Steve Jobs on Apple's Turnaround: Focus, culture, and product

well as you you may know i was basically fired from apple when i was 30 and uh and and was invited to come back 12 years later so so that was that was a difficult when it happened but maybe the best thing that ever happened to me there wouldn't be a pixar if that hadn't happened and uh so you know you just you move on life goes on and you learn from it you were fired from apple when you were 30. asked to come back when you were what 42 did you think that moment how sweet it is no i i thought at that moment um what uh you know what a circle of life you know life is is just always mysterious and surprising and you never know what's around the next corner so you know i think all of us all of us need to be on guard against arrogance which uh which knocks at the door whenever you're successful have you lived through that oh sure for sure i'm working pretty hard and uh so there are a lot of people but i'm one of them my car is there pretty early and it's in the parking lot pretty late and on weekends so um and i value my family time a lot so i i'm pretty committed to this uh and seeing apple turn around the company i mean i started the company with steve wozniak in my parents garage you know 20 years ago and over 22 years ago

and so there's a definite place in my heart for this i'm drawing a salary of i think a dollar per year so i hope i'm not burdening the shareholders too much and and i'm i very much want to see apple get turned around and i think it's gonna so i i don't know how much more committed i could be if people need these symbols well maybe that'll happen i don't know but but um you know my answer to them is i don't know how i could be working any harder and i don't feel my job is to win a popularity contest right now you know i feel my job is to help the team at apple do the right things to turn this company around so that it can really prosper again and and i think that's going to happen and if if some you know some people i mean the markets we're talking markets now that are so large that there's you know someone or some group of people that aren't going to like just about anything we do but my job is not to win a popularity contest well i think it's what apple stands for you know it's it's a very rare thing in this world when a company can really bring sort of the right and the left brain together and say we're about doing you know the right things to make money in a successful business but we also have the passion and the creativity and the inventiveness to push this industry forward and to work with our customers to take these tools in in ways they've never been before to help them go change the world and apple has a history a track record of doing just that and i think that that's that's got a place in people's hearts and i think apple still has a lot of that and we're going to get rid of a lot of the bramble and the brush around that so that can shine again no i think apple has delivered some pretty good stuff i think apple's going to get back to

delivering some great stuff we don't predict our financials yeah i think that there's a lot of things changing at apple right now and some are going to show up in the financials positively some are going to show up in the financials negatively and i think that we're going to get to a new trend but that new trend will not become evident for another quarter or so so i really don't think it helps to predict right now i think we have a very clear target on where we're going in that regards and we think profitability is very very important what i said was that we examined the future product roadmap not the products that are shipping today the future ones that we were working on and what we found was that 30 of them were incredibly good and about 70 percent of them were either pretty good or things that we didn't really need to be doing businesses we really didn't need to be in and so we've paired a lot of that back so we could focus the same amount of original resource even more on what was remaining and adds a few new things in so the resources that we're investing are equal or greater than we have been but it's on fewer things so we're going to do a better job at them i think there are not going to be any corporate massive layoffs what we're doing is we have a i think a pretty clear direction now and each group uh is looking at the work plans to do what they need to do to to to accomplish the the pieces of that that they have to do and we are reorganizing some things a little bit differently combining things in a few different ways and in some cases when the music stops there'll be some people that don't have a chair but that'll be on a department-by-department basis it'll be you know a fairly low-key thing we're not talking about any massive layoffs somebody taught me a long time ago a

very valuable lesson which is if you do the right things on the top line the bottom line will follow and what they meant by that was if you get the right strategy if you have the right people and if you have the right culture culture at your company you'll do the right products you'll do the right marketing you'll do the right things logistically and in manufacturing and distribution and if you do all those things right the bottom line will follow so yes we have obviously plans about where we'd like to see the bottom line but we are focusing most of our energy not on financial re-engineering because that's not what's been been troubled at apple we're focusing our energy on the right product strategies the right market strategies the right communication strategies the right logistics and distribution strategies and we the team is making i i think very strong strides in these areas and you'll start to see some of this stuff appear you know in the next 90 120 days so i'm actually really happy about this you know think different is easy to say i mean it's just two words it's easy to say but much harder to do but it's a company of ten thousand people how do you permeate the message throughout all the employees what do you say to them well you permeate it by um example ultimately and in other words when something's not quite good enough do you stop and make it better or do you just ship it you know and everybody watches when you to see how the senior management makes those decisions and what we've tried to do is stop and make it great before we ship it we have problems stop and fix them

and and by example uh uh you can say anything you want but everybody watches very carefully when you're in a difficult situation what decisions you make what values you have how do you see yourself 10 years from now you know my my headlights are not that good i don't know i don't really think about it you know i think about a year two three down the road we have some projects at apple that are sort of maybe four years down the road five years well probably like three or four at the most because things change too much you can be going down a path you say well in five years i want to be here but then something new happens and you you say forget that i want to be over there so most of this five-year planning that i've seen in my life um some of it's essential but most of it uh changes too quickly so we tend to look three four years it's about as far ahead as we can see we see at apple one of the things we've always felt is that we want to stand at the intersection of of technology and humanities we want to bring the humanist element into these tools and not have them just serve our intellectual side but have them serve some other sides of of us as well and so that's that's i think what we do particularly well you know the whole computer industry wants to forget about the humanist side right and just focus on the technology and a lot of our industry focuses just on more is better more megahertz and megabytes and you know speeds and feeds we call it but we think there's a whole other side of the coin which is what do you do with these things can we do more than just spreadsheets

and word processors can we help you express yourself in richer ways in your music in your movies in your photography and these kinds of things that people want to do