Steve Jobs Skills Of Life In Business
It’s a very complicated world. It’s a very noisy world. And we not gonna get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.
We don’t stand a chance of advertising with features and benefits and with RAMs and with charts and comparisons. The only chance we have of communicating is with a feeling.
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.
You saw the 1984 commercial. Macintosh was basically this relatively small company in Cupertino, California, taking on the Goliath, IBM, and saying, “Wait a minute, your way is wrong. This is now the way we want computers to go. This is not the legacy we want to leave. This is not what we want our kids to be learning. This is wrong and we are going to show you the right way to do it and here it is. It’s called Macintosh and it is so much better.
We do no market research. We don’t hire consultants. We just want to make great products.
5 great quotes on marketing:
Best way to sell something – don’t sell anything. Earn the awareness, respect, & trust of those who might buy. Rand Fishkin
The culture is your brand. Tony Hsieh
Make your marketing so useful people would pay you for it. Jay Baer
The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing. Tom Fishburne
The consumer is not a moron; she is your wife. David Ogilvy
Fact 1: ‘Empathy, Focus, and Impute‘. Those were the 3 goals of the initial ‘Apple Marketing Philosophy‘ released in 1977.
STEVE JOBS WORDS ON TECHNOLOGY
What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.
We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.
I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer, should learn a computer language because it teaches you how to think.
Talking about bicycles: Human are tool builders, and we build tools that can dramatically amplify our innate human abilities. We actually ran an ad like this early at Apple that the personal computer is the bicycle of the mind and I believe that with every bone in my body that all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank near, if not at the top, as history unfolds and we look back.
It is the most awesome tool that we ever invented (the computer). And I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place in Silicon Valley, at exactly the right time historically where this invention has taken form.
A computer is the most incredible tool we’ve ever seen. It can be a writing tool, a communications center, a super calculator, a planner, a filer and an artistic instrument all in one, just by being given new instructions, or software, to work from. There are no other tools that have the power and versatility of a computer.
Right now, computers make our lives easier. They do work for us in fractions of a second that would take us hours. They increase the quality of life, some of that by simply automating drudgery and some of that by broadening our possibilities. As things progress, they’ll be doing more and more for us.
These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I’m not downplaying that.
I think it’s brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television – but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.
On how will the Web impact our society: We live in an information economy, but I don’t believe we live in an information society. People are thinking less than they used to. It’s primarily because of television. People are reading less and they’re certainly thinking less.
I don’t see most people using the Web to get more information. We’re already in information overload. No matter how much information the Web can dish out, most people get far more information than they can assimilate anyway.
But the next thing is going to be computer as guide or agent. And what that means is that it’s going to do more in terms of anticipating what we want and doing it for us, noticing connections and patterns in what we do, asking us if this is some sort of generic thing we’d like to do regularly, so that we’re going to have, as an example, the concept of triggers.
We’re going to be able to ask our computers to monitor things for us, and when certain conditions happen, are triggered, the computers will take certain actions and inform us after the fact.
The point is that tools are always going to be used for certain things we don’t find personally pleasing. And it’s ultimately the wisdom of people, not the tools themselves, that is going to determine whether or not these things are used in positive, productive ways.
I do feel there is another way we have an effect on society besides our computers.
Did you know that Steve’s kids were not allowed to use iPads at home? Maybe he knew how addictive these technologies were.
Here’s what he had to say about iPads:
They haven’t used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home.
STEVE JOBS WORDS ON APPLE
One of the things that made Apple great was that, in the early days, it was built from the heart.
And boy, have we patented it. (First announcement of the iPhone, Macworld 2006)
The roots of Apple were to build computers for people, not for corporations. The world doesn’t need another Dell or Compaq.
You know, everybody has a cell phone, but I don’t know one person who likes their cell phone. I want to make a phone that people love.
What if Apple didn’t exist? Think about it. Time wouldn’t get published next week. Some 70% of the newspaper in the U.S. wouldn’t publish tomorrow morning. Some 60% of the kids wouldn’t have computers; 64% of the teachers wouldn’t have computers. More than half the Websites created on Macs wouldn’t exist. So there’s something worth saving here. See?
What are the great brands? Levi’s, Coke, Disney, Nike. Most people would put Apple in that category. You could spend billions of dollars building a brand not as good as Apple. Yet Apple hasn’t been doing anything with this incredible asset.
What is Apple, after all? Apple is about people who think ‘outside the box’, people who want to use computers to help them change the world, to help them create things that make a difference, and not just to get a job done.
Apple’s the only company left in this industry that designs the whole widget. Hardware, software, developer relations, marketing.
Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. Click to tweet It’s very fortunate if you can work on just one of these in your career. Apple’s been very fortunate in that it’s introduced a few of these.
What we want to do is make a leapfrog product that is way smarter than any mobile device has ever been, and super-easy to use. This is what iPhone is. OK? So, we’re going to reinvent the phone.
I had this idea of being able to get rid of the keyboard, type on a multi-touch glass display, and I asked our folks, “Could we come up with a multi-touch display?
We designed iMac to deliver the things consumers care about most: the excitement of the Internet and the simplicity of the Mac.
It’s not about charisma and personality, it’s about results and products and those very bedrock things that are why people at Apple and outside of Apple are getting more excited about the company and what Apple stands for and what its potential is to contribute to the industry.
Talking about the iPod Nano: We’re in uncharted territory. We’ve never sold this many of anything before.
STEVE JOBS QUOTES ON INNOVATION
I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. Click to tweet
It’s very easy to take credit for the thinking. The doing is more concrete. But somebody, it’s very easy to say “Oh, I thought of these three years ago”. But usually when you dig a little deeper, you find that the people that really did it were also the people that really worked through the hard intellectual problems as well.
Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.
Leonardo [da Vinci] was the artist but he also mixed all his own paints. He also was a fairly good chemist. He knew about pigments, knew about human anatomy. And combining all of those skills together, the art and the science, the thinking and the doing, was what resulted in the exceptional result.
The people that have really made the contributions have been the thinkers and the doers.
Actually, making an insanely great product has a lot to do with the process of making the product, how you learn things and adopt new ideas and throw out old ideas.
People get stuck as they get older. Our minds are sort of electrochemical computers. Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them. It’s a rare person who etches grooves that are other than a specific way of looking at things, a specific way of questioning things.
You always have to keep pushing to innovate. 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.
The Beatles were the same way. They kept evolving, moving, refining their art. That’s what I’ve always tried to do – keep moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you are not busy being born, you’re busy dying.
Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
I don’t think that my role in life is to run big organizations and do incremental improvements.
I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I’ve done that sort of thing in my life, but I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don’t know why. Because they’re harder. They’re much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you’ve completely failed.
The people who go to see our movies are trusting us with something very important – their time and their imagination. So in order to respect that trust, we have to keep changing; we have to challenge ourselves and try to surprise our audiences with something new every time.
Innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.
It’s ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.
You can’t go out and ask people, you know, what the next big thing is. There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse’.
My philosophy is that everything starts with a great product. So, you know, I obviously believed in listening to customers, but customers can’t tell you about the next breakthrough that’s going to happen next year that’s going the change the whole industry. So you have to listen very carefully. But then you have to go and sort of stow away – you have to go hide away with people that really understand the technology, but also really care about the customers, and dream up this next breakthrough.
Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly and get on with improving your other innovations.
STEVE JOBS WORDS ON THINKING DIFFERENTLY
The theme of the campaign is ‘Think different’. It’s honoring the people who think different, and who move this world forward.
Apple is built on refugees from other companies. These are the extremely bright individual contributors who were troublemakers at other companies.
The people who made Mac are sort of on the edge. Click to tweet
On if he is a nerd or a hippie: If I had to pick one of those two I’m clearly a hippie. All the people that I worked with were clearly in that category too.
I think the artistry is in having an insight into what one sees around them. Generally putting things together in a way no one else has before and finding a way to express that to other people who don’t have that insight.
5 quotes on thinking differently
I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking. Albert Einstein
If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old. Peter Drucker
Obsession is the wellspring of genius and madness. Michel de Montaigne
Be yourself, everyone else is already taken. Oscar Wilde
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect). Mark Twain