Steve Jobs

by Walter Isaacson

But his more important goal, he said, was to do what Hewlett and his friend David Packard had done, which was create a company that was so imbued with innovative creativity that it would outlive them.

The creativity that can occur when a feel for both the humanities and the sciences combine in one strong personality was the topic that most interested me in my biographies of Franklin and Einstein, and I believe that it will be a key to creating innovative economies in the twenty-first century.

the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology,

he said that religion was at its best when it emphasized spiritual experiences rather than received dogma.

“I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don’t. It’s the great mystery.”

creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.”

He said there is nothing over there that isn’t here, and he was correct.

I learned the truth of the Zen saying that if you are willing to travel around the world to meet a teacher, one will appear next door.

I told him, ‘Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.’ ”

This fusion of flower power and processor power, enlightenment and technology, was embodied by Steve Jobs

He emphasized that you should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.”

In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important.

“The goal was never to beat the competition, or to make a lot of money. It was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater.”

‘Hey, if we’re going to make things in our lives, we might as well make them beautiful.’ ”

The television ad and the frenzy of press preview stories were the first two components in what would become the Steve Jobs playbook for making the introduction of a new product seem like an epochal moment in world history. The third component was the public unveiling of the product itself, amid fanfare and flourishes, in front of an audience of adoring faithful mixed with journalists who were primed to be swept up in the excitement.

After thirty years Gates would develop a grudging respect for Jobs. “He really never knew much about technology, but he had an amazing instinct for what works,” he said. But Jobs never reciprocated by fully appreciating Gates’s real strengths. “Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology,” Jobs said, unfairly. “He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.”

Nevertheless, as is often the case with Microsoft products, persistence eventually made Windows better and then dominant.

As Hoffman later lamented, “The reality distortion field can serve as a spur, but then reality itself hits.”

For Jobs, the problem was that Sculley never became a product person. He didn’t make the effort, or show the capacity, to understand the fine points of what they were making.

At the company he founded after being ousted from Apple, Jobs was able to indulge all of his instincts, both good and bad. He was unbound. The result was a series of spectacular products that were dazzling market flops. This was the true learning experience. What prepared him for the great success he would have in Act III was not his ouster from his Act I at Apple but his brilliant failures in Act II. The

As Markkula had taught him, a great company must be able to impute its values from the first impression it makes.

When one reporter asked him immediately afterward why the machine was going to be so late, Jobs replied, “It’s not late. It’s five years ahead of its time.”

Even at a young age Lisa began to realize his diet obsessions reflected a life philosophy, one in which asceticism and minimalism could heighten subsequent sensations. “He believed that great harvests came from arid sources, pleasure from restraint,” she noted. “He knew the equations that most people didn’t know: Things led to their opposites.”

Both the dissembling and the truth-telling were simply different aspects of his Nietzschean attitude that ordinary rules didn’t apply to him.

Every once in a while, I find myself in the presence of purity—purity of spirit and love—and I always cry.

“We at Apple had forgotten who we were. One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

“What we’re trying to do is not highfalutin. We’re trying to get back to the basics of great products, great marketing, and great distribution. Apple has drifted away from doing the basics really well.”

One of his core principles was that hardware and software should be tightly integrated.

One of Jobs’s great strengths was knowing how to focus. “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,” he said. “That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.”

“People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”

Atop the two columns he wrote “Consumer” and “Pro”; he labeled the two rows “Desktop” and “Portable.” Their job, he said, was to make four great products, one for each quadrant.

I came to realize that what was really important was the care that was put into it. What I really despise is when I sense some carelessness in a product.”

Rams preached the gospel of “Less but better,” Weniger aber besser,

Ever since Apple’s first brochure proclaimed “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” Jobs had aimed for the simplicity that comes from conquering complexities, not ignoring them.

You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.

The stores would impute the ethos of Apple products: playful, easy, creative, and on the bright side of the line between hip and intimidating.

“If something isn’t right, you can’t just ignore it and say you’ll fix it later,” he said. “That’s what other companies do.”

Once a year Jobs took his most valuable employees on a retreat, which he called “The Top 100.” They were picked based on a simple guideline: the people you would bring if you could take only a hundred people with you on a lifeboat to your next company.

we shouldn’t get into any business where we didn’t control both the hardware and the software, otherwise we’d get our head handed to us.”

The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first, but also that it knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind.

The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don’t really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music. We made the iPod for ourselves, and when you’re doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you’re not going to cheese out. If you don’t love something, you’re not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.

Jobs did not organize Apple into semiautonomous divisions; he closely controlled all of his teams and pushed them to work as one cohesive and flexible company, with one profit-and-loss bottom line. “We don’t have ‘divisions’ with their own P&L,” said Tim Cook. “We run one P&L for the company.”

Joni Mitchell’s greatest song, “Both Sides Now,” with its lyrics about being older and wiser: “I’ve looked at life from both sides now, / From win and lose, and still somehow, / It’s life’s illusions I recall, / I really don’t know life at all.”

“When we were teenagers in Dublin, we said we would never do naff stuff,” Bono replied. Vincent, despite being British and familiar with rock slang, said he didn’t know what that meant. “Doing rubbishy things for money,” Bono explained.

After a few pints, they decided to call Vincent back in California. He was not home, so Bono left a message on his answering machine, which Vincent made sure never to erase. “I’m sitting here in bubbling Dublin with your friend Jony,” it said. “We’re both a bit drunk, and we’re happy with this wonderful iPod and I can’t even believe it exists and I’m holding it in my hand. Thank you!”

Beautiful msg

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.”

He invited Ma to play at his wedding, but he was out of the country on tour. He came by the Jobs house a few years later, sat in the living room, pulled out his 1733 Stradivarius cello, and played Bach. “This is what I would have played for your wedding,” he told them. Jobs teared up

Beatiful

“There’s a classic thing in business, which is the second-product syndrome,” Jobs later said. It comes from not understanding what made your first product so successful. “I lived through that at Apple. My feeling was, if we got through our second film, we’d make it.”

(In fact that was not usually Jobs’s mode of operation. He often began negotiations by proclaiming that the other company’s products or services sucked.)