Culture & Competency

Steve on Focus

The March 17, 2008 edition of FORTUNE magazine includes an interview with Steve Jobs of Apple. I really liked his thoughts on focus:

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the 100 other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the many things we haven’t done as the things we have done. The clearest example was when we were pressured for years to do a PDA, and I realized one day that 90% of the people who use a PDA only take information out of it on the road. They don’t put information into it. Pretty soon cellphones are going to do that, so the PDA market’s going to get reduced to a fraction of its current size. So we decided not to get into it. If we had gotten into it, we wouldn’t have had the resources to do the iPod.

Categories: Culture & Competency