Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc

Stanford Report, June 14, 2005

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, 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.

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. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Innovation of rapid Innovation

The New, Faster Face of Innovation

Thanks to technology, change has never been so easy—or so cheap

• 
  

By ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON And MICHAEL SCHRAGE

Call it innovation on steroids. Or innovation at warp speed. Or just the innovation of rapid innovation.

The Journal Report

See the complete Business Insight report.

But the essential point remains: Technology is transforming innovation at its core, allowing companies to test new ideas at speeds—and prices—that were unimaginable even a decade ago. They can stick features on Web sites and tell within hours how customers respond. They can see results from in-store promotions, or efforts to boost process productivity, almost as quickly.

The result? Innovation initiatives that used to take months and megabucks to coordinate and launch can often be started in seconds for cents.

And that makes innovation, the lifeblood of growth, more efficient and cheaper. Companies are able to get a much better idea of how their customers behave and what they want. This gives new offerings and marketing efforts a better shot at success.

Harry Campbell

Companies will also be willing to try new things, because the price of failure is so much lower. That will bring big changes for corporate culture—making it easier to challenge accepted wisdom, for instance, and forcing managers to give more employees a say in the innovation process.

There will be even better payoffs for customers: Their likes and dislikes will have much more impact on companies' decisions. In globally competitive markets, they will ultimately end up getting products and services better tailored to their needs.

Already, this powerful new capability is changing the way some of the biggest companies in the world do business, inspiring new strategies and revolutionizing the research-and-development process.

"In the U.S., we do the vast majority of our concept testing online, which has created truly substantial savings in money and time," says Joan Lewis, global consumer and market knowledge officer at Procter & Gamble Co.

What does all of this experimentation look like in practice?

Consider Google Inc., which runs 50 to 200 search experiments at any given time. In one case, Google asked selected users how many search results they would like to see on a single screen. More, said the users, many more. So Google ran an experiment that tripled the number of search results per screen to 30. The company found that traffic declined.

What happened? On average it took about a third of a second longer for search results to appear—a seemingly insignificant delay that nonetheless upset many of the users. The greater number of results also made it more likely that a user would click on a page that did not have the information he or she was seeking.

In an environment where experimentation is this quick and efficient, many traditional practices make less economic sense. For instance, current research-and-development efforts are often driven by considerations that the company's technicians think are important but customers really don't care about. Mobile-phone companies, for one, had a reputation for piling on features that added more cost and complexity than value.

But it's not just Web-based companies that are taking advantage of technology to run crucial experiments.

Even retailers—who might seem to have tremendous logistical challenges implementing rapid experiments across lots of stores—can tap this new approach, thanks to the rise of sophisticated tracking systems that make measuring customer behavior more agile and less expensive.

These systems—which track everything from purchases at the cash register to how products move through the supply chain—allow stores to cheaply collect terabytes of data on their customer interactions, the performance of products in the field, employee productivity and other factors. Traditionally, companies have simply rooted through all of that data to look for patterns and trends; they've mined their data. But some retailers are beginning to realize that they can get much better results by using their digital systems to run experiments.

Michael Schrage talks with the Journal’s Erin White about how managers can strike the right balance in giving employees guidance on innovation—avoiding being too restrictive on the one hand or allowing a free-for-all on the other.

Take Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which frequently runs comparative in-store experiments with signage, displays and shelf layouts to see what influences shopper decisions. Wal-Mart can test different arrangements in a number of stores for a week or so to see which approach boosts sales the most. If different sign colors or unusual merchandise juxtapositions increase—or depress—relative sales, the stores can quickly share the information and implement the same plan. That said, store managers also have the ability to make decisions at their store to meet individual customer needs.

Other companies, meanwhile, have blended digital technologies and conventional systems to test out ideas. For instance, Harrah's Entertainment Inc. uses advanced information systems to analyze data from its Total Reward Card and field experiments throughout its casino and hotel network.

The Speed of Change

• The Evolution: Technology is allowing companies to test new ideas at speeds—and prices—that were unimaginable even a decade ago.
• The Effect: Innovation, the lifeblood of growth, is growing more efficient and cheaper.
• What's Ahead: Innovative companies will shift away from traditional research-and-development methods. Managers will change the way they solicit ideas. And much, much more.

Gary Loveman, the chief executive who brought the experimentation mindset to 70-year-old Harrah's, quips, "There are two ways to get fired from Harrah's: stealing from the company, or failing to include a proper control group in your business experiment."

Where will all this lead? Experiments will become far more pervasive and persuasive as information technology improves and testing grows faster and cheaper. More companies—and more enterprising individuals who work in them—will recognize that experiments don't have to be time-consuming and expensive, and they will propose more tests that exploit those economies.

Increasingly, the more innovative companies—the Googles and Harrah's of tomorrow—will shift away from traditional research-and-development methods. Five years ago, for instance, a leadership team might have reviewed two or three "big" innovation proposals from consulting gurus; executive teams today might compare the outcomes of 50 or 60 real-world experiments to decide which ones to act upon.

For Further Reading

See these related articles from MIT Sloan Management Review.

• The Era of Open Innovation
  By Henry W. Chesbrough (Spring 2003)
  Companies are increasingly rethinking the fundamental ways in which they generate ideas and bring them to market—harnessing external ideas while leveraging their in-house R&D outside their current operations.
  http://sloanreview.mit.edu/x/4435
• Institutionalizing Innovation
  By Scott D. Anthony, Mark W. Johnson and Joseph V. Sinfield (Winter 2008)
  Building an engine that produces a steady stream of innovative growth businesses is difficult, but companies that are able to do it differentiate themselves from competitors.
  http://sloanreview.mit.edu/x/49216
• An Inside View of IBM's 'Innovation Jam'
  By Osvald M. Bjelland and Robert Chapman Wood (Fall 2008)
  IBM brought 150,000 employees and stakeholders together to help move its latest technologies to market. Both the difficulties it faced and the successes it achieved provide important lessons.
  http://sloanreview.mit.edu/x/50101
• The 12 Different Ways for Companies to Innovate
  By Mohanbir Sawhney, Robert C. Wolcott and Inigo Arroniz (Spring 2006)
  Companies with a restricted view of innovation can miss opportunities. A new framework called the "innovation radar" helps avoid that.
  http://sloanreview.mit.edu/x/47314
• Creating New Markets Through Service Innovation
  By Leonard L. Berry, Venkatesh Shankar, Janet Turner Parish, Susan Cadwallader and Thomas Dotzel (Winter 2006)
  Many companies make incremental improvements to their service offerings, but few succeed in creating service innovations that generate new markets or reshape existing ones.
  http://sloanreview.mit.edu/x/47213

All of which guarantees huge changes for corporate cultures. Challenging conventional wisdom, for one thing, becomes immeasurably faster, cheaper and easier. And there's a subtle shift in how people view innovation. People don't talk about running experiments months into the future—they're into immediacy, because they see that they can test ideas right away, and the company culture starts to actively encourage speed. A provocative hypothesis proposed during a morning meeting might graduate into a full-blown experiment by day's end.

Even if a test doesn't produce a workable idea, there's usually something important to be gleaned from it. "Genius is born from a thousand failures," says Greg Linden, an entrepreneur who has been an innovator at both Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. "In each failed test, you learn something that helps you find something that will work. Constant, continuous, ubiquitous experimentation is the most important thing."

This new environment also has big implications for managers. Simply put, bosses must be prepared to give up some control. With testing so cheap, easy and accessible, there's less need to ration it as they have in the past. Managers used to directing the company's innovation efforts must give their workers the freedom to come up with ideas on their own and pursue them without lots of red tape.

Some of the best experiments come from outside the chain of command. At Amazon, for instance, innovators initially developed the company's recommendations feature—which suggests other products customers might want—without explicit approval from higher-ups.

Not only do we expect managers to solicit and welcome more ideas from lower down in the ranks, we expect that lots more people will be invited to review experiments and make changes. Customer-service and maintenance people, say, might chime in on experiments proposed by manufacturing or distribution.

That might seem hard to believe, given the turf battles that can arise over new ideas. But when experiments become more abundant—and easy and inexpensive to change—those proprietary issues won't come up as much. Think of the difference between improving and sharing presentations back in the day of transparencies and 35mm slides versus PowerPoint presentations, which can be modified with a few clicks of a mouse.

Harry Campbell

As more people get involved in experimentation, companies will also need to change their focus in education and training efforts for innovation. Instead of just getting workers to creatively interpret large volumes of data, companies will need to help them develop the skills to rapidly design provocative experiments. Passive analysis will be subordinate to active experimentation.

Another crucial development down the road will be "scaling." Digital technology, as we have seen, allows companies to test new ideas quickly and easily. But the technology also lets companies easily scale those ideas—or implement them rapidly and cheaply throughout the whole business. We predict that as companies realize the power of this idea, they will focus on experiments that not only can be tested rapidly but also can be put into wide effect just as quickly.

The most obvious example of scaling is a Web site. Companies can test out a new feature with a quick bit of programming and see how users respond. The change can then be replicated on billions of customer screens.

But that kind of scaling becomes rapidly possible in the bricks-and-mortar world, too, as more business processes become digital—supply-chain management, customer-relationship management and so forth. When a retailer identifies a better process for screening new employees, the company can embed the process in its human-resource-management software and have thousands of locations implementing the new plan the next morning.

We think the future of innovation and the future of experimentation will continue to evolve, thanks to the improving economics of digital technologies. As a result, the next decade of innovation in the global marketplace will be even more tumultuous than the last. That's a great opportunity for innovators—and even better news for customers and consumers world-wide.

--Dr. Brynjolfsson is a professor of management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Mr. Schrage is a research fellow at the MIT Center for Digital Business. They can be reached at reports@wsj.com.

Leading Clever People, Forbes Aug 2009

Leadership

The Odd Clever People Every Organization Needs

Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, 08.13.09, 04:45 PM EDT

Here's how to identify them and lead them.

As we ponder how the Western economies can navigate their way out of the recession, we might easily make the harsh judgment that clever people got us into it and we'll need clever people to get us out of it. The investment banks at the heart of the current financial malaise were full of clever people. So what went wrong? Is it possible we didn't really understand how to lead them?

The truth is that organizations need a particular kind of clever employees--people with a propensity for innovation and even iconoclasm. People who happily tread on organizational sacred ground while seeking new ways to produce sustained economic growth. They can add disproportionate amounts of value, and they become more productive when they are well led. They are people like Will Wright of Electronic Arts ( ERTS - news - people ), the originator of "Sim City" and "Spore." They need teams--teams that have their own high-octane dynamics. To develop such teams, businesses must become clever organizations, magnets for these people who can sustain innovation over long periods.

How do we identify such people?The first and most obvious point to make is that they are not simply those with the highest IQs or most impressive academic qualifications (although many of them do meet those standards). Our conversations and observations have led us to develop a simple definition:

Clever people are highly talented individuals who have the potential to create disproportionate amounts of value from the resources that an organization makes available to them.

When we first set out to research these smart and powerful, yet often recalcitrant clever people, we thought they would be consultants, lawyers, investment bankers, research-and-development wizards and other similar smart professionals. Many of them were, but we also found value-creating brilliance in a huge variety of places--in schools, in hospitals, in fast-moving consumer-goods businesses, in breweries and not just in those institutions' R&D departments. Clever people can be schoolteachers, university and hospital administrators, museum curators. But as disparate as they are, they are all capable of creating huge amounts of value for organizations.

Many highly talented individuals are capable of producing remarkable results on their own, outside of any organization. Such standalone clever people include most famous artists and solo musicians. But those aren't the people we're talking about. We specifically mean talented individuals who need an organization to achieve their full potential. The brilliant engineers at Cisco ( CSCO - news - people ) need the organization and their colleagues as they seek to revolutionize the way we work, learn and play.

In the U.S., we know, being clever carries connotations of being ostentatiously smart and difficult. We prefer the English meaning, being skilled and talented, with the understanding that being smart usually comes with a few rough edges. The truth is that these people are both talented and difficult.

Why must they be difficult? Because they all share these qualities:

--They know their worth (their skills are not easily replicated).

--They ask difficult questions.

--They are organizationally savvy.

--They are not impressed by corporate hierarchy.

--They expect instant access to decision makers.

--They are well connected outside of their organizations.

--Their passion is for what they do, not for who they work for.

--Even if you lead them well, they won't thank you.

How do you spot the clevers who really make a positive difference? In recent years organizations have been obsessed with identifying talent. Most large organizations have singled out what are often called "talent pools" and "high potentials." We would sound a note of caution: Look more for past outcomes than for potential. Clever people develop track records of organizational success.

Once you have identified them, how do you lead them? The conventional wisdom is that you should act as a benevolent guardian. Explain rather than tell, give space and resources, provide recognition, protect from organizational noise, connect with other clevers and so on. This may be necessary, but it is insufficient.

In the clever organization, benevolence is balanced with discipline. Clever people are most productive when they're given boundaries. As much as they need autonomy, they also need structure. Creating the right sort of space--large enough to allow clevers to express themselves, but also with systems and structures to help them focus their efforts--is vital. One without the other is dangerous and ultimately unproductive.

Cleverness thrives in response to real-world challenges with real-world constraints. This is exemplified by the careers of the world-renowned consulting engineers Ove Arup & Partners. They responded to the peculiarities of their assignments by producing the Beijing cube swimming pool and the Sydney Opera House.

It is sometimes suggested that people can be energized to achieve goals by leaders encouraging them that everything is possible. That kind of optimism often doesn't work with clever people. They seem to prefer the reverse. Tell them something isn't possible and they'll be highly motivated to prove you wrong. The world needs them to be right.

Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones are the co-authors of Clever: Leading Your Smartest, Most Creative People. Rob Goffee is a professor of organizational behavior at London Business School. Gareth Jones is a fellow of the Centre for Management Development at London Business School and a visiting professor at INSEAD.