Top 48 Brent Schlender Quotes
#1. By the late 1990s, it was almost as if the Orwellian scenario of the Mac's "1984" commercial had come true. Big Business, with a pair of capital B's, ruled computing. The drones used what they were told.
Brent Schlender
#2. Software development requires very little capital investment, since it is basically intellectual capital, pure thoughtstuff, expressed in a set of detailed instructions written in a language that machines can understand.
Brent Schlender
#3. So many of the people who want to be like Steve have the asshole side down. What they're missing is the genius part.
Brent Schlender
#4. should go see Steve," he whispered in his ear. "He's out in the parking lot crying.
Brent Schlender
#5. To Steve, these stores were pulling off something he had never been able to manage: they sold a lifestyle product at an absurdly high margin by presenting it in a beautiful and yet informative way.
Brent Schlender
#6. Ed Catmull has thought a lot about the role luck plays at a great company, and how businesspeople manage that luck. It's all in the preparedness, he says, and in creating a culture that can adapt to the unexpected. "These things are always going to happen. What separates you is your response,
Brent Schlender
#7. displayed and sold represented the very worst of what could go wrong when things weren't done his way. The salespeople, always interested in quick turnover, seemed to make little effort to understand what was special about a Mac, and had less incentive to do so after
Brent Schlender
#8. Steve was innately comfortable trusting his gut; it's a characteristic of the best entrepreneurs, a necessity for anyone who wants to make a living developing things no one has ever quite imagined before.
Brent Schlender
#10. Having a grand, bold goal was useless if you didn't have the ability to tell a compelling story about how you'd get there.
Brent Schlender
#11. One of the things I've always felt," Steve told me, "is that if you're going to be creative, it's like jumping up in the air; you want to make damn sure the ground is going to be there when you get back.
Brent Schlender
#12. Pixar's Ed Catmull likes to say that since you can't control the luck itself, which is bound to come your way for better and for worse, what matters is your state of preparedness to deal with it.
Brent Schlender
#13. Above all, saying no became a crucial way of keeping everyone, including himself, focused on what really mattered.
Brent Schlender
#14. He, better than anyone, understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished.
Brent Schlender
#15. It was quite a collection of people: Hindus and Buddhists, rockers and doctors, all accomplished, all gathered in the United Church of Christ's Garden of Allah.
Brent Schlender
#17. after an old girlfriend failed to solder a few chips correctly, he made her the team's bookkeeper.
Brent Schlender
#19. Challenges, confrontations: in his limited experience, this was how you got things done; this was how the great stuff broke through.
Brent Schlender
#20. Steve's life wasn't a movie. It was inspiring, confounding, and unabashedly human, to the very end.
Brent Schlender
#21. What I loved about working for Steve," says Cue, "is that you learned that you could accomplish the impossible. Again and again.
Brent Schlender
#23. Autobiography of a Yogi, a book that he would return to several
Brent Schlender
#24. Steve had grown comfortable with only seeing the connections between the dots after the fact. Maturity, and the extraordinary talents of the team he had built, made that possible.
Brent Schlender
#25. Steve was the best delegator I ever met," Johnson said at Stanford. "He was so clear about what he wanted that it gave you great freedom.
Brent Schlender
#26. 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.
Brent Schlender
#27. Near-death experiences can help one see more clearly sometimes.
Brent Schlender
#28. I don't really care, this is what I want to do. And if I try my best and fail, well, I tried my best.
Brent Schlender
#29. One little thing led to another. One success, one particular challenge, could spur thoughts about another product, or a different iteration of an existing product, or a whole new channel of revenue. As Steve liked to say, "You can only connect the dots of how things really happened in hindsight.
Brent Schlender
#30. What's the point in looking back," he told me in one email. "I'd rather
Brent Schlender
#31. He visited me in the Stanford hospital twice during the weeks when I was recovering
Brent Schlender
#32. By some analysts' estimates, the Cupertino company now pockets as much as 80 percent of the profits of the entire cellphone handset business.
Brent Schlender
#33. The sun will set and the sun will rise, and it will shine upon us tomorrow in our grief and our gratitude, and we will continue to live with purpose, memory, passion, and love.
Brent Schlender
#34. STEVEN PAUL JOBS felt deeply entitled almost from the start, thanks to parents who raised him to think that he was every bit as special as they believed he could be.
Brent Schlender
#35. Despite his evasiveness and his determination to hew to a single message, Jobs was a vivid presence. The intensity of his self-confidence made me hang on his every word. He spoke in carefully constructed sentences, even when trying to answer an unexpected question.
Brent Schlender
#36. When he decided that Woz would be "Employee #1," Steve went to him and whined; it didn't take long till Scotty relented and gave Steve a new, customized tag: "Employee #0.
Brent Schlender
#37. Hard disk drives were finally cheap enough for consumers to afford: If you shopped around, you could find one that held 10 megabytes of digital storage for about $700.
Brent Schlender
#38. restlessness is far more important and powerful than simple ambition or raw intelligence. It is the foundation of resilience, and self-motivation. It is fueled by curiosity, the ache to build something meaningful, and a sense of purpose to make the most of one's entire life.
Brent Schlender
#39. If Steve ever was starstruck, it was by Lasseter, whose artistry seemed to be irrefutable evidence of what Steve believed to be the most important attribute of computers: that they were tools that could unleash and enhance human creativity.
Brent Schlender
#40. Through its "Bondi blue" (named for the evocative tropical waters of Bondi Beach, near Sydney, Australia) translucent plastic exterior, a buyer could see the inner workings of the computer, its rigorously arranged wires and circuit boards loaded with chips that looked like 3-D maps of cities.
Brent Schlender
#41. the Apple III, whose footprint had to be small enough to leave lots of open room on an office desk, would be absolutely silent, which meant no internal cooling fan.
Brent Schlender
#42. at Pixar, Steve couldn't shape the culture. He wasn't the founder, and even as owner, he could not change the company to reflect his image and sensibilities. It already had a culture. It already had a leader. Its cohesive and collaborative team knew exactly what it wanted to do.
Brent Schlender
#43. When Lasseter got his next paycheck, it contained a small bonus. "You have to use this to buy a new car," Steve told him. "It has to be safe, and I have to approve it." John and Nancy picked out a Volvo, and Steve approved.
Brent Schlender
#45. most breakthrough products result from a long cycle of hit-and-miss prototypes, the steady accumulation of features, and a timely synthesis of existing technologies.
Brent Schlender
#46. The last person who wrote about me for the Wall Street Journal didn't even know the difference between machine memory and a floppy!
Brent Schlender
#47. There are thousands of people across the country taking photography courses. They'll never be professional photographers. They just want to understand what the photographic process is all about.
Brent Schlender
#48. got the Journal to buy me a Fat Mac." I had convinced the big guys in New York that if I was going to be writing about Apple, I'd better be familiar with their latest machines.
Brent Schlender
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
