Steve Jobs

STAY HUNGRY, STAY FOOLISH

When Steve Jobs got kicked out of apple, the company he f_______,
he described it as being punched in the sto_________, getting the wind
knocked out of him, and not being able to brea_____.
The firing was not just business eitherit was personal. He was
o_______ by the man he had hired to run the company, John Sculley,
former president of Pepsi.
While recruiting him, Jobs threw down the gaunt______ by asking
Sculley if he wanted to sell sugar water the rest of his life or change
the way people live and work. Phrased this way, Sculley could not turn
down the ch__________; he came to run Apple in 1983.
By 1985, the relationship had gone s________. In July of that year,
Sculley told security analysts that Jobs would have no role in the
operations of the company now or in the future. It was the coup de
grce.
Bitter, angry, and de_______, Jobs sold more than $20 million of his
Apple stock. Still feeling lost and be________, he tried to relax, to get
his breath back, so to speak. The digital genius spent time cycling along
the beach and toured Paris and Italy. After some six weeks of this respite
from the corporate gr______, Jobs felt a little better. He started getting
out. He had lunch with Paul Berg, a No_____ laureate in biochemistry at
Stanford University. Berg talked about the time-con________ trial-and-
error methodology he used to ana_____ DNA. Jobs suggested computer
simulation to speed things up. Berg said that the necessary computers
and software were not available. He said it to the right person.
Fueled with this new vi_______ and playing off his strengths and
interests, Jobs created NeXT, a computer company that manufactured
workstations and developed the NextStep operating system. Its
computers were chic, expensive black boxes that stood out against the
beige PC world. The new operating system featured object-oriented
programming, allowing developers to more easily write programs. The
company la_________ in 1986 (the same year Jobs bought the graphics
division of Lucasfilm for $10 million and named it Pixar), and sold its
first PCs for $10,000 in 1988. The company had its partisans (educators
and financial engineers loved it), but it was a m______ success. Still, the
company was successful enough that Apple bought it for $400 million in
1996; Apple also got Jobs as interim chief executive officer in the deal.
Sculley had gotten the boot in 1993, and on his comeback at the
helm of the company he founded, Jobs was v_______ more successful.
He introduced new products such as the iMac, the iBook, and the
blockbuster iPod. These successes cemented his appointment. Apple
shares went from $7 in 2003 to $97 in early 2007, defying the bear
market in the NASDAQ and tech world.
John Sculley? After leaving Apple, he worked variously in politics,
business, and consulting, never achieving the same pro__________ he
enjoyed while at Apple. Jobs enlarged his already-my________ status in
the tech world by leading tech giants Apple and Pixar. Disney
announced plans to acquire Pixar in 2006, and Jobs became Disneys
largest shareholder (6 percent). His iPod achieved success in consumer
electronics that had eluded the popular but niched Macintosh line. He
had av________ his painful ouster personally and in the marketplace
and achieved one of the most amazing comebacks in business history,
not to mention another type of comeback in 2004 from a rare but
treatable form of cancer.
How did Jobs do it, create products that were, in his words,
insanely great? He says creativity is really the business of connecting
things, of seeing and syn_______. This ability to connect comes from
more thinking or more experience. He also said that design wasnt
something you put on top of a product but its fun____________ soul.