Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader

They spent the rest of the time talking about where Apple should focus in the future. Jobs’s ambition was to build a company that would endure, and he asked Markkula what the formula for that would be. Markkula replied that lasting companies know how to reinvent themselves. Hewlett-Packard had done that repeatedly; it started as an instrument compa

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Another of Jobs’s maxims at the retreat was “It’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy.” He wanted to instill a rebel spirit in his team, to have them behave like swashbucklers who were proud of their work but willing to commandeer from others. As Susan Kare put it, “He meant, ‘Let’s have a renegade feeling to our group. We can move fast. We

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He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. He and his colleagues at Apple were able to think differently: They developed not merely modest product advances based on focus grou

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Who would argue for not focusing, or for not holding employees accountable? What maker of products or deliverer of services wouldn’t benefit from asking the question: Are we basing that decision on what’s best for the product, and therefore for the customer? Is there a company that couldn’t benefit from a critical examination of its messaging, to a

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