Steve Jobs

I've always considered part of my job was to keep the quality level of people in the organizations I work with very high. I mean, that's what I consider one of the few things I actually, you know, can contribute individually myself versus the team that I work with is to really try to instill in the organization the goal of having only eight players because in the field that I'm in, like in a lot of fields, the difference between the worst taxicab driver and the best taxicab driver to get you across town Manhattan might be two to one. Best one will get you there in 15 minutes, the worst one will get you there in half an hour or, you know, the best cook and the worst cook, maybe it's three to one, you know, pick something like that.

In the field that I'm in, the difference in software in particular, the difference between and the best person and the worst person is about a hundred to one or more. The difference between a good software person and a great software person is probably 50 to one, 25 to 50 to one, huge dynamic range. And therefore I have found, and not just in software, but almost everything I've done, it really pays to go after the best people in the world. It's painful. It's very painful when you have some people that are not the best people in the world and you have to get rid of them. But I found that my job has sometimes been exactly that, to get rid of some of the people that didn't measure up.

And I've always tried to do it in a humane way, but nonetheless it has to be done and it's not ever fun. Is that the hardest and most painful part of managing a company from your point of view? Oh sure. Of course. So.

Balance between thinking and doing. I mean, one of the things in the semiconductors was you had risk takers. I mean, Bob Noyce, you know, learns to hang glide at age 40. These people like laying their butts in the line. How important was that in the early days? I mean, we're going back to 75.

Well, again, after seeing, you know, my entire life's been spent only in one industry, which is this one. But I've been in it now for about 15 years, and I've seen a lot of people make a lot of things. I've seen a lot of people fail a lot of things. And my point of view on this, or my observation is, that the doers are the major thinkers. The people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker -doer in one person. And if we really go back and we examine, you know, did Leonardo have a guy off to the side that was thinking five years out in the future what he would paint or the technology he would use to paint it.

Of course not. Leonardo was the artist, but he also mixed all his own paints. He also was a fairly good chemist, 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. And there is no difference in our industry. The people that have really made the contributions have been the thinkers and the doers. A lot of people, of course, it's very easy to take credit for the thinking. The doing is more concrete. But it's very easy for somebody to say, oh, I thought of this 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. and doing it every day. Thank you.

What happens is that this is the same in technology as it is at Pixar and on the creative side. Where you've got incredibly talented people that are also rare and in demand, if you don't treat them right, they can go get another job in 10 minutes, right? So this strange thing happens, which is that the hierarchy of power inverts, and the CEO is actually at the bottom. So I sort of feel like I work for most of these people because they're the ones that are doing all the brilliant work. And it's the same in software. It's the same thing. The best people are very hard to come by, so it's management's job to support them because they're on the front lines doing the work.

So that's kind of how we run the place. We do that by creating the right environment, a very rich environment, and removing obstacles out of their way and putting together the right teams of people together and getting the right projects, keeping the quality levels very high, both in terms of people and strategy and projects, those kinds of things. We enjoy the enjoyimentos.

We enjoy the enjoyimentos. We enjoy the enjoyimentos. We enjoy enjoyimentos. We enjoy enjoyimentos. We enjoy enjoyimentos. We enjoy enjoyimentos.

Our ambitions visually are growing as fast as the technology can feed them. And so I think the worlds, the visual worlds, which we'll be able to create will be much richer over time.

On the creative side, though, I think the art of storytelling is very old. And no amount of technology can turn a bad story into a good story. That's our mantra at Pixar. You know, it's the story, stupid, if you will.

And so, you know, I think storytelling is a real art, and that's something that we're always going to be working on very, very hard. And I don't think it's changed in a long time, and I'm not sure it will. And I don't think it's something that technology has anything to do with.

The greatest people are self -managing. They don't need to be managed. Once they know what to do, they'll go figure out how to do it. They don't need to be managed at all. What they need is a common vision, and that's what leadership is. What leadership is, is having a vision, being able to articulate that so the people around you can understand it, and getting a consensus on a common vision. We wanted people that were insanely great at what they did, but were not necessarily those seasoned professionals, but who had at the tips of their fingers and in their passion the latest understanding of where technology was and what we could do with that technology, and who wanted to bring that to lots of people.

So the neatest thing that happens is when you get a core group of 10 great people, it becomes self -policing as to who they let into that group. So I consider the most important job of someone like myself is recruiting.

Somebody taught me a long time ago a very valuable lesson, which is if you do the right things on the top line, the bottom line will follow. And what they meant by that was if you get the right strategy, if you have the right people, and if you have the right culture at your company, you'll do the right products, you'll do the right marketing, you'll do the right things logistically and in manufacturing and distribution. And if you do all those things right, the bottom line will follow. So, yes, we have obviously plans about where we'd like to see the bottom line, but we are focusing most of our energy not on financial reengineering, because that's not what's been troubled at Apple.

We're focusing our energy on the right product strategies, the right market strategies, the right communication strategies, the right logistics and distribution strategies. And the team is making, I think, very strong strides in these areas. And you'll start to see some of this stuff appear in the next 90, 120 days. So I'm actually really happy about this.

Some people think our industry is very mature. And they think there is going to be rapid consolidation and very few companies left over. And it's pretty much very predictable from here on out. That point of view I do not share at all. I think we're about one inch down a road that's many miles long. And that every time there's major technological innovation, there's a tremendous opportunity for new players, for a reorganization of the industry to occur.

And I think that there is certainly as much opportunity for innovation in the next five years as any five -year period I've ever seen in our industry. I think there's just as much opportunity for new companies to come along, for new approaches to be taken, and for customers to get much better computers five years from now than they have today. So I'm pretty optimistic. And I think we all need to remember that we're just in the infancy of this revolution.

What are the factors for success for young people today? What pitfalls should they avoid if you're playing the role of an older statesman? For entrepreneurs? Yeah, for young entrepreneurs. Oh, I get asked this a lot, and I have a pretty standard answer, which is a lot of people come to me and they say, well, I want to be an entrepreneur. And I go, oh, that's great. What's your idea? And they go, well, I don't have one yet. And I say, well, I think you should go get a job as a busboy or something until you find something you're really passionate about because it's a lot of work.

And I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non -successful ones is pure perseverance. It is so hard. You pour so much of your life into this thing, and there are such rough moments in time that most people give up. I don't blame them. I mean, it's really tough, and it consumes your life. I mean, if you've got a family and you're in the early days of a company, I can't imagine how one could do it. I'm sure it's been done, but it's rough. I mean, because it's pretty much an 18 -hour -a -day job, seven days a week for a while.

So unless you have a lot of passion about this, you're going to not survive. You're going to give it up. So you've got to have an idea or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you're passionate about. Otherwise, you're not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. And I think that's half the battle right there. So I think that's what I would love to do. So I think that's what I would love to do. Thank you.

I remember reading an article when I was about 12 years old, I think it might have been Scientific American, where they measured the efficiency of locomotion for all these species on planet Earth. How many kilocalories did they expend to get from point A to point B? And the condor one came in at the top of the list, surpassed everything else, and humans came in about a third of the way down the list, which was not such a great showing for the crown of creation. But somebody there had the imagination to test the efficiency of a human riding a bicycle. Human riding a bicycle blew away the condor, all the way off the top of the list.

And it made a really big impression on me that we humans are tool builders, and that we can fashion tools that amplify these inherent abilities that we have to spectacular magnitudes. And so for me, a computer has always been a bicycle of the mind, something that takes us far beyond our inherent abilities. And I think we're just at the early stages of this tool, very early stages, and we've come only a very short distance, and it's still in its formation, but already we've seen enormous changes. I think that's nothing compared to what's coming in the next hundred years. Thank you.

The stuff you're going to see out of Apple starting within the next 12 months and continuing for the next 36 months is going to really be incredibly great. We've worked with the person that did the bronze stuff, as an example, but we've been working with some of those people very closely and we've got some incredibly great stuff. And our feeling is this, it's turning out to be the way we're running the company, the advertising, the product design. We're just trying to get simple again. We're trying to get just really simple. And we took a look at it and our feeling is that the next wave of industrial design is going to be the high tech look.

It's going to be this sort of gunmetal gray metallic or black and that's easy to do. But that's what we're going to do is we're going to make the products high tech and then we're going to package them in packaging where you look at it and you know that it had to be high technology to fit it in that small of a package or that shape of a package. And then we can make them beautiful and white just like the bronze stuff. We can make them just simple objects and you know they're high tech because they couldn't have been made any other way. You see what I'm saying?

Rather than going black, you know, whatever you see. So that's our approach. Very simple. And we're really shooting to, you know, Museum of Modern Art quality stuff. That's our goal. And we're going to get there.

Before we went public, over 80 % of Apple was owned by the employees. Right now, I'd say over 50 % of Apple is owned by the employees. There's some larger blocks in there, but still. And again, I don't think finance is what drives people at Apple. I don't think it's money, but feeling like you own a piece of the company, and this is your damn company, and if you see something... We always tell people, you work for Apple first and your boss second. We feel pretty strongly about that, and it tends to really reinforce that attitude.

My model of business is the Beatles. You know, they were four very talented guys who kept each other's kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other. And the sum was greater than, the total was greater than the sum of the parts. And that's how I see business. You know, great things in business are never done by one person. They're done by a team of people. And we've got that here at Pixar. And we've got that at Apple as well. The Beatles, when they were together, they did truly brilliant, innovative work. And when they split up, they did good work, but it was never the same.

And I see business that way too. It's really always a team.