I, Steve: Steve Jobs In His Own Words (In Their Own Words)

by George Beahm

It’s not just recruiting. After recruiting, it’s then building an environment that makes people feel they are surrounded by equally talented people and that their work is bigger than they are. The feeling that the work will have tremendous influence and is part of a strong, clear vision—all of those things. Recruiting usually requires more than you alone can do, so I’ve found that collaborative recruiting and having a culture that recruits the “A” players is the best way. Any interviewee will speak with at least a dozen people in several areas of this company, not just those in the area that he would work in. That way a lot of your “A” employees get broad exposure to the company, and—by having a company culture that supports them if they feel strongly enough—the current employees can veto a candidate. —In the Company of Giants, 1997

The only chance we have of communicating is with a feeling.

Broad-Based Education Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.… I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.… It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. —Commencement address, Stanford University, June 12, 2005

Broad Life Experiences, Importance of A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have. —Wired, February 1996

Confusing Product Lines What I found when I got here was a zillion and one products. And I started to ask people, why would I recommend a 3400 over a 4400? Or when should somebody jump up to a 6500, but not a 7300? And after three weeks, I couldn’t figure this out. And I figure if I can’t figure it out…how are customers ever going to figure this out? —Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, 1998

When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can oftentimes arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart and want objects which are well thought through. —Newsweek, October 16, 2006

Real artists ship. —Folklore.org, January 1984

Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me.… Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful…that’s what matters to me. —Wall Street Journal, May 25, 1993

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. —Fortune, January 24, 2000

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that. —Wired, February 1996

E-Book Readers I’m sure there will always be dedicated devices, and they may have a few advantages in doing just one thing. But I think the general-purpose devices will win the day. Because I think people just probably aren’t willing to pay for a dedicated device. —New York Times, September 9, 2009

My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to make them better. —CNNMoney/Fortune, February 2008

People judge you by your performance, so focus on the outcome. Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected. —Steve Jobs: The Journey is the Reward, 1987

Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists steal.

We said: We don’t see how you can convince people to stop being thieves, unless you can offer them a carrot—not just a stick. And the carrot is: We’re gonna offer you a better experience…and it’s only gonna cost you a dollar a song. —Rolling Stone, December 25, 2003

Losing Market Share And how are monopolies lost? Think about it. Some very good product people invent some very good products, and the company achieves a monopoly. But after that, the product people aren’t the ones that drive the company forward anymore. It’s the marketing guys or the ones who expand the business into Latin America or whatever.… So a different group of people start to move up. And who usually ends up running the show? The sales guy. —Bloomberg Businessweek, October 12, 2004

Money Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.… Rarely do I find an important product or service in people’s lives where you don’t have at least two competitors. Apple is positioned beautifully to be that second competitor. —Fortune, November 9, 1998

Need for Teamwork In our business, one person can’t do anything anymore. You create a team of people around you. You have a responsibility of integrity of work to that team. Everybody does try to turn out the best work that they can. —Smithsonian Institution Oral and Video Histories, April 20, 1995

Partnership We don’t think one company can do everything. So you’ve got to partner with people that are really good at stuff.… We’re not trying to be great at search, so we partner with people who are great at search.… We know how to do the best maps client in the world, but we don’t know how to do the back end, so we partner with people that know how to do the back end. And what we want to do is be that consumer’s device and that consumer’s experience wrapped around all this information and things we can deliver to them in a wonderful user interface, in a coherent product. —D5 Conference: All Things Digital, May 30, 2007

You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.… Don’t settle. —Commencement address, Stanford University, June 12, 2005

Pixar’s People Apple has some pretty amazing people, but the collection of people at Pixar is the highest concentration of remarkable people I have ever witnessed. There’s a person who’s got a Ph.D. in computer-generated plants—3-D grass and trees and flowers. There’s another who is the best in the world at putting imagery on film. Also, Pixar is more multidisciplinary than Apple ever will be. But the key thing is that it is much smaller. Pixar’s got 450 people. You could never have the collection of people that Pixar has now if you went to two thousand people. —Fortune, November 9, 1998

Priorities Assessment On meeting his wife, Laurene: I was in the parking lot, with the key in the car, and I thought to myself: If this is my last night on earth, would I rather spend it at a business meeting or with this woman? I ran across the parking lot, asked her if she’d have dinner with me. She said yes, we walked into town, and we’ve been together ever since. —New York Times Magazine, January 12, 1997

Product Imagination 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’s 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.’” —Fortune, March 7, 2008

Quality We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through. —Playboy, February 1985

Regarding the simplicity of the iMac: If you go out and ask people what’s wrong with computers today, they’ll tell you they’re really complicated, they have a zillion cables coming out of the back, they’re really big and noisy, they’re really ugly, and they take forever to get on the Internet. And so we tried to set out to fix those problems with products like the iMac. I mean, the iMac is the only desktop computer that comes in only one box. You can set it up and be surfing the Internet in 15 minutes or less. —Macworld Expo, March 13, 1999

Stagnation, the Danger of On Apple during his decade-long absence: The trouble with Apple is it succeeded beyond its wildest dreams. We succeeded so well, we got everyone else to dream the same dream. The rest of the world became just like it. The trouble is, the dream didn’t evolve. Apple stopped creating. —Rolling Stone, April 18, 1996

You don’t need to take notes. If it’s important, you’ll remember it. —Inside Steve’s Brain, 2009

Survival Victory in our industry is spelled survival. The way we’re going to survive is to innovate our way out of this. —Time, January 14, 2002

Teamwork My model for business is the Beatles. They were four very talented guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people. —60 Minutes, 2008

Thinking Through the Problem Once you get into the problem…you see that it’s complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That’s where most people stop, and the solutions tend to work for a while. But the really great person will keep going, find the underlying problem, and come up with an elegant solution that works on every level. That’s what we wanted to do with the Mac. —AppleDesign, 1997

To Be or Not to Be Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown our your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. —Commencement address, Stanford University, June 12, 2005

Working Hard and Growing Older I’ve read something Bill Gates said about six months ago. He said, “I worked really, really hard in my twenties.” And I know what he means, because I worked really, really hard in my twenties, too. Literally, you know, seven days a week, a lot of hours every day.… But you can’t do it forever, and you don’t want to do it forever. —Time, October 10, 1999

Zen The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. [An allusion to a popular saying by Zen master Shunryu Suzuki: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”] —Commencement address, Stanford University, June 12, 2005

SJ begins the effort to simplify Apple’s product line from four dozen computer models to ten.

Mac OS 10.7, Lion, is released, bringing the look and feel of the iPhone and iPad iOS to Apple’s computer line. It is available only by download as an Apple application for $29.99. (July 20)

Apple CEO Timothy Cook holds his first media event to announce the iPhone 4GS. (October