Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Steve Jobs…Book Notes

I have read more pages per day using a Kindle on the Tube than any time since I was in Ann Arbor 23 years ago.  A Kindle in my pocket has allowed me to complete door stops including the Steve Jobs biography.  Books that were once intimidating are now now accesible.  The only down side is the rip off I felt when the Jobs’ book ended at 78% of completion (the last 22% are the index, acknowledgement and sources).

It is the most inspiring business book and as one friend called it, the Atlas Shrugged of our generation.

Key takeaways:
They stole their interface and a lot of the Mac and Windows ideas from Xerox.  When Windows was released Jobs told Gates that he was ripping off Apple.  “Gates looked at him coolly and said, ‘Well Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it.  I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.’”

John Lasseter pitched Toy Story which sprang from the belief that products have an essence to them, a purpose for which they were made.  “If the object were to have feelings these would be based on its desire to fulfill its essence.  The purpose of a glass, for example, is to hold water; if is had feelings, it would be happy when full and sad when empty.  The essence of a computer screen is to interface with a human.  The essence of a unicycle is to be ridden in a circus.  As for toys, their purpose is to be played with by kids, and thus their existential fear is of being discarded or upstaged by newer toys.  So a buddy movie pairing an old favorite toy with a shiny new one would have an essential drama to it.”

He wanted the Apple stores because he said if Apple is going to succeed they do so with innovation and you can’t win on innovation unless you have a way to communicate with customers.
A good company must impute, it must convey its values and importance in everything it does from packaging to marketing.  He was reminded of his first visit to the Ralph Lauren story on Madison Avenue.

Jobs knew the isolating potential of technology, he was a strong believer in face to face meetings.  “There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and i-chat.  That’s crazy.  Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings from random discussions.”


Unfortunately Jobs disapproved of Market Research, one of his flaws.  He used the Wayne Gretzky quote about going to where the puck is going to be.  Henry Ford said if he’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have said "a faster horse.  People don’t know what they want until you show it to them."

“A lot of us want to give something back to our species, add something to the flow...we try to use our talents to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow.  That’s what has driven me.”

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