My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary.
Vegetarianism and Zen Buddhism, meditation and spirituality, acid and rock – Jobs rolled together, in an amped-up way, the multiple impulses that were hallmarks of the enlightenment-seeking campus subculture of the era.
Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.
The knack is to get people to follow you, even to places they may not think they can go, by motivating them to share your sense of mission.
Seasons or Ritz-Carlton hotel. So Johnson sent his first five store managers through the Ritz-Carlton training.
For his thirtieth and fortieth birthdays, Jobs had celebrated with the stars of Silicon Valley and other assorted celebrities. But when he turned fifty in 2005, after coming back from his cancer surgery, the surprise party that his wife arranged featured mainly his closest friends and professional colleagues. It was at the comfortable San Francisco home of some friends, and the great chef Alice Waters prepared salmon from Scotland.
By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things. The original Mac team taught me that A-plus players like to work together, and they don’t like it if you tolerate B work. Ask any member of that Mac team. They will tell you it was worth the pain.
One useful leadership talent is knowing when to push ahead against doubters and when to heed them.
Publicity whiz who guided Jobs early on and remained a trusted advisor. M.
In his logbook, Kline recorded, in a memorably minimalist notation, “22:30. Talked to SRI Host to Host. CSK.
Taylor recalled that he ran into a brick wall every time he tried to deal with the suits back east. As the head of a Xerox research facility in Webster, New York, explained to him, “The computer will never be as important to society as the copier.”73.
They consider people who don’t know Hamlet from Macbeth to be Philistines, yet they might merrily admit that they don’t know the difference between a gene and a chromosome, or a transistor and a capacitor, or an integral and differential equation. These concepts might seem difficult. Yes, but so, too, is Hamlet. And like Hamlet, each of these concepts is beautiful. Like an elegant mathematical equation, they are expressions of the glories of the universe.
When one has so many different people with different opinions to deal with in a new affair,” he explained to his friend Cadwallader Colden, “one is obliged sometimes to give up some smaller points in order to obtain greater.
Einstein’s 1905 burst of creativity was astonishing. He had devised a revolutionary quantum theory of light, helped prove the existence of atoms, explained Brownian motion, upended the concept of space and time, and produced what would become science’s best known equation.
I taught him that if you act like you can do something, then it will work. I told him, ‘Pretend to be completely in control and people will.
I designed the Apple I because I wanted to give it away for free to other people,” said Wozniak.
Alex Haley once said that the best way to begin a speech is “Let me tell you a story.” Nobody is eager for a lecture, but everybody loves a story.
It was important, his father said, to craft the backs of cabinets and fences properly, even though they were hidden. “He loved doing things right. He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn’t see.
I keep thinking about all the time away from my family this will cause, and the time away from the other family at Pixar,” Jobs said. “But the only reason I want to do it is that the world will be a better place with Apple in it.
No one would ever see them, but the members of the team knew that their signatures were inside, just as they knew that the circuit board was laid out as elegantly as possible.