Apple co-founder, Steve Jobs, has died of pancreatic cancer.
He was 56.
On August 24, 2011, Jobs announced his resignation from his role as Apple’s CEO. In his letter of resignation, Jobs strongly recommended that the Apple executive succession plan be followed and Tim Cook be named as his successor.
“My job is to make the whole executive team good enough to be successors, so that’s what I try to do,” Jobs has said.
Steve Jobs was worth more than $1,000,000 when he was 23, and more than $10,000,000 when he was 24. “And over $100,000,000 when I was 25,” Jobs has said, “and it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money.”
Here, we reflect on Steve Jobs’ Top 10 Quotes About Business.
On Supply/Demand
“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.
“You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.”
On Employees
“When I hire somebody really senior, competence is the ante. They have to be really smart. But the real issue for me is, Are they going to fall in love with Apple? Because if they fall in love with Apple, everything else will take care of itself.
They’ll want to do what’s best for Apple, not what’s best for them, what’s best for Steve, or anybody else. (this actually reiterates my oft-repeated mantra of “ubiquitous evangelism” in companies).”
“Recruiting is hard. It’s just finding the needles in the haystack. You can’t know enough in a one-hour interview.
So, in the end, it’s ultimately based on your gut. How do I feel about this person? What are they like when they’re challenged? I ask everybody that: ‘Why are you here?’ The answers themselves are not what you’re looking for. It’s the meta-data.”
On Management
“So when a good idea comes, you know, part of my job is to move it around, just see what different people think, get people talking about it, argue with people about it, get ideas moving among that group of 100 people, get different people together to explore different aspects of it quietly, and, you know – just explore things.”
On the Recession
“A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.”
“We’ve had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren’t going to lay off people, that we’d taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place – the last thing we were going to do is lay them off.”
On Innovation
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”
