Transcript
Introduction
The saga of Steve Jobs is the Silicon Valley creation myth writ large. Launching a startup in his parent's garage and building it into the world's most valuable company. He didn't invent many things outright, but he was a master at putting together ideas, art, and technology in ways that invented the future. Some leaders push innovation by being good at the big picture. Others do so by mastering details. Jobs did both, relentlessly. Steve Jobs, thus, became the greatest business executive of our era, the one most certain to be remembered a century from now. History will place him in the pantheon right next to Edison and Ford.
Biographers are supposed to have the last word, but this is a biography of Steve Jobs. Even though he did not impose his legendary desire for control on this project, I suspect that I would not be conveying the right feel for him. The way he asserted himself in any situation if I just shuffled him onto history's stage without letting him have some last words. Over the course of our conversations, there were many times when he reflected on what he hoped his legacy would be.
Here are those thoughts, in his own words. "My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit because that's what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money."
"It's a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything, the people you hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings. Some people say, give the customer what they want, but that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, 'If I asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, a faster horse.' People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page. Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There's something magical about that place."
"There are a lot of people innovating, and that's not the main distinction of my career. The reason Apple resonates with people is that there's a deep current of humanity in our innovation. I think great artists and great engineers are similar in that they both have a desire to express themselves. In fact, some of the best people working on the original Mac were poets and musicians on the side."
"In the '70s, computers became a way for people to express their creativity. Great artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were also great at science. Michelangelo knew a lot about how to quarry stone, not just how to be a sculptor. At different times in the past, there were companies that exemplified Silicon Valley. It was Hewlett-Packard for a long time. Then in the semiconductor era, it was Fairchild and Intel. I think that it was Apple for a while, and then that faded. And then today, I think it's Apple and Google and a little more so Apple. I think Apple has stood the test of time. It's been around for a while, but it's still at the cutting edge of what's going on."
"It's easy to throw stones at Microsoft, and yet I appreciate what they did and how hard it was. They were very good at the business side of things. They were never as ambitious product-wise as they should have been. Bill likes to portray himself as a man of the product, but he's really not. He's a businessperson. Winning business was more important than making great products. He ended up the wealthiest guy around. And if that was his goal, then he achieved it. But it's never been my goal. And I wonder in the end if it was his goal."
"I admire him for the company he built. It's impressive, and I enjoyed working with him. He's bright and actually has a good sense of humor. But Microsoft never had the humanities and liberal arts in its DNA. Even when they saw the Mac, they couldn't copy it well. They totally didn't get it. I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field. And then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing great salesmen because they're the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers."
"So the salespeople end up running the company. When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don't matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off. It happened at Apple when Sculley came in, which was my fault. Apple was lucky, and it rebounded. I hate it when people call themselves entrepreneurs when what they're really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public so they can cash in and move on. They're unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest work in business. That is how you really make a contribution and add to the legacy of those who went before."
"You build a company that will stand for something a generation or two from now. That's what Walt Disney did and Hewlett and Packard and the people who built Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That's what I want Apple to be. I don't think I run roughshod over people. But if something sucks, I tell people to their face. It is my job to be honest. I know what I'm talking about, and I usually turn out to be right. That's the culture I try to create. We are brutally honest with each other, and anyone can tell me they think I'm full of s***, and I can tell them the same."
"And we've had some rip-roaring arguments where we were yelling at each other and it's some of the best times I've ever had. I feel totally comfortable saying, 'Ron, that story looks like s*,' in front of everyone else. Or I might say, 'God, we really f*ed up the engineering on this,' in front of the person that's responsible. That's the ante for being in the room. You've got to be able to be super honest. Maybe there's a better way, a gentlemen's club, where we all wear ties and speak in soft language and velvet code words. But I don't know that way because I'm middle class from California."
"I was hard on people sometimes, probably harder than I needed to be. I remember the time when my son was six years old, coming home, I had just fired somebody that day. And I imagined what it was like for that person to tell his family and his young son that he had lost his job. It was hard, but somebody has got to do it. I figured that it was always my job to make sure that the team was excellent. And if I didn't do it, nobody was going to do it. You always have to keep pushing to innovate."
"Bob Dylan could have sung protest songs forever and probably made a lot of money, but he didn't. He had to move on. And when he did, by going electric in 1965, he alienated a lot of people. His 1966 Europe tour was his greatest. He would come on and do a set of acoustic guitars and the audience loved him. Then he would do an electric set and the audience booed. There was one point where he was about to sing Like a Rolling Stone and someone from the audience yells, "Judas," and Dylan says, 'Play it f***ing loud,' and they did. The Beatles were the same way. They kept evolving, moving, refining their art. That is what I've always tried to do. Keep moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says, 'If you're not busy being born, you're busy dying.'"
"What drove me? I think most creative people want to express appreciation for being able to take advantage of the work that's been done by others before us. I didn't invent the language or mathematics I use. I make little of my own food, none of my own clothes. Everything I do depends on other members of our species and the shoulders that we stand on. And a lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and to add something to that flow. It's about trying to express something in the only way that most of us know how. We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That is what has driven me."
That is an excerpt that appears in the last chapter called Legacy of the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Steve Jobs, and it was written by Walter Isaacson. So I originally read this book for the first time four years ago. It is actually one of the first episodes of Founders. It's Founders #5. And if you're going to study the history of entrepreneurship, it's probably the first book I'd recommend reading because of this idea that you and I talk about all the time that books with the original links. They lead you to one idea or one person to the next.