I’ve been clearing up my work area quite aggressively. A new team member will join us next monday, and my collection of scsi/power cables, drives, ancient folders and manuals was clearly in the way of a proper place to sit for the new colleague.
By good fortune, I chanced upon an old BusinessWeek article I had liked so much, back in late 2004, that I printed out a copy for keeps. The article is an interview with Steve Jobs, titled “The Seed of Apple’s Innovation”, and can still be found on BW’s website at this link.
I liked that Steve had good things to say about HP:
“Both Steve Wozniak and I … and I can speak for Woz — got our view of what a technology company should be while working for Hewlett Packard in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And the first rule over there was to build great products.”
The article teaser went like this: “CEO Steve Jobs says among other practices, it’s “saying no to 1000 things” so as to concentrate on the “really important” creations. Which seemed really apt because I had gathered 1000 things worth of junk, to the extent that this gem of an article was buried and hidden within the pile. Suffice to say, this inspired me to discard much of the plastic, metal and paper baggage that had been following me from office to office. It’s always easier to de-sentimentalize old possessions when one is inspired.
And talking about inspiration …. the part of the interview I like best is at the end. Jobs talks about how Apple ran an ad campaign that celebrated great men and women who embodied the idea of “Think Different”. Ghandi. Dylan. King. Henson. Picasso. Ali. Lennon. Einstein. Edison……..
Here’s to the crazy ones.
The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
They’re not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.
You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.
Because they change things.
They push the human race forward.
And while some may see them as the crazy ones,
We see genius.
Because the people who are crazy enough to think
they can change the world,
Are the ones who do.
Jobs: “It [the think different ad campaign] was certainly for customers, to some degree, but it was even more for Apple itself. You can tell a lot about a person by who his/her heroes are. That ad was to remind us of who our heroes are and who we are.”
Which made me think. About who my heroes are.
From History, there’s Lincon. Martin Luther King Jr. Francis of Assisi. Ghandi.
From Business, there’s Bill & Dave (HP). Yunos (Grameen Bank). McDonough (Cradle to Cradle), Kuhlmann (INGDirect). Jobs (not surprisingly).
And so many more from Literature and Comics and Movies. Heroes. Building a better world.
