Jobs’s return to Apple 12 years later shows how the most important task in business – the creation of new value – cannot be reduced to a formula and applied by professionals.
No technology company can be built on branding alone.
If you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business – no.
College students can become extremely skilled at a few specialties, but many never learn what to do with those skills in the wider world.
Every company starts in unique circumstances, and every company starts only once.
1. Goals that can be satisfied with minimal effort; 2. Goals that can be satisfied with serious effort; and 3. Goals that cannot be satisfied, no matter how much effort one makes.
Selling your company to the media is a necessary part of selling it to everyone else.
In the world of business, at least, Shakespeare proves the superior guide. Inside a firm, people become obsessed with their competitors for career advancement. Then the firms themselves become obsessed with their competitors in the marketplace. Amid all the human drama, people lose sight of what matters and focus on their rivals instead.
The hazards of imitative competition may partially explain why individuals with an Asperger’s-like social ineptitude seem to be at an advantage in Silicon Valley today. If you’re less sensitive to social cues, you’re less likely to do the same things as everyone else around you.
You can expect the future to take a definite form or you can treat it as hazily uncertain.
Look around. If you don’t see any salespeople, you’re the salesperson.
We are more fascinated today by statistical predictions of what the country will be thinking in a few weeks’ time than by visionary predictions of what the country will look like in 10 or 20 years from now.
The essential first step is to think for yourself. Only by seeing our world anew, as fresh and strange as it was to the ancients who saw it first, can we both re-create it and preserve it for the future.
The airlines compete with each other, but Google stands alone. Economists use two simplified models to explain the difference: perfect competition and monopoly.
If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.
War metaphors invade our everyday business language: we use headhunters to build up a sales force that will enable us to take a captive market and make a killing. But really it’s competition, not business, that is like war: allegedly necessary, supposedly valiant, but ultimately destructive.
Like acting, sales works best when hidden.
A start up messed up at the foundation cannot be fixed.
In the short term I want to change the world, In the long term I want to live forever.
As computers become more and more powerful, they won’t be substitutes for humans: they’ll be complements.