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Kindle Notes & Highlights
‘You don’t need to take notes. If it’s important, you’ll remember it.’
“But I believe life is an intelligent thing—that things aren’t random.”
Jobs said that he looked to his hero Bob Dylan for inspiration. One of the things that Jobs admired about Dylan was his refusal to stand still. Many successful artists at some point in their careers atrophy: they keep doing what made them successful in the first place, but they don’t evolve. “If they keep on risking failure, they’re still artists,” Jobs said. “Dylan and Picasso were always risking failure.”
“Focus means saying no.” Focus is also having the confidence to say no when everyone else is saying yes.
being excited about being wrong because that means you’ve discovered something new.”
The task, Ive said, is “to solve incredibly complex problems and make their resolution appear inevitable and incredibly simple, so you have no sense how difficult this thing was.”
it’s in those early stages when you’re still very open to exploration, that you find opportunities.”
What happened? They had it! They had it in the palm of their hands! They grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory!
a technique known to psychologists studying problem solving as “generate and test.” To solve a problem, all the possible solutions are generated and then tested to see if they offer a solution. It’s a form of trial and error, but not as random; it’s guided and purposeful.
everyone who works on the movies is considered an artist. Everyone works together to tell stories,
team of good storytellers can fix a bad story, but a poor team cannot.
“Marketing, after all, is really theater,” Sculley wrote. “It’s like staging a performance. The way to motivate people is to get them interested in your product, to entertain them, and to turn your product into an incredibly important event.
Without a passionate commitment to their work, they might lose interest and abandon it. “Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you’re not going to survive,” Jobs has said. “You’re going to give it up. So you’ve got to have an idea or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you’re passionate about; otherwise you’re not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. I think that’s half the battle right there.”
the wider world’s reaction has often been disdainful. In 1984, the first Mac’s graphical user interface was widely derided as “a toy.” Bill Gates was mystified that people wanted colored computers. Critics initially called on Apple to open up the iPod. Without a strong belief in his vision, a passion for what he was doing, it would be much harder for Jobs to resist the critics.
Most management advice for the last twenty-five years has focused on issues like empathy and compassion. Advice books encourage building teamwork through kindness and understanding. There’s been very little written about scaring the pants off employees to improve results. But as Richard Nixon said, “People react to fear, not love—they don’t teach that in Sunday School, but it’s true.”
Both of them had this ability to—well, not invent products—but discover products. Both of them said these products have always existed, it’s just that no one has ever seen them before. We were the ones who discovered them. The Polaroid camera always existed and the Macintosh always existed. It’s a matter of discovery.
“We are going to innovate ourselves out of this downturn,” Jobs declared in 2001 when the PC industry was in recession.
In the history of business, the most successful companies aren’t product innovators, but those that develop innovative business models. Business innovators take the breakthroughs of others and build on them by figuring out new ways to manufacture, distribute, or market them. Henry Ford didn’t invent the motorcar, but he did perfect mass production. Dell doesn’t develop new kinds of computers, but it did create a very efficient direct-to-consumer distribution system.
Part of the process is Apple’s overall corporate strategy: What markets does it target, and how does it target them? Part of it is keeping abreast of new technology developments and being receptive to new ideas, especially outside the company. Part of it is about being creative, and always learning. Part of it is about being flexible, and a willingness to ditch long-held notions. Part of it is about being customer-centric. And a lot of it is trying to find the simplest, most elegant solution through an iterative, generate-and-test design process. Innovation at Apple is largely about shaping
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Entrepreneurs launched websites for selling pet food over the Net, or built giant warehouses for delivering groceries by van, before there was any inkling customers wanted to shop this way. And it turns out they didn’t. No one wanted to get their groceries delivered from Webvan’s automated warehouses. The Internet bubble burst, taking with it businesses that had developed solutions to problems that didn’t exist.
“The older I get, the more I’m convinced that motives make so much difference,” Jobs said. “HP’s primary goal was to make great products. And our primary goal here is to make the world’s best PCs—not to be the biggest or the richest.” Jobs said Apple has a second goal, which is to make a profit—both to make money but also to keep making products. “For a time,” Jobs said, “those goals got flipped at Apple, and that subtle change made all the difference. When I got back, we had to make it a product company again.”
innovation is about creativity, putting things together in unique ways. “Creativity is just connecting things,” Jobs told Wired magazine. “When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. . . . Unfortunately, that’s too rare a
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everything he learned about products he learned from Heathkits as a kid. Heathkits were popular kits for building electronics like ham radios, amplifiers, and oscillators. The kits taught Jobs that products were manifestations of human ingenuity, not magical objects dropped from the sky.
