Today, I will be sharing with you some business quotes of a famous business leader; this leader is the founder and brain behind the tremendous success of Apple Inc. He is no other person that Steve Jobs and we will be learning from his wealth of experience. But before we do that, let’s do a brief run down on Steve Jobs.
Short Bio on Steve Jobs: Steve Jobs is an American Business Magnate and inventor. He is the co-founder of Apple and founder of Pixar. He dropped out of Reed College and co-founded Apple; one of the most innovative companies in the world. Steve Jobs is on our list of richest drop out billionaires. His company Pixar, successfully produced Toy story, a Bugs life, The incredibles and Finding Nemo amongst others.
In 2007, Steve Jobs was named the most powerful person in business by Fortune Magazine. In 2009, he was named CEO of the decade and was ranked 57th on the Forbes list of the most powerful people in the world. Below is Apple’s innovation strategy as devised by Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Inc.
Steve Jobs Quotes: Learning from Apple’s Innovation Strategy
1. “Apple’s market share is bigger than BMW’s or Mercedes or Porsche’s in the automotive market. What’s wrong with being BMW or Mercedes?
2. “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”
3. “Design is not what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
4. “I think we are having fun. I think our customers really like our products. And we are always trying to do better.”
5. “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”
6. “I want to put a ding in the universe.”
7. “It is piracy, not overt online music stores that is our main competitor.”
8. “It took us three years to build the NEXT computer. If we’d given the customer what they said they wanted, we’d have built a computer they’d have been happy with, a year after we spoke to them – not something they’d want now.”
9. “Pretty much, Apple and Dell are the only ones in this industry making money. They make it by being Wal-Mart, we make it by innovation.”
10. “Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It’s best to admit them quickly and get on with improving your other innovations.”
11. “The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay.”
12. “To turn really interesting ideas and fledging ideas into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines.”
13. “Why join the navy if you can be a pirate?
14. “You can’t just ask the customers what they want and try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they will want something new.”
15. “If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally shaped fonts.”
16. “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?
— The line Steve Jobs used to lure John Sculley as Apple’s CEO, according to Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple
17. “My model for business is the Beatles. They were four guys that kept each other’s negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts. Great things in business are not done by one person; they are done by a team of people.”
18. “Team, it turned out that Michael Dell wasn’t perfect at predicting the future. Based on today’s stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down and things may be different tomorrow but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today.”
19. “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me… Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.”
20. “I was worth about over a million dollars when I was twenty-three and over ten million dollars when I was twenty-four, and over a hundred million dollars when I was twenty-five and it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money.”
21. “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.”
22. “We used to dream about this stuff. Now, we get to build it. It’s pretty neat.”
23. “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.”
24. “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
25. “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
26. “The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”
27. “Because I’m the CEO, and I think it can be done. – On why Jobs chose to override engineers who thought the iMac wasn’t feasible. I’ve always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do.”
28. “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
29. “It comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much.”
30. “I’m the only person I know that’s lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year…. It’s very character-building.”
31. “John Sculley ruined Apple and he ruined it by bringing a set of values to the top of Apple which were corrupt and corrupted some of the top people who were there, drove out some of the ones who were not corruptible, and brought in more corrupt ones and paid themselves collectively tens of millions of dollars and cared more about their own glory and wealth than they did about what built Apple in the first place — which was making great computers for people to use.”
32. On Fixing Apple: “The products suck! There’s no sex in them anymore!”