that is to have them know everything, not just in their part of the business, but in every part of the business.”So what we do every Monday is we review the whole business. We look at what we sold the week before. We look at every single product under development, products we’re having trouble with, products where the demand is larger than we can make. All the stuff in development, we review. And we do it every single week. I put out an agenda — 80% is the same as it was the last week, and we just walk down it every single week.”We don’t have a lot of process at Apple, but that’s one of the few things we do just to all stay on the same page.”
- And check this out - on catching technology’s next wave: “Things happen fairly slowly, you know. They do. These waves of technology, you can see them way before they happen, and you just have to choose wisely which ones you’re going to surf. If you choose unwisely, then you can waste a lot of energy, but if you choose wisely it actually unfolds fairly slowly. It takes years.”
Todd — Thanks for posting this. I wasn’t going to read the Fortune piece just because it seems like there are so many of them on Apple and Jobs. But the applicability to the public media universe is spot-on. At least if we’re doing it “right,” I would say.