It’s like Jim Collins Commented on My Blog

Well. Not really. In fact, not at all. But I did find this Inc. article where Jim Collins is being interviewed about entrepreneurship and he talks about Steve Jobs as an entrepreneur. Here’s what he says:

I think we saw the best of entrepreneurship in the ’80s. I invited Steve Jobs to my entrepreneurship class at Stanford in 1988 or ‘89. He was doing NeXT at the time. He said, “We aren’t creating computers. We are creating bicycles for the mind.” That was his phrase. He said the most efficient locomotive vehicle is a bicycle, and you could create a bicycle for the mind. It just happened to be a personal computer. Now, that way of looking at a business is very different from thinking, We’re creating a company so everybody can get rich and retire. If that’s how Jobs had seen it, he would have quit a long time ago. Same with Yvon Chouinard at Patagonia. He wanted to make incredible products, but those products would be part of something bigger — creating a role model for people who wanted to build a sustainable organization. It was a noble vision of entrepreneurship, and a lot of these entrepreneurs shared it.

I’m not the kind of guy that could say, “I’m creating bicycles for the mind” with a straight face but I love the idea that these entrepreneurs were focused on something bigger than themselves. In the process of achieving their vision, both of Collins’ examples were rewarded handsomely, but I love that the real reward for them was more about building something they cared about.