Under The Influence: Steve Jobs

My model for business is the Beatles. They were four guys who kept each others negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum parts. And that's how I see business. Great things in business are never done by one person, they are done by a team of people.

Steve Jobs (1955 -2011) Quoted on Gaiam Life

[Beatles or Stones?] If the vault was on fire and I could grab only one set of master tapes, I would grab the Beatles. The hard one would be between the Beatles and Dylan. Somebody else could have replicated the Stones. No one could have been Dylan or the Beatles

Walter Isaacson: Steve Jobs (p.415)

On Steve Job's personal iPod were most of the tracks from A Hard Day's Night, Abbey Road, Help!, Let It Be, Magical Mystery Tour, Meet The Beatles! Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band. (but none from Revolver, Rubber Soul or The White Album!). The only other artist with more tracks was Bob Dylan.

[Strawberry Fields Forever] is a complex song, and it's fascinating to watch the creative process as they went back and forth and finally created it over a few months...they just didn’t stop. They were such perfectionists they kept it going and going.

This made a big impression on me when I was in my thirties. You could just tell how much they worked at this. They did a bundle of work between each...recording.

The way we build stuff at Apple is often this way. Even the number of models we’d make of a new notebook or iPod. We would start off with a version and then begin refining and refining, doing detailed models of the design, or the buttons, or how a function operates. It’s a lot of work, but in the end it just gets better, and soon it’s like, “Wow, how did they do that?!?

Walter Isaacson: Steve Jobs (p.418-19)

Lennon was always my favourite Beatle

Walter Isaacson: Steve Jobs (p.418)

Apple Computers was sued by Apple Corps numerous times between 1978 and 2007. In 2007 Apple paid the Beatles $500 million for all worldwide rights to the name and then licensed back to the Beatles the rights to use the name.