I'm an Apple nut. Simple yet revolutionary gets my attention.
Last fall I read the biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. Fantastic insights.
Here’s 10 things I highlighted. Some apply to leadership. Some apply to preaching:
1. Apple had a 3rd partner, Ron Wayne, who got cold feet after 11 days. He was paid a buyout of $2,300. Had he stayed, his share would be worth $2.6 billion. Lesson? Don't bail too early. Take a risk and trust.
2. The empowering force of naïveté –
“Because I didn’t know it couldn’t be done, I was enabled to do it. ”
3. Jobs' haunting question to Pepsi’s Scully as he recruited him –
"Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?"
4. Jobs responding to a question about how he did market research for the Mac:
“Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?”
5. What prepared him for the success he would have in Act 3 of his life
was not his success during Act 1 at Apple, but his brilliant failures in Act 2.
6. It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple.
7. Gretzky – “Skate where the puck is going, not where it has been.”
8. Henry Ford – “If I’d asked customers what the wanted, they’d have told me, ‘a faster horse’.”
9. "You build a company that will stand for something a generation or two from now. That’s what Walt Disney did, and HP, and the people that built Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That’s what I want Apple to be."
10. Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.
