Quotes About Leadership

I'll always remember Apple like any man remembers the first woman he's fallen in love with." But he was also willing to fight with its management if need be. "When someone calls you a thief in public, you have to respond." Apple's

inevitable call from him saying, "This hotel sucks, let's go." But Ive also captured the scattershot brilliance at the core of Jobs's genius when he described his boss tossing out ideas at a meeting. "Sometimes they were dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But

By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things

I came to work with Steve for a week," Lin recalled.

veteran colleagues at Apple used to call his "reality distortion field." Sometimes it was the inadvertent misfiring of memory

Jobs did indeed make the Macintosh into a low-cost competitor to the Lisa, one with incompatible software. Making matters worse was that neither machine was compatible with the Apple II. With no one in overall charge at Apple, there was no chance of keeping Jobs in harness.

Every time I'd design something great, Steve would find a way to make money for us," said Wozniak.

There should be an honored place in history for statesmen whose ideas turned out to be right.

The open sniping between Jobs and Eisner began in the summer of 2002

the Mac is dead, what's going to replace it?" Amelio asked. Jobs's reply didn't impress him. "Steve didn't seem to have a clear answer," Amelio later said. "He seemed to have a set of one-liners.

Grove's mantra was "Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive." Noyce and Moore may not have been paranoid, but they were never complacent.

Twiggy being made. More than half were rejected. Jobs erupted. With his face flushed, he began shouting and sputtering about firing everyone who worked there. Bob Belleville, the head of the Mac engineering team, gently

Walter Isaacson

So Jobs and his team became excited about the prospect of building a phone that they would want to use. "That's the best motivator of all," Jobs later said.

He had launched his "Think Different" campaign, featuring iconic photos of some of the same people we were considering, and he found the endeavor of assessing historic influence fascinating.

For the rest of his career, Jobs would understand the needs and desires of customers better than any other business leader, he would focus on a handful of core products, and he would care, sometimes obsessively, about marketing and image and even the details of packaging.

think they can change the world are the ones who do. —Apple's "Think

To succeed at any ambitious project, you had to assess all of the intricate ramifications of an action, weigh probabilities, share information, organize people, and more.

Even thirty years later, reflecting back on the competition, Jobs cast it as a holy crusade: "IBM was essentially Microsoft at its worst. They were not a force for innovation; they were a force for evil. They were like ATT or Microsoft or Google is." Unfortunately

Some leaders push innovations by being good at the big picture. Others do so by mastering details. Jobs did both, relentlessly.

The best thing ever to happen to Steve is when we fired him, told him to get lost

the best semiconductor engineers in the country

V—the story of a willful and immature prince who becomes a passionate but sensitive, callous but sentimental, inspiring but flawed king—begins

Walter Isaacson