“This song moves me like few others.”
Steve drafted playlists of his favorite songs and why he loved them in 2003, the year the iTunes Music Store debuted.
From: Steve Jobs
To: Steve Jobs
Subject: Re: Celebrity Playlist
Date: April 16, 2003, 9:02 p.m.
1. Sligo River Blues, In Christ There is No East or West, John Fahey
2. If I Laugh, Cat Stevens (or Trouble)
3. Every Grain of Sand, Bob Dylan
4. Baby Let Me Follow You Down, Bob Dylan, 66 tour,live, She Belongs to Me, Desolation Row, Just Like A Woman, It’s All Over Now Baby Blue
5. Vince Guaraldi, Never Never Land
6. Sweet Jane, Velvet Underground
7. Here Comes the Sun, Beatles (Ticket To Ride,
Yesterday, Nowhere Man, In My Life)
8. Little Green, Joni Mitchell
9. Camelot, Lerner & Loewe
10. Suite Judy Blue Eyes, Crosby, Stills & Nash (Wooden Ships)
11. Neil Young, Harvest
12. Hey Joe, Jimi Hendrix
13. How Long Has This Been Going On, Audrey Hepburn, Funny Face
14. Good Shepherd, Jefferson Airplane
15. You’re Still My Woman, B.B. King
16. For A Dancer, Jackson Browne
17. New Morning, Bob Dylan
18. Take Me to the River, Talking Heads,
Stop Making Sense
19. Angel From Montgomery, Bonnie Raitt
20. Father and Son, Cat Stevens
21. Minor Swing, Django Reinhardt
22. Where to Now St. Peter, Elton John
23. Colors/Dance, George Winston
24. The Dark End of the Street, James Carr
25. Come On, Let’s Go, Ritchie Valens
26. Tupelo Honey, Van Morrison
27. Judy Garland, Over the Rainbow, Live
From: Steve Jobs
To: Steve Jobs
Subject: Celebrity Playlist–writeup
Date: December 27, 2003, 4:58 p.m.
For a Dancer
I first heard this on my car radio while driving down Highway 280, and I started crying. I had not listened to much Jackson Browne at that time, and was just blown away by the lyrics. I have since listened to many more of his songs, but this one is still my favorite.
Little Green
This is an autobiographical song by Joni Mitchell about giving a daughter up for adoption. Maybe it’s because I’m adopted, but this song moves me like few others. After I realized what this song was about, I cry every time I hear it. She wrote it when she was young, and it remains one of the best of her many great songs.
I Get A Kick Out of You
From Ella’s incomparable Cole Porter Songbook album.
All I Have to Do is Dream
This song was a hit when I was very young, and I remember listening to it as my parents listened to it, which brings back great memories. It was a transition period from the 50s to the 60s — Buddy Holly was dead, the Beatles hadn’t arrived yet, and groups like The Everly Brothers filled the gap nicely.
“This is what it feels like to be living in—and creating—a Golden Age.”
Steve sent himself notes to prepare for a talk on Pixar.
From: Steve Jobs
To: Steve Jobs
Subject: Re: Golden Age
Date: May 3, 2003, 5:08 p.m.
Websters Dictionary states that the term Golden Age dates from 1555 and means: a period of great happiness, prosperity, and achievement.
Pixar is in a Golden Age. With our soon-to-be-released Finding Nemo, we have completed 5 computer animated feature films, with three more in some stage of production. All original Pixar stories. Our track record of 4 for 4, and hopefully 5 for 5, is unparalleled in the history of animation, and indeed in the history of film.
Our real Golden Age is being fueled by the maturing of our people. I have seen Pete, Andrew and Lee grow into the second generation of Pixar Directors, all with the experience of leading the creation of a feature film under their belts. I have seen Darla and Graham grow into our industry’s best producers, producing our films with greater and greater mastery. I have seen Rob Cook and his R&D team ushering in a new, second golden age of amazing new Pixar science and technology. And I see more directors and producers coming right behind them. In every aspect of our studio, I see the kind of sprouting that signals Springtime—and I think the world, which is already amazed at what we have done so far, is going to be even more amazed at what’s in store for them in the coming years.
Tonight is a night for celebration, but don’t forget to pause for a moment and realize that this is what it feels like to be living in—and creating—a Golden Age. And, 25 years from now, when a kid—maybe even your grandkid—asks you what it was like to be at Pixar during its Golden Age, you’ll know—if you can only find the words to describe it.
“I think I got lucky and had the chutzpah to call these guys up.”
On May 24, 2003, Steve spoke with Leslie Berlin about his mentor Robert Noyce. Noyce co-invented the microchip and co-founded Intel and Fairchild Semiconductor, the first successful silicon microchip company in Silicon Valley.
Leslie Berlin: Why’d you decide to join the Grinnell College board?
Steve Jobs: Bob asked me to do it. I went to a small liberal arts college. Six months officially, and for two years I was kind of a drop-in. And so I’ve always had a soft spot for private liberal arts colleges. You really only find them in America, and they’re a very wonderful thing.
It was a fun experience. And the funnest part was just traveling down with Bob. We almost died together; I don’t know if you know about this.
LB: No.
SJ: Well, Bob’s a pilot, as you know. He flew all kinds of planes. He bought a Seabee. Have you heard about that?
LB: I’ve heard that he had this plane.
SJ: It was a Seabee. And a Seabee was a World War II plane. They stopped making them probably at the end of the forties. And there were like a hundred of them left. It was a plane whose fuselage was in the shape of the hull of a boat. Its wings were on top; and it could land on a runway or in the water.
He bought one. He had just gotten it, and he called me up and said, “Hey, there’s a Seabee fly-in up at Trinity Lake. […] Do you want to go?” I said, “Sure. Let’s go.” So, we get in the Seabee plane […] and we land in Lake Shasta. We got out and went for a swim, and it was really great. Really great. So we take off again, and it’s getting kind of hot. Bob pulls a lever that he thinks is the air ventilation. But he pulls the wrong lever. He pulled the lever that locks the wheels.
We get to Trinity Lake, and he’s landing on the runway […] and we hit the tarmac. The wheels on the wings, of course, are locked, so the plane immediately lunges forward. Sparks start flying. We very nearly flipped the plane over. It was only due to his excellent piloting that we survived.
And I was imagining, as this was all happening, the headlines: “Bob Noyce and Steve Jobs Killed in Fiery Plane Crash.” I think it was pretty close. ✂
SJ: I was young. I was in my late twenties. And Bob was—gosh, he must have been in his later forties.
LB: He was born in ’27.
SJ: Yeah, and I was born in ’55. So almost thirty years. Yeah, so, he was in his—well, Jesus—in his early fifties. And now that I’m approaching fifty, it’s easy to see how people in their fifties know more than people in their twenties.
He just kind of tried to give me the lay of the land and tried to give me a perspective that I could only partially understand.
I think he was interested in what someone in their twenties thought too. And he was fascinated by the personal computer. The personal computer and Intel had nothing to do with each other at that time. So he was fascinated by that stuff. That was it. So we just, we just became buddies.
LB: Do you recall any specific conversations or any situations where you were thinking one thing and he was suggesting otherwise, and you did or didn’t listen?
SJ: The things I remember are not the business things. It’s actually more personal stuff. I remember him trying to teach me how to ski better. I remember when I got fired from Apple, he was one of the first people to call me.
He just had a lot of soul. And I think he was the soul of Intel. Gordon [Moore] and Andy [Grove] are fantastic, but I think Bob, Bob was the soul of that place. ✂
LB: One of my favorite quotes from him is where he says that optimism is the essential ingredient for innovation.
SJ: Well, it’s optimism and passion, because it’s really hard. And if you don’t really, really care about what you’re doing, you’re gonna give up if you’re a sane person—because it’s just super hard. I’m sure it was extremely hard for him at times. ✂
SJ: When you get into your fifties—I’m forty-eight, I’m kind of there, pretty much—you’re not grabbing the pencil out of the twenty-five-year-old’s hand to do it better than they are. If you’re smart, you’re hiring twenty-five-year-olds who are smarter than you. You know things that they don’t know, and they know things that you don’t know, and it all works.
It shouldn’t have been Bob that was designing the breakthrough chips, and if it was, then he ain’t running the company. His job was to, number one, recruit; number two, set an overall direction; and number three, you know, inspire and cajole and persuade. And if that’s what he’s known for, that means he’s doing the job. He had his day when he was the young hotshot, and he came through. But that wasn’t the job. ✂
SJ: I called up him and Andy and a few other people, Jerry Sanders [the founder of microchip company AMD]. I just called them up and I said, “Look, I’m young and I’m trying to run with this company. I’m just wondering if I could buy you lunch once a quarter and pick your brain.”
And everybody I ever asked said yes. It was nice. Bob said yes. Andy Grove said yes; that was how I met Andy. Jerry Sanders said yes. It was pretty wonderful. I was very, very lucky, because I got to meet and get to know a little bit of Hewlett and Packard, too.
I sort of feel like that second era of the Valley, the semiconductor companies kind of leading into the early computer companies—I got to smell that, and I always held that very near and dear. And Bob was sort of why.
LB: Do you think this sort of generational link you’re describing here, in terms of your own relationship with Bob and, to a lesser extent, your relationship with Hewlett and Packard—do you think it’s a feature of the valley, or do you think you just got lucky and had the chutzpah to call these guys up?
SJ: Well, I think I got lucky and had the chutzpah to call these guys up. However, there are other people who have chutzpah to call people up too. The Google guys called me up, so I had lunch with them. And so I think it still happens a little. I don’t think it ever happened a lot, and I don’t think it happens a lot now. But I think it still happens—it happened a little, and it still happens a little. Maybe most people aren’t interested. They have their own things to worry about. ✂
SJ: I think there’s a tradition here [in Silicon Valley]. And that doesn’t mean that it’s a well-worn groove that you drop into. It’s not that easy. But there’s role models, and there’s legends, and there’s all sort of folklore—the kind of thing that makes a culture. And many people don’t spend the time to learn about it, which is fine. But some people find themselves in it, and slowly start to absorb it and get curious as to what came before them.
LB: And when you think of Bob giving you the lay of the land, is it along these sorts of lines, in some sense?
SJ: Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s sort of like … you know your olfactory sense is your most poignant sense in terms of its connection to your memory? You can smell something, in your thirties, and it’ll take you right back to when you were seven years old. The gift that Bob gave me was that connection and sense of smell, that strong connection back to some wonderful era of this valley that I lived in but [only] through him got a very strong sense of what it was.
It’s hard to explain. But if you could sort of transmit—when you smell that smell, and it takes you back to when you were seven—if you could give that to somebody else, that was kind of what he was able to give to me. And I don’t know how it happens, but you know it. And I was curious.
LB: Why does that sense of connection matter? Why is it so important to you?
SJ: There’s a human drama to most everything. You look at it sometimes, and it seems dry as history. But if you peel the onion, there’s humanity underneath.
Just to understand what’s going on now—you can’t really do that unless you understand how it got here. There’s a great quote by Schopenhauer. It’s a great quote. I should pull this up. I’ll get it all wrong. I’ve got to go up and get it.
[Goes upstairs, grabs Schopenhauer’s On the Suffering of the World, and then reads from it on the stairs.] “He who lives to see two or three generations is like a man who sits some time in the conjurer’s booth at a fair and witnesses the performance twice or thrice in succession. The tricks were meant to be seen only once; and when they are no longer a novelty and cease to deceive, their effect is gone.” ✂
SJ: The other thing I admired about Bob was that he gave up the CEO job at Intel. You know, he really did give it up. He wasn’t trying to run it from a back room.
He understood how important it was to have a succession, to keep the company going, not have it just be a one-man show.
“You never know what’s around the next corner.”
On May 29, 2003, Steve gave a talk to MBA students about his experience as CEO of Pixar and Apple. Two years later, he would deliver his seminal Stanford commencement address on the same campus.
Pixar is a very different kind of company than Apple. Apple is a company that has new products every few weeks. It’s a company where you make ten important decisions a day, but if some of them are wrong, most of them are not terribly hard to correct a few months down the road.
Pixar is a company that has one new product a year, at best. That’s the holy grail for us: to have a movie a year, and we are just about there. As CEO, you make a few important decisions a quarter—maybe three—but they are very hard to change if you decide you want to change them.
So, they are very, very different sides of the spectrum. However, you can look at Apple and say Apple is the most creative of the technology companies, and you can look at Pixar and say Pixar is by far the most technical of the creative companies, and in that sense, maybe they are striving for some ideal in the middle, coming from different ends of the spectrum. ✂
If we [Apple] come up with a dozen innovations in a year, we can maybe advertise four or five of them. We can’t advertise more than that because, even if we had all the money in the world, the customer would get very confused with all these messages coming at them on TV. What do you do with the other half-dozen innovations you come up with? You know: six, seven, eight, nine, ten innovations? You have to communicate those with the customer at the point of sale. And it [the existing distribution channel] was not capable of that. So we decided to start our own. So that’s why we got into retail.
We did things a little differently. Our goal in retail was not just to sell to the 5 percent of people who own our products today; it was to go for the other 95. And we decided they would not drive ten miles to look at an Apple Store if they weren’t at all interested in buying our products.
We decided we had to ambush them. What that meant was that we had to go to high-traffic locations and put stores there. They [customers] didn’t have to take the risk of driving ten miles to find out they weren’t interested. They just had to take the risk of walking ten feet because they were walking by anyway, and they knew they could escape rapidly if it was something they hadn’t wanted. So we paid extra money for great locations and put them on great streets like University Avenue [in Palo Alto] and the A [-grade] malls across the country. And the real estate we’ve got is just A+. ✂
I learned this at Pixar: technology companies and content companies have absolutely no understanding of each other. None. It’s worse than you’d ever imagine. In Silicon Valley, most people think the creative process is a bunch of guys in their early thirties sitting on a couch, drinking beer, and thinking up jokes. Really. They really do.
And yet I’ve watched people at Pixar making these films, and they work as hard as I’ve seen anybody in a technology company ever work. The creative process is as disciplined as any engineering process I’ve ever seen in my life. And they’re as passionate about it as any technical person I’ve ever seen.
On the other hand, the content companies have no appreciation of the creative process in the technical companies. They think that technology is something that you write a check for and buy. That’s it. And they do not understand that there’s a wide, dynamic range of capability and elegance. They don’t understand the creativity in the process. So these are like ships passing in the night. ✂
The most important lesson I ever learned was that you have to hire people better than you are. […] In normal life, the difference in dynamic range from average to best is usually 30, 40, 50 percent. Twice as good: rarely. So the difference between an average meal in downtown Palo Alto tonight and the best one—maybe it’s two to one. Flight home, if you’re going home for the holidays: 50 percent difference. Rental cars, breakfast cereals. I don’t know, pick one.
But I saw that Woz [Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak]—one guy—having meetings in his head could run circles around two hundred engineers at Hewlett-Packard. That’s what I saw. And I thought, “Wow.” And I didn’t really understand it at first.
Then I started to understand it. It took me about ten years to actually try to put it into practice. Because you’d try to hire and find those people. And they’re really hard to find. And everyone says they are all prima donnas. But it turns out that when they work with each other, they’re not prima donnas. They really like it. The first time I tried to build that organization—that was the Mac team. And it really worked. I saw a team of fifty people do something that literally hundreds, or thousands, of people at other companies couldn’t do. And so I’ve since then always tried to find really great people who love what they are doing and are extremely good at it. And sometimes they have experience, and sometimes they’re really young. They’re diamonds in the rough—and you hire them and take chances on them. But that’s been the most important lesson I’ve learned in business: that the dynamic range of people dramatically exceeds things you encounter in the rest of our normal lives—and to try to find those really great people who really love what they do. ✂
I was basically fired from Apple. And that was really hard. So I’m sure I learned a lot from that. [Audience laughs.] I did. I did learn a lot from that. And as a matter of fact, there would have been no Pixar if that hadn’t happened. Life’s funny in this way. Sometimes your greatest strengths are your greatest weaknesses. Sometimes your greatest adversities, you learn the most from. I don’t know.
But there wouldn’t be a Pixar if it hadn’t been for that. But life is funny, you know? I never would have thought I’d end up back at Apple, but here I am. So it’s a circus world, and you never know what’s around the next corner.
People say you learn more from failures than you do from successes, and that’s probably true. And I’ve made more mistakes than most people I know. But getting older does that [helps you grow] too. You get married. You know, you have a family. And your perspective starts to change on things.
When I was young, if I had to fire somebody, I didn’t think—to be honest, I didn’t think twice about it. When you get a little older, and maybe you have kids, you realize that the person you have to fire—even if they totally screwed up, they should be fired, you should have fired them months ago, anyone else would have fired them last year—even so, you realize that that person is going to have to go home to their wife and their children and tell them they got fired today and that they don’t have a job anymore. You realize that.
So part of it is nothing that you do yourself, no accomplishments you achieve. It’s just the process of getting older and kicked around, and maybe a little wiser in the process. That’s, more than anything, probably what it is. ✂
[When I returned to Apple in 1997,] the individual contributors were phenomenal. And I asked a lot of these guys, “Why did you stay?” And they said, “Because we bleed six colors.” I heard that from a lot of people—there were six colors in the old Apple logo. It was management that was a problem. So we actually got rid of most of the management team and promoted a lot of these young people into management positions.
And what I found is that nobody in their right mind wants to be a manager. [Audience laughs.] It’s true. It’s a lot of work, and you don’t get to do the fun stuff. But the only good reason to be a manager is so some other bozo doesn’t be the manager—and ruin the group you care about.
Really. And if you’ve lived through a bad situation where you’ve had bad management, you’ll do anything to not have your group destroyed by that again. And you will even step up and be the manager yourself, even though you don’t want to do that.
And I talked a few hundred people into doing that. And 90, over 90 percent of them have turned into extraordinary managers. Extraordinary. So that’s what saved Apple, those people right there. And it’s been one of the great experiences of my life to have the privilege of working with them. ✂
There’s a lot of management techniques. I’m sure you study a lot of management techniques. When I was younger, it was management by objective. It’s all a crock. They’re all after-the-fact management techniques: “You’ve failed, and I know that because we are going out of business tomorrow.” All after the fact. “You’ve ruined this department; all the good people have left. So now I’m firing you.” “You’ve accomplished none of your objectives.” It doesn’t work.
And a really smart guy I met a long time ago who used to teach at Disney University—Walt Disney recruited him to run Disney University, actually—he told me about his point of view, which I’ve remembered to this day. He called it management by values. What that means is you find people that want the same things you want, and then just get the hell out of their way.
The way I describe it is, let’s say we’re all going to take a trip together. The first thing is to figure out where we all want to go. The worst thing is if we all decide we want to go to different places. You can never manage it. [Pointing] You want to go to New Orleans. You want to go somewhere else. I want to go to San Francisco. You want to go to San Diego.
It doesn’t work. Right?
But if we all want to go to San Diego, that’s the key. Then we can argue about how to get there. [Pointing] You think it’s better to walk. You think it’s better to take a plane. You think it’s better to take a train. We’ll figure that [part] out. Because if I say, “I want to take a train to San Diego,” and somebody goes, “That’s really stupid! It will take three days! We can fly and be there in an hour,” I’ll go, “Oh. OK.” Because, actually, I want to go to San Diego. So if I can get there in an hour [flying], I’ll ditch my idea about the train.
That’s what management by values is. It’s finding people with passion that want to go to San Diego—who want to go to the same place you want to go to! Right? That’s the key.
And so, what happened at Apple was that Apple’s goals used to be to make the best personal computers in the world. And then the second goal was to make a profit so we could keep on doing number one. Right?
What happened was that, for a time, those got reversed: “We want to make a bunch of money, and so, OK, to do that, we’re going to have to make some good personal computers.” But it didn’t work. It never works. And so things start to fall apart.
Those subtle changes in values can mean everything. The higher up in the organization they are, the more pervasive influence they have. So if you want to preserve something, what you want to do is have a good enough place to go, that’s got a long enough focal length that it will survive over time, that everybody agrees on—and not codify how you’re going to get there. So that each generation can argue anew about the best way to get to San Diego, and they’re not just taking your footsteps on how you got there. You see what I’m saying? But all the people want to go to the same place.
And that’s one of my mantras around Apple and Pixar: that recruiting is the most important thing that you do. Finding the right people—that’s half the battle.
Well, thank you guys for the chance to be with you. I appreciate it very much.