The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay.
Interpretation
Great leaders empower their teams by removing obstacles and providing support.
In this quote, Steve Jobs emphasizes the crucial role of leadership in enabling a team's success. He suggests that it is the people who actively contribute to the work who drive progress, and it is the leader's responsibility to create a conducive environment by minimizing distractions and interference from the larger organization. Effective leadership is about supporting and facilitating the efforts of passionate individuals, allowing their creativity and productivity to flourish.
In practice
In a business meeting, to inspire your team about the importance of leadership and teamwork.
Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.
It is piracy, not overt online music stores, which is our main competitor.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.
For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?' And whenever the answer has been 'No' for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.
Trying to build a team over the course of the winter to put on the field is really just half the job. Because if your best players go down, it's not so much him going down as who you replace him with, which ultimately might have the biggest impact on how you end up finishing. So you want to have both a belt and suspenders for support.
One of the great difficulties as you rise up through an organisation is that your prior competencies are exploded and broken apart by the territory you've been promoted into: the field of human identity.
We treat employees as a member of the family. If management take the risk of hiring them, we have to take the responsibility for them.
It is a luxury to put our interests first. It is an honor to put the interests of others before our own.
I make my battle plans from the spirit of my sleeping soldiers
For organizations seriously committed to making teamwork a cultural reality, I'm convinced that 'the right people' are the ones who have three virtues in common - humility, hunger, and people smarts.
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