Steve Jobs: Quotes about people

“It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.”

Steve Jobs

As quoted in Fortune (9 November 1998); also quoted in "TIME digital 50" in TIME digital archive (1999) http://web.archive.org/web/20000612103032/http://www.time.com/time/digital/digital50/08.html
1990s
Context: 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.

Money , People

“It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

Steve Jobs

Sense , Making love , People

“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Steve Jobs

Apple Inc. "Think different" advertising company.
2000s

Motivational , People , World , Quotes

“But in the end, for something this complicated, 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.”

Steve Jobs

As quoted in BusinessWeek (25 May 1998) http://www.businessweek.com/1998/21/b3579165.htm
1990s

People , Time

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people... Unfortunately, that's too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”

Steve Jobs

Interviewed with Wired: Gary Wolf. Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html (February 1996)
1990s

Problem , People , Feeling , Understanding

“It's easy to find people to do things. What's harder is to find people to tell you what should be done.”

Steve Jobs

Source: Lecture Steve Jobs gave in 1992 is a masterclass on conflict resolution. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPPpo4jv4mU

People

“And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people”

Steve Jobs

Interviewed with Wired: Gary Wolf. Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html (February 1996)
1990s
Context: Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people... Unfortunately, that's too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

People

“I found that there were these incredibly great people at doing certain things, and that you couldn't replace one of these people with 50 average people. They could just do things that no number of average people could do.”

Steve Jobs

As quoted in Steve Jobs at 44, Time (Michael Krantz and Steve Jobs, Oct. 10, 1999) http://content.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,32207,00.html
1990s

People

“Rolling Stone: Nevertheless, you've often talked about how technology can empower people, how it can change their lives. Do you still have as much faith in technology today as you did when you started out 20 years ago?
Jobs: Oh, sure. It's not a faith in technology. It's faith in people.
Rolling Stone: Explain that.
Jobs: Technology is nothing. What's important is that you have a faith in people, that they're basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they'll do wonderful things with them. It's not the tools that you have faith in — tools are just tools. They work, or they don't work. It's people you have faith in or not. Yeah, sure, I'm still optimistic I mean, I get pessimistic sometimes but not for long.”

Steve Jobs

1990s

People , Faith , Change

“We hired truly great people and gave them the room to do great work. A lot of companies […] hire people to tell them what to do. We hire people to tell us what to do. We figure we're paying them all this money; their job is to figure out what to do and tell us.”

Steve Jobs

The management philosophy here really is to give people enough rope to hang themselves. We hire people to tell us what to do. That's what we pay them for.
1990s
Source: Steve Jobs, 1996, Fresh Air radio interview by Terry Gross, npr.org http://www.npr.org/2011/10/06/141115121/steve-jobs-computer-science-is-a-liberal-art, audio 26:30/31:05
Source: Steve Jobs 1982, interview in InfoWorld March 4, 1982, p.15 books.google https://books.google.fr/books?id=gT4EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA15&dq=rope

Money , People

“You always have to keep pushing to innovate. Dylan could have sung protest songs forever and probably made a lot of money, but he didn’t. He had to move on, and when he did, by going electric in 1965, he alienated a lot of people. His 1966 Europe tour was his greatest…. The Beatles were the same way. They kept evolving, moving, refining their art. That’s what I’ve always tried to do — keep moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you are not busy being born, you’re busy dying.”

Steve Jobs

As quoted in Steve Jobs (2011) by Walter Isaacson, p. 570
2010s

Money , People , Art , Way

“Jobs: Most people have no concept of how an automatic transmission works, yet they know how to drive a car. You don't have to study physics to understand the laws of motion to drive a car. You don't have to understand any of this stuff to use Macintosh.”

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs, Playboy, Feb 1985, by Philip Elmer-Dewitt, “Steve-Jobs The Playboy Interview” http://fortune.com/2010/11/20/steve-jobs-the-playboy-interview/, Fortune.com, November 20, 2010.
1980s

People , Law , Cars , Understanding

“When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money.
That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.”

Steve Jobs

Interview Steve Jobs: Visionary Entrepreneur by Santa Clara Valley Historical Association (1994) Steve Jobs: Visionary Entrepreneur http://www.siliconvalleyhistorical.org/#!steve-jobs-film/c1x1c, Silicon Valley Historical Association] Steve Jobs: Secrets of Life quote http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYfNvmF0Bqw, Santa Clara Valley Historical Association, YouTube]
1990s

Life , Money , People , World

“Rolling Stone: It's been 10 years since the PC revolution started. Rational people can debate about whether technology has made the world a better place –
Jobs: The world's clearly a better place. Individuals can now do things that only large groups of people with lots of money could do before. What that means is, we have much more opportunity for people to get to the marketplace — not just the marketplace of commerce but the marketplace of ideas. The marketplace of publications, the marketplace of public policy. You name it. We've given individuals and small groups equally powerful tools to what the largest, most heavily funded organizations in the world have. And that trend is going to continue. You can buy for under $10,000 today a computer that is just as powerful, basically, as one anyone in the world can get their hands on.”

Steve Jobs

1990s

Money , People , World , Idea

“Jobs: Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields. We all brought to this a sort of “liberal arts” air, an attitude that we wanted to pull the best that we saw into this field. You don’t get that if you are very narrow.
Cringley: How does the Web affect the economy?
Jobs: We live in an information economy. The problem is that information's usually impossible to get, at least in the right place, at the right time. The reason Federal Express won over its competitors was its package-tracking system. For the company to bring that package-tracking system onto the Web is phenomenal. I use it all the time to track my packages. It's incredibly great. Incredibly reassuring. And getting that information out of most companies is usually impossible.
But it's also incredibly difficult to give information. Take auto dealerships. So much money is spent on inventory—billions and billions of dollars. Inventory is not a good thing. Inventory ties up a ton of cash, it's open to vandalism, it becomes obsolete. It takes a tremendous amount of time to manage. And, usually, the car you want, in the color you want, isn't there anyway, so they've got to horse-trade around. Wouldn't it be nice to get rid of all that inventory? Just have one white car to drive and maybe a laserdisc so you can look at the other colors. Then you order your car and you get it in a week.”

Steve Jobs

Robert X. Cringley for a Public Broadcasting System [PBS] television series, “Triumph of the Nerds” (1995), “The Lost Interview: Steve Jobs Tells Us What Really Matters” https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/17/the-lost-interview-steve-jobs-tells-us-what-really-matters/#5cb0fc8e6c3a, Forbes, Steve Denning, Nov 17, 2011,
1990s

Money , People , World , Art

“Jobs: Let me compare it with IBM. How come the Mac group produced Mac and the people at IBM produced the PCjr? We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.
Playboy: Are you saying that the people who made the PCjr don’t have that kind of pride in the product?
Jobs: If they did, they wouldn’t have turned out the PCjr.”

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs, Playboy interview http://reprints.longform.org/playboy-interview-steve-jobs, Feb 1985
1980s

People , Beauty , Way , Thinking

“Unfortunately, people are not rebelling against Microsoft. They don’t know any better.”

Steve Jobs

Interview in Rolling Stone magazine, no. 684 (16 June 1994)
1990s, Rolling Stone interview (1994)

People

“Look at the design of a lot of consumer products — they're really complicated surfaces. We tried to make something much more holistic and simple. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don't put in the time or energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart, and want objects which are well thought through.”

Steve Jobs

On the design of the iPod, as quoted in Newsweek (14 October 2006)
2000s