Brent Schlender Quotes

Steve was the best delegator I ever met," Johnson said at Stanford. "He was so clear about what he wanted that it gave you great freedom.

restlessness is far more important and powerful than simple ambition or raw intelligence. It is the foundation of resilience, and self-motivation. It is fueled by curiosity, the ache to build something meaningful, and a sense of purpose to make the most of one's entire life.

Sun Microsystems, a Silicon Valley workstation maker, got its start in 1982 making such machines for use on the Stanford University Network (hence its name). Sun set a record that still stands in the annals of American business for being the company that from a dead start reached the $1 billion sales mark faster than any other manufacturer - it took all of four years.

What wasn't made clear, and what Bill didn't even come close to revealing, was how his deep understanding of the computing needs of businesses would transform the computer business itself over the next several years, further sidelining anyone who, like Steve, chose to focus on the aesthetics and thrills of personal computers. Even though nobody recognized it at the time, Bill was about to take the personal right out of personal computing. Ironically, in so doing, he would leave an opening for Steve to fill - eventually.

displayed and sold represented the very worst of what could go wrong when things weren't done his way. The salespeople, always interested in quick turnover, seemed to make little effort to understand what was special about a Mac, and had less incentive to do so after

One day I asked him if he had come to enjoy the process of building companies, now that he was trying to do so for a third time. "Uh, no," he started, as if I were a fool. But if he didn't enjoy building companies, he sure had a thoughtful and convincing way of describing why he kept doing it. "The only purpose, for me, in building a company is so that that company can make products. One is a means to the other. Over a period of time you realize that building a very strong company and a very strong foundation of talent and culture in a company is essential to keep making great products.

To overlook those years (muddled, complicated times) is to fall into the trap of only celebrating success. We can learn as much, if not more, from failure, from promising paths that turn into dead ends. The vision, understanding, patience, and wisdom that informed Steve's last decade were forged in the trials of these intervening years. The failures, stinging reversals, miscommunications, bad judgment calls, emphases on wrong values-the whole Pandora's box of immaturity- were necessary prerequisites to the clarity, moderation, reflection, and steadiness he would display in later years.

We can learn as much, if not more, from failure, from promising paths that turn into dead ends. The vision, understanding, patience, and wisdom that informed Steve's last decade were forged in the trials of these intervening years. The failures, stinging reversals, miscommunications, bad judgment calls, emphases on wrong values-the whole Pandora's box of immaturity-were necessary prerequisites to the clarity, moderation, reflection, and steadiness he would display in the later years.

By the late 1990s, it was almost as if the Orwellian scenario of the Mac's "1984" commercial had come true. Big Business, with a pair of capital B's, ruled computing. The drones used what they were told.

at Pixar, Steve couldn't shape the culture. He wasn't the founder, and even as owner, he could not change the company to reflect his image and sensibilities. It already had a culture. It already had a leader. Its cohesive and collaborative team knew exactly what it wanted to do.

Develop for it?" he told InfoWorld. "I'll piss on it.

Autobiography of a Yogi, a book that he would return to several

Pixar's Ed Catmull likes to say that since you can't control the luck itself, which is bound to come your way for better and for worse, what matters is your state of preparedness to deal with it.

Collins, echoing Ed Catmull, "What separates people is the return on luck, what you do with it when you get it. What matters is how you play the hand you're dealt." He continues, "You don't leave the game, until it's not your choice. Steve Jobs had great luck at arriving at the birth of an industry. Then he had bad luck in getting booted out. But Steve played whatever hand he was dealt to the best of his ability. Sometimes you create the hand, by giving yourself challenges that will make you stronger, where you don't even know what's next. That's the beauty of the story. Steve's almost like the Tom Hanks character in Castaway - just keep breathing because you don't know what the tide will bring in tomorrow.

Steve wanted people to love Apple," says Cook, "not just work for Apple, but really love Apple, and really understand at a very deep level what Apple was about, about the values of the company. He didn't write them on the walls and make posters out of them anymore, but he wanted people to understand them. He wanted people to work for a greater cause.

Do you have the humility to continually grow, to learn from your failures and get back up? Are you utterly relentless for your cause, ferocious for your cause? Can you channel your intensity and intelligence and energy and talents and gifts and ideas outward into something that is bigger and more impactful than you are? That's what great leadership is about.

Above all, saying no became a crucial way of keeping everyone, including himself, focused on what really mattered.

So many of the people who want to be like Steve have the asshole side down. What they're missing is the genius part.

Lucas was courting a range of other potential buyers at the same time, including Siemens, Hallmark, General Motors' EDS division, and Philips. But as one deal after another fell through, the balance of power tilted toward Steve, who didn't need the group as much as Lucas needed the money. So he was perfectly willing to play tough himself. "At one point," says Barnes, who helped with the negotiations, "the delays went on forever and he just went and told one of their executives to 'fuck off.' One of the Lucas team said, 'You can't say that to one of our EVPs.' 'Yes I can,' he replied. 'And fuck you, too.'

By the time the two got around to focusing on the iPhone, Steve had become closer to Jony than anyone he had ever worked with. "The bond became so strong between us," says Ive. "We could just be honest and straightforward and not have to articulate precisely why this is a good idea or why this is a valuable idea. And we also were honest enough to be able to say 'Nah, that's a terrible idea,' without worrying about each other's feelings so much.

Steve had grown comfortable with only seeing the connections between the dots after the fact. Maturity, and the extraordinary talents of the team he had built, made that possible.

Steve was innately comfortable trusting his gut; it's a characteristic of the best entrepreneurs, a necessity for anyone who wants to make a living developing things no one has ever quite imagined before.

By some analysts' estimates, the Cupertino company now pockets as much as 80 percent of the profits of the entire cellphone handset business.

Software development requires very little capital investment, since it is basically intellectual capital, pure thoughtstuff, expressed in a set of detailed instructions written in a language that machines can understand.

To Steve, these stores were pulling off something he had never been able to manage: they sold a lifestyle product at an absurdly high margin by presenting it in a beautiful and yet informative way.

The main reason we were close and worked in the way we did was that it was a collaboration that was based on more than just the traditional view of design," Ive says. "We both perceived objects in our environment, and people, and organizational structures intuitively in the same way. Beauty can be conceptual, it can be symbolic, it can stand as testament to progress and what humankind has managed to achieve in the last fifteen years. In that sense, it could represent progress, or it could be something as trivial as the machined face on a screw. That's why we got on well, 'cause we both thought that way. If my contribution was simply to the shapes of things, we wouldn't have spent so much time together. It makes no sense that the CEO of a company this size would spend nearly every lunchtime and big chunks of the afternoon with somebody who just was preoccupied with form.

Steve embraced the marketing adage that every single moment a consumer encounters a brand - whether as a buyer, a user, a store visitor, a passerby seeing a billboard, or someone simply watching an ad on TV - is an experience that adds either credits or debits to the brand's "account" in his imagination.

it didn't bother me to say, 'Hey, Steve, shut up.

should go see Steve," he whispered in his ear. "He's out in the parking lot crying.

What I loved about working for Steve," says Cue, "is that you learned that you could accomplish the impossible. Again and again.

Hard disk drives were finally cheap enough for consumers to afford: If you shopped around, you could find one that held 10 megabytes of digital storage for about $700.

after an old girlfriend failed to solder a few chips correctly, he made her the team's bookkeeper.

What's the point in looking back," he told me in one email. "I'd rather

STEVEN PAUL JOBS felt deeply entitled almost from the start, thanks to parents who raised him to think that he was every bit as special as they believed he could be.

The last person who wrote about me for the Wall Street Journal didn't even know the difference between machine memory and a floppy!

There are thousands of people across the country taking photography courses. They'll never be professional photographers. They just want to understand what the photographic process is all about.

I don't really care, this is what I want to do. And if I try my best and fail, well, I tried my best.

One little thing led to another. One success, one particular challenge, could spur thoughts about another product, or a different iteration of an existing product, or a whole new channel of revenue. As Steve liked to say, "You can only connect the dots of how things really happened in hindsight.

The sun will set and the sun will rise, and it will shine upon us tomorrow in our grief and our gratitude, and we will continue to live with purpose, memory, passion, and love.

Challenges, confrontations: in his limited experience, this was how you got things done; this was how the great stuff broke through.

The key was the customer experience,

The turnaround, however, did not come without expensive failures. Apple had done a good job embracing the Internet, by making the process of getting access to the Web as simple as any other function of an iMac. But Apple's eWorld, a proprietary online subscription service bundled with new iMacs, was a flop, despite a friendly interface that suggested that going online could be as easy as walking from one neighborhood to the next. All it really offered was email services and a way to download software, and in practice it wasn't any easier to use than bigger services like EarthLink and AOL, which came bundled on Wintel PCs.

Steve's life wasn't a movie. It was inspiring, confounding, and unabashedly human, to the very end.

One of the things I've always felt," Steve told me, "is that if you're going to be creative, it's like jumping up in the air; you want to make damn sure the ground is going to be there when you get back.