Adam Lashinsky > Quotes

“You either did or you didn't - there is no try. - Steve Jobs.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple -- From Steve Jobs Down to the Janitor: How America's Most Successful—and Most Secretive—Big Company Really Works

“I don't know anyone who wouldn't say it's the most fulfilling experience in their lives. People love it. Which is different from saying they have fun. Fun comes and goes. - Steve Jobs”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“Saying no is a core tenet of Apple product development and, for that matter, Apple’s approach to doing business. In fact, the ability to say no—to reject features, products, categories, market segments, deals, and even certain partners—is how Steve Jobs explained Apple’s core strengths. “Focusing is powerful,” he said. “A start-up’s focus is very clear. Focus is not saying yes. It is saying no to really great ideas.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“Apple's approach to career development is yet another way it runs contrary to the norms at other companies. The prevalent attitude for workers in the corporate world is to consider their growth trajectory. What's my path up? How do I get to the next level? Companies, in turn, spend an inordinate amount of time and money grooming their people for new responsibilities. They labor to find just the right place for people. But what if it turns out all that thinking is wrong? What if companies encouraged employees to be satisfied where they are because they're good at what they do, not to mention because that might be what's best for shareholders?

Instead of employees fretting that they were stuck in terminal jobs, what if they exalted in having found their perfect jobs? A certain amount of office politics might evaporate in a corporate culture where career growth is not considered tantamount to professional fulfilment. Shareholders, after all, don't care about fiefdoms and egos. There are many professionals who would find it liberating to work at what they are good at, receive competitive killer compensation, and not have to worry about supervising others or jockeying for higher rungs on an org chart.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“it is the intimate interaction between the operating system and the hardware that allows us to do that.” Jobs was speaking at a conceptual level. A former Apple engineer broke it down to the nitty-gritty: “Apple is all about integration. The way to get true integration is to control everything from the operating system down to what kind of saw you are going to use on the glass.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“Apple doesn’t own the saw, and it doesn’t own the company that owns the saw. It also doesn’t staff the factory where the saw will be used. But it absolutely has an opinion as to which saw its supplier will use. It’s a new form of vertical integration. Where once a manufacturer would own every step of the process, Apple now controls each step without owning any of it.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“Apple’s marketing and communications team works in a building just across from 1 Infinite Loop called M-3, the M standing for “Mariani Avenue”, not for marketing. When the marketers walk through the front door and then two consecutive secured doors, they walk around a light blue wall to get to their desks. On the wall is painted a prominent message in large whitish silver letters. It reads: SIMPLIFY, SIMPLIFY, SIMPLIFY. A broad line is drawn through the first two SIMPLIFYs.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“The reason they didn’t discuss expenses is almost certainly because their bosses didn’t, either. Jobs held that authority himself and monitored it solely through his CFO.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“The ‘Innovator’s Dilemma’ doesn’t exist at Apple,” he said, referring to Clay Christensen’s popular book about how big companies fail to anticipate the next wave because they are unwilling to sacrifice existing sales.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“The hallmarks of the Apple product message are, as with so much at Apple, simplicity and clarity. Throughout its history, Apple has unveiled products and features that either didn’t previously exist in the industry or represented meaningful leaps forward. The simple design and capabilities of the first iPod and the groundbreaking multitouch expand-and-contract feature on the iPhone are two noteworthy examples.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“Consistency of message helps build customer loyalty. Clear messaging can also have a huge impact on the bottom line. “If there’s one thing that I take away today, and I still use time and time again, it’s that the best messaging is clear, concise, and repeated,” reflected Borchers, who became a venture capitalist with the Silicon Valley firm Opus Capital after leaving Apple.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“Managers at all levels of Apple said they rarely were pressed for any kind of financial analysis or to defend decisions based on potential return on investment.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“PC makers put crapware on their computers—antivirus software, subscription offers, and so on—precisely because the revenue is lucrative. Apple forgoes such opportunities time and again, convinced that high-quality products will ultimately generate more profits. It’s a classic long-term approach.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“Once things really picked up, a virtuous halo effect took hold: Heavy promotions of iPods brought people into retail stores, where customers were exposed to Macs. iPod advertising indirectly drove the sales of computers—even if Apple wasn’t currently pumping huge ad dollars into the category.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“Put these corporate attributes together—clear direction, individual accountability, a sense of urgency, constant feedback, clarity of mission—and you begin to have a sense of Apple’s values. Values may be a squishy topic in the corporate world, a term that’s interchangeable with culture or core beliefs.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“Companies, as they grow to become multi-billion-dollar entities, somehow lose their vision,” he told Playboy in 1985. “They insert lots of layers of middle management between the people running the company and the people doing the work. They no longer have an inherent feel or passion about the products. The creative people, who are the ones who care passionately, have to persuade five layers of management to do what they know is the right thing to do.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“The key, said Borchers, was highlighting exactly what made the iPhone stand out”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“In a company organized along functional rather than divisional lines, scouting must be a core competency of its leader. Steve Jobs long considered the issue of spotting and grooming talent to be one of the most important aspects of being an entrepreneur and a CEO.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“Buddhism—a faith Jobs studied intensely—teaches that if you are going to prepare a cup of tea, the making of the cup of tea should command all your attention; even this insignificant task should be completed with all the mastery you can bring to it.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“The trick with selling breakthrough products is to explain them clearly.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“Under Steve Jobs, only one executive “owned” a P&L, and that was the chief financial officer. By creating a system whereby only a financial executive would mind the budget, Jobs forced functional executives to focus on their strengths.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“The goal of the Apple stores was to appeal to non-Macintosh customers,”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“I think as long as humans don’t solve this human nature trait of sort of settling into a world-view after a while, there will always be opportunity for young companies; young people to innovate, as it should be.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“Logistics is in fact a key aspect of military planning, and Cook is responsible for Apple’s operational excellence. For example, when Apple knew it would move away from disk drives in its iPods and MacBook Air notebooks, it invested in billion-dollar forward purchases of flash memory. Cook’s supply-chain organization executed this masterstroke, which accomplished the trifecta of securing Apple’s supply, locking in the lowest price, and hobbling the competition’s access to components. Such back-of-the-shop excellence at a company known for its creative flair is a rare example of what researchers Charles O’Reilly of Stanford and Michael Tushman, a professor of organizational behavior at the Harvard Business School, refer to as “ambidexterity as a dynamic capability.” In other words, it reflects the ability of a top-performing company to be simultaneously efficient and innovative.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“The ethos at Apple was always about its uniqueness, and attention to detail is part of that ethos.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“You’re going to do twenty briefings, and they’ll all sound exactly the same to you. But that’s what you want, because the person who is hearing it is hearing it for the first time. And where you get into trouble is where you start to mix it up because you’re getting bored. So one of the key things was: Just use the same words over and over and over again. That will turn into the same words that the consumer hears, which ultimately will turn into the same words that they then use to define the product to their friends.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“Steve’s talked about the goal of Apple, and the goal of Apple is not to make money but to make really nice products, really great products,”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“The reason you have committees is that you have divided responsibilities,” Jobs said. “We don’t. At Apple you can figure out exactly who is responsible.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“Speaking of Jobs, Moritz writes: “He was unwilling to let product planning become burdened with analysis, focus groups, decision trees, the shifts of the bell curve, or any of the painful drudgery he associated with large companies. He found Apple’s prototype customer in the mirror and the company came to develop computers that Jobs, at one time or another, decided he would like to own.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“large companies do not usually have efficient communication paths from the people closest to some of these changes at the bottom of the company to the top of the company which are the people making the big decisions … Even in the case where part of the company does the right thing at the lower levels, usually the upper levels screw it up somehow.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple