Steve Jobs

United States
24 Feb 1955 // 5 Oct 2011
Entrepreneur / Inventor

Quotes

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We have a very simple, clear organization. It's very easy to know who has authority for what, who has responsibility for what. There's no politics about it, they're virtually politics-free organizations.
I found that there were these incredibly great people at doing certain things, and you couldn't replace one of these people with 50 average people. They could just do stuff that no number of average people could do.
We had to lay some people off...every one that I had to do it personally, I thought, 'A lot of these fathers and mothers are going to have to...tell their families they just lost their jobs.' And I'd never really thought about that before.
You've got to figure out a way to manage the complexity of large projects yet still allow your core teams to focus on the essentials.
Apple's the only company left in this industry that designs the whole widget. Hardware, software, developer relations, marketing. It turns out that that... is Apple's greatest strategic advantage... if you believe that there's still room for innovation in this industry.
Leonardo da Vinci was a great artist and a great scientist. Michelangelo knew how to cut stone at the quarry. Edwin Land at Polaroid once said, 'I want Polaroid to stand at the intersection of art and science,' and I've never forgotten that.
I look for vectors going in time. What's changing, what are the trends? What windows have just opened and what windows are closing?
You...have to pick horses to ride for five to ten year periods because you don't want to be changing things.
My #1 job here at Apple is to make sure that the top 100 people are A+ players. And everything else will take care of itself. If the top 50 people are right, it just cascades down throughout the whole organization.
You have to invest in thinking through the architecture of things.
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On Anger: "For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind."
Essays
On Destiny: "Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today."
Human, All Too Human
On Friendship: "A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."
Essays