Sublime

Woodell and I were very different, and yet our friendship was based on a selfsame approach to work. Each of us found pleasure, whenever possible, in focusing on one small task. One task, we often said, clears the mind. And each of us recognized that this small task of finding a bigger office meant we were succeeding.

Sans le savoir, nous étions en train de concevoir ce qui serait la future bibliothèque de Zappos – une bibliothèque qui dépasserait, de loin, la petite poignée de livres que quelques employés s’échangeraient de temps en temps.

West never passed up an opportunity to add flavor to the project. He helped to transform a dispute among engineers into a virtual War of the Roses. He created, as Rasala put it, a seemingly endless series of “brushfires,” and got his staff charged up about putting them out. He was always finding romance and excitement in the seemingly ordinary. He

Years later, after Grove had learned to appreciate this, he read Peter Drucker’s The Practice of Management, which described the ideal chief executive as an outside person, an inside person, and a person of action. Grove realized that instead of being embodied in one person, such traits could exist in a leadership team. That was the case at Intel,

Shea had suffered. He knew better than most about life’s ups and downs, its misunderstandings and broken relationships. He had endured the disorder of internal battles and physical disabilities. He came through it all not as a bitter, cantankerous, and introverted old man but as a human being capable of a loving response to those he trusted. Of cou

And yet Kelly would say at one point, “With all the needed emphasis on leadership, organization and teamwork, the individual has remained supreme—of paramount importance. It is in the mind of a single person that creative ideas and concepts are born.”40 There was an essential truth to this, too—John Bardeen suddenly suggesting to the solid-state gr

Kessel went on a fact-finding mission to Silicon Valley, meeting with hardware experts from Apple and Palm and with executives from the famed industrial design firm Ideo.