Steve Jobs's Secret for Building the Richest Company in the World

This quote from the Wall Street Journal jumped out at me this morning from their “Steve Jobs’s Best Quotes” article:

“We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.

When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.” [Playboy, Feb. 1, 1985]

This drive to create products of the highest quality with a unique aesthetic is also something one found in the career of someone else who built a major corporation that has enhanced our lives: Walt Disney. This is a theme I’ve written on before and will hopefully develop and research more fully for future articles. Suggestions and recommended reading from PJM’s readers is always appreciated.