Steve is all the rage. Run your company like Steve Jobs. Do nuclear physics like Einstein. I doubt anyone should try to run their company like Steve Jobs. But that doesn’t stop it being interesting to listen to things he says.
In any event, I ran into this response by Jobs to a nasty question and liked it.
This was when Jobs was busy trying to turn round a near doomed company. I’ve also seen him quoted by the author of Good Strategy: Bad Strategy when at about the same time, he was asked something like this “you’ve closed down a vast number of programs at Apple. What are you planning to spend the additional resources on”. Jobs didn’t say had a strategy meeting planned. He answered with words to the effect “I don’t know what we’ll do with the resources. We’re waiting for the next big thing.” Who knows he may have been foxing. He certainly managed to get hold of it.
This is from Jobs Closing Keynote at the Apple WWDC in 1997. Rather than come out and give a rah-rah speech, he chose to run the whole thing as a Q&A with the audience of developers and Apple staff.
Watch the whole thing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LEXae1j6EY#t=04m48s
It’s extraordinary. With hindsight you can watch him laying out the entire future of what Apple has become. Ok you have a squint a bit sometimes, but he had a clear idea of where he was going as a result of the NeXT experience.
I don’t get this. Waiting for the ‘next big thing’? Nothing comes of waiting for the next big thing. You have to create the ‘next big thing’. That requires strategy. That is what Jobs did by spotting the missing link in marketing mp3 players. iPods were a cute device but iTunes made them a sensation. .
Zonk
“only connect”
Zonker, what do you think he could be getting at?
(In any event, you can read the exchange as it’s in the free Kindle sample part of the book I mentioned.)
zonk
“all originality is variations on a theme” Edison did not invent a record player, he invented a recording industry.