18 Innovation Lessons From Steve Jobs

Apple, Inc. continues to set the standard for what a personal computer can be and do. There’s a lot you can learn from Steve Jobs and his innovative leadership style. Jobs’ history in business has contributed much to the symbolic image of the innovative Silicon Valley entrepreneur, emphasizing the importance of design and understanding the important role aesthetics play in public appeal. Steve Jobs has resigned as Apple’s CEO.

These are some of Steve Jobs‘ principles and quotes on business and leadership you can learn from:

1. There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. ‘I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.’ And we’ve always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very very beginning. And we always will.
2. But good PR educates people. That’s all it is. You can’t con people in this business. The products speak for themselves.
3. We’ve had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren’t going to lay off people, that we’d taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place — the last thing we were going to do is lay them off.
4. I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.
5. Much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.
6. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers.
7. I thought deeply about this. I ended up concluding that the worst thing that could possibly happen as we get big and as we get a little more influence in the world is if we change our core values and start letting it slide, I can’t do that. I’d rather quit.
8. Innovation requires a team and you cannot inspire evangelists unless you offer a compelling vision….
9. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.
10. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully
11. It comes down to the very real fact that most customers don’t know what they want in a new product.
12. We figure out what we want. You can’t go out and ask people ‘what’s the next big thing?
13. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.
14. My job is to make the whole executive team good enough to be successors, so that’s what I try to do.
15. The secret to innovation comes from “Saying no to 1,000 things.”
16. Design is not just what it looks like and feels like, design is how it works.
17. Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
18. My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to make them better.