Steve Jobs on his major mistake during Apple’s troubled years: “Letting…

October 23, 2011

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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Talk to the Future Video Magazine

October 1, 2008

Talk to the FutureThese ‘pub­lic con­ver­sa­tions with today’s bold­est voic­es’ are the brain­child of San Fran­cis­co, Cal­i­for­nia-based activist jour­nal­ist Anne-christine d’Adesky. She’s trav­el­ing the world inter­view­ing pol­i­cy mak­ers and on-the-ground orga­niz­ers on issues of glob­al health and AIDS. The site uses Google Video and Mov­able Type to cre­ate an online video mag­a­zine.

Vis­it: Talk​tothe​fu​ture​.org and Acdadesky​.org

Hey who am I to decide anything

April 9, 2007

Over on Non­the­ist Friends web­site, there’s an arti­cle look­ing back at ten years of FGC Gath­er­ing work­shops on their con­cern. There was also a post some­where on the blo­gos­phere (sor­ry I don’t remem­ber where) by a Pagan Friend excit­ed that this year’s Gath­er­ing would have a work­shop focused on their concerns.

It’s kind of inter­est­ing to look at the process by which new the­olo­gies are being added into Lib­er­al Quak­erism at an ever-increasing rate.

  • Mem­ber­ship of indi­vid­u­als in meet­ings. There are hun­dreds of meet­ings in lib­er­al Quak­erism that range all over the the­o­log­i­cal map. Add to that the wide­spread agree­ment that the­o­log­i­cal uni­ty with the meet­ing is not required and just about any­one believ­ing any­thing could be admit­ted some­where (or “grand­fa­thered in” as a birthright member).
  • A work­shop at the Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence Gath­er­ing and espe­cial­ly a reg­u­lar work­shop at suc­ces­sive Gath­er­ings. Yet as the very informed com­ments on a post a few years ago showed, the­ol­o­gy is not some­thing the plan­ning work­shop com­mit­tee is allowed to look at and at least one pro­po­nent of a new the­ol­o­gy has got­ten them­selves on the decid­ing com­mit­tee. The Gath­er­ing is essen­tial­ly built on the non­de­nom­i­na­tion­al Chau­taqua mod­el and FGC is per­fect­ly hap­py to spon­sor work­shops that are in appar­ent con­flict with its own mis­sion statement.
  • An arti­cle pub­lished in Friends Jour­nal. When the the Quak­er Sweat Lodge was strug­gling to claim legit­i­ma­cy it all but changed its name to the “Quak­er Sweat Lodge as fea­tured in the Feb­ru­ary 2002 Friends Jour­nal.” It’s a good mag­a­zine’s job to pub­lish arti­cles that make peo­ple think and a smart mag­a­zine will know that arti­cles that pro­voke a lit­tle con­tro­ver­sy is good for cir­cu­la­tion. I very much doubt the edi­to­r­i­al team at the Jour­nal con­sid­ers its agree­ment to pub­lish to be an inoc­u­la­tion against critique.
  • A web­site and list­serv. Fif­teen dol­lars at GoDad​dy​.com and you’ve got the web address of your dreams. Yahoo Group is free.

There are prob­a­bly oth­er mech­a­nisms of legit­i­ma­cy. My point is not to give com­pre­hen­sive guide­lines to would-be cam­paign­ers. I sim­ply want to note that none of the actors in these deci­sions is con­scious­ly think­ing “hey, I think I’ll expand the def­i­n­i­tion of lib­er­al Quak­er the­ol­o­gy today.” In fact I expect they’re most­ly pass­ing the buck, think­ing “hey, who am I to decide any­thing like that.”

None of these decision-making process­es are meant to serve as tools to dis­miss oppo­si­tion. The orga­ni­za­tions involved are not hand­ing out Impri­maturs and would be quite hor­ri­fied if they real­ized their agree­ments were being seen that way. Amy Clark, a com­menter on my last post, on this sum­mer’s reunion and camp for the once-young mem­bers of Young Friends North Amer­i­ca, had a very inter­est­ing comment:

I agree that YFNA has become FGC: those pre­vi­ous­ly involved in YFNA have tak­en lead­er­ship with FGC … with both pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive results. Well … now we have a chance to look at the lega­cy we are cre­at­ing: do we like it?

I have the feel­ing that the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of lib­er­al Quak­er lead­er­ship does­n’t quite believe it’s lead­ing lib­er­al Quak­erism. By “lead­er­ship” I don’t mean the small skim of the pro­fes­sion­al Quak­er bureau­cra­cy (whose mem­bers can get _too_ self-inflated on the lead­er­ship issue) but the com­mit­tees, clerks and vol­un­teers that get most of the work done from the local to nation­al lev­els. We are the inher­i­tors of a proud and some­times fool­ish tra­di­tion and our actions are shap­ing its future but I don’t think we real­ly know that. I have no clever solu­tion to the issues I’ve out­lined here but I think becom­ing con­scious that we’re cre­at­ing our own lega­cy is an impor­tant first step.