Om Steve Jobs, inspiration og perspiration

Thomas Edison har sagt at:

"Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration."

Det kan der være noget om. 

I forbindelse med Steve Jobs' afgang som CEO for Apple har mange tunger talt om hans evne til at træffe store beslutninger ved at følge sin intuition. Og andre har sagt at det er noget være sludder, at det er hårdt arbejde og disciplin.

Lad mig illustrere med et par citateter:

Adrian Slywotzky skriver for Harvard Business Review (via Daring Fireball):

But the idea, so common in this week’s media coverage, that Jobs was an inspired savant who succeeded by taking big risks on personal hunches, is way off the mark. Rather than worship at the altar of inspiration and “going with your gut,” the rest of us should use this moment to consider the fundamental strategies that drove Apple’s success.

Og her er et citat fra manden selv, Steve Jobs, i BusinessWeek fra 12. oktober, 2004 (via Julien Callede)

The system is that there is no system. That doesn’t mean we don’t have process. Apple is a very disciplined company, and we have great processes. But that’s not what it’s about. Process makes you more efficient.

But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem. It’s ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.

And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.

Som jeg ser det overser de fleste virksomheder begge sider af sagen.