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Alan: Let's look at Steve Jobs, you call Steve
J.; Richard Brandson, and
Donald Trump.
Larry: Steven Jobs, by all reports, was a
disagreeable, unpleasant
person by every standard you care to think.
He also, especially
in his earlier life, waged a horrific battle
against people who
thought his ideas were foolish; the idea that
the function of
the device was anything other than the most
important thing, and
form, design, was a matter of a detail. That
form would follow
the function and it was routine, and any engineer
could do it.
Alan: Anybody could do it.
Larry: He objected to that severely, is of
course correct, and was
fired from his own company because of it.
I do not believe he
actually quite ever recovered from that; made
him more
disagreeable then he might otherwise been.
Alan: Passionate.
Larry: Without a doubt. He also understood
one of the things that we
try to help our students understand about
creativity, which is
you pay close attention to what your customers
say but you never
expect a customer to make the creative act.
It's a huge
difference, it's a distinction, and I watch
many people get it
wrong. They believe in dialogue with their
customers alone, they
will create ... they will find some great
innovation. Steven
Jobs protested against that vigorously.
Alan: Let's skip from Jobs over then to Trump.
Larry: It's too bad he's never had an innovative
idea in his life.
Alan: I agree.
Larry: I would not count him as an innovator.
If he's not an
innovator, he is not an entrepreneur in the
classic sense. A
successful businessperson with an extraordinary
ability
[inaudible: 02:00] and a barber from Mars.
He's a strange man,
but he's not an entrepreneur in my mind.
Mr. Brandson has certainly offered innovations
in a variety of
ways; service innovations often. He also delivers,
usually, what
he says he's going to deliver, so that is
new services
effectively implement in many cases, in most
cases I would say.
That's admirable, that's what entrepreneurs
do; they offer new
things and actually implement them so the
customer has a new
range of choices. It turns out that he also
is a very passionate
person, is also very good at self-promotion.
I don't have any
objection to that so long as the person is
promoting something
of substance ...
Alan: Of value.
Larry: ... that is new. He is clearly an experimenter,
and that makes
him, for my mind, the classic entrepreneur.
Not all experiments
succeed ...
Alan: No.
Larry: ... but many of them need to. He's
a serial experimenter, which
is again, very admirable.
Announcer: AQ's Blog & Grill.
