Reshared post from +Tim O’Reilly

Steve Jobs on his major mis­take dur­ing Apple’s trou­bled years: “Let­ting prof­itabil­ity out­weigh pas­sion” http://​huff​.to/​n​N​H​jGY #ditto (a tweet by @stevecase) struck home for me, because in the after­math of Jobs’ death I’ve been think­ing a lot about O’Reilly, want­ing to make sure that we stream­line and focus on the stuff that mat­ters most.

Here’s the money quote from the article:

“My pas­sion has been to build an endur­ing com­pany where peo­ple were moti­vated to make great prod­ucts,” Jobs told Isaac­son. “[T]he prod­ucts, not the prof­its, were the moti­va­tion. Scul­ley flipped these pri­or­i­ties to where the goal was to make money. It’s a sub­tle dif­fer­ence, but it ends up mean­ing everything.”

Jobs went on to describe the legacy he hoped he would leave behind, “a com­pany that will still stand for some­thing a gen­er­a­tion or two from now.”

“That’s what Walt Dis­ney did,” said Jobs, “and Hewlett and Packard, and the peo­ple who built Intel. They cre­ated a com­pany to last, not just to make money. That’s what I want Apple to be.“
All of our great­est work at O’Reilly has been dri­ven by pas­sion and ide­al­ism. That includes our early for­ays into pub­lish­ing, when we were a doc­u­men­ta­tion con­sult­ing com­pany to pay the bills but wrote doc­u­men­ta­tion on the side for pro­grams we used that didn’t have any good man­u­als. It was those man­u­als, on top­ics that no exist­ing tech pub­lisher thought were impor­tant, that turned us into a tech pub­lisher “who came out of nowhere.”

In the early days of the web, we were so excited about it that +Dale Dougherty wanted to cre­ate an online mag­a­zine to cel­e­brate the peo­ple behind it. That mor­phed into GNN, the Global Net­work Nav­i­ga­tor, the web’s first por­tal and first com­mer­cial ad-supported site.

In the mid-90s, real­iz­ing that no one was talk­ing about the pro­grams that were behind all our most suc­cess­ful books, I brought together a col­lec­tion of free soft­ware lead­ers (many of whom had never met each other) to brain­storm a com­mon story. That story rede­fined free soft­ware as open source, and the world hasn’t been the same since. It also led to a new busi­ness for O’Reilly, as we launched our con­fer­ence busi­ness to help bring vis­i­bil­ity to these projects, which had no com­pany mar­ket­ing behind them.

Think­ing deeply about open source and the inter­net got me think­ing big ideas about the inter­net as oper­at­ing sys­tem, and the shift of influ­ence from soft­ware to net­work effects in data as the key to future appli­ca­tions. I was fol­low­ing peo­ple who at the time seemed “crazy” — but they were just liv­ing in a future that hadn’t arrived for the rest of the world yet. It was around this time that I for­mu­lated our com­pany mis­sion of “chang­ing the world by spread­ing the knowl­edge of innovators.”

In 2003, in the dark days after the dot com bust, our com­pany goal for the year was to reignite enthu­si­asm in the com­puter busi­ness. Two out­comes of that effort did just that: +Sara Winge ‘s cre­ation of Foo Camp spawned a world­wide, grass­roots move­ment of self-organizing “uncon­fer­ences,” and our Web 2.0 Con­fer­ence told a big story about where the net was going and what dis­tin­guished the com­pa­nies that sur­vived the dot­com bust from those that pre­ceded it.

In 2005, see­ing the pas­sion that was dri­ving garage inven­tors to a new kind of hard­ware inno­va­tion, Dale once again wanted to launch a mag­a­zine to cel­e­brate the pas­sion­ate peo­ple behind the move­ment. This time, it was a mag­a­zine: Make: (http://​makezine​.com), and a year later, we launched Maker Faire (http://​mak​er​faire​.com) as a com­pan­ion event. 150,000 peo­ple attended Maker Faires last year, and the next gen­er­a­tion of star­tups is emerg­ing from the fer­ment of the move­ment that Dale named.

Mean­while, through those dark years after the dot­com bust, we also did a lot of pub­lish­ing just to keep the com­pany afloat. (With a small data sci­ence team at O’Reilly, we built a set of ana­lyt­i­cal tools that helped us under­stand the untapped oppor­tu­ni­ties in com­puter book pub­lish­ing. We real­ized that we were play­ing in only about 2/5 of the mar­ket; mov­ing into other areas that we had never been drawn to helped pay the bills, but never sparked the kind of cre­ativ­ity as the areas that we’d found by fol­low­ing our passion.)

It was at this time that I for­mu­lated an image that I’ve used many times since: profit in a busi­ness is like gas in a car. You don’t want to run out of gas, but nei­ther do you want to think that your road trip is a tour of gas stations.

When I think about the great per­sis­tence of Steve Jobs, there’s a les­son for all of us in it.

What’s so great about the Apple story is that Steve ended up mak­ing enor­mous amounts of money with­out mak­ing it a pri­mary goal of the com­pany. (Ditto Larry and Sergey at Google.) Con­trast that with the folks who brought us the 2008 finan­cial cri­sis, who were focused only on mak­ing money for them­selves, while tak­ing advan­tage of oth­ers in the process.

Mak­ing money through true value cre­ation dri­ven by the desire to make great things that last, and make the world a bet­ter place — that’s the heart of what is best in cap­i­tal­ism. (See also the won­der­ful HBR blog post, Steve Jobs and the Pur­pose of the Cor­po­ra­tion. http://​blogs​.hbr​.org/​c​s​/​2​0​1​1​/​1​0​/​s​t​e​v​e​_​j​o​b​s​_​a​n​d​_​t​h​e​_​p​u​r​p​o​s​e​_​o​f​.​h​tml I also got a lot of per­spec­tive on this topic from +Lean­der Kah­ney’s book, Inside Steve’s Brain http://​www​.ama​zon​.com/​I​n​s​i​d​e​-​S​t​e​v​e​s​-​B​r​a​i​n​-​L​e​a​n​d​e​r​-​K​a​h​n​e​y​/​d​p​/​1​5​9​1​8​4​1​984 )

Embed­ded Link

What Steve Jobs Learned From His Biggest Fail­ure
Wal­ter Isaacson’s autho­rized biog­ra­phy of Steve Jobs traces the Apple co-founder’s career in Sil­i­con Valley–from its soar­ing highs to its crush­ing lows. Jobs has been hailed as a tech vision­ary, but …

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