“Creativity is just connecting things,” Jobs told Wired magazine. “When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. . . . Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”
(FORTUNE Magazine) – Well into the conversation with FORTUNE that you're about to read, Steve Jobs, the once and interim CEO of Apple Computer, professes to feel, at the wizened age of 43, no different from when he was a frisky 17-year-old. True to form, he contradicts himself a little later, confessing to be "an old man now." Those comments reveal as much about why Jobs has been able to pull off his prestidigital revival of Apple--his first and still greatest creation--as do his observations on his business strategies and actions of the past year. Here's why. Jobs is most effective as a businessman and leader when he invokes the pathos and gestalt of his generation. He is, after all, a child of the 1960s--you're still likely to find him barefoot in the office, and for breakfast he eats granola doused in apple juice. Yet Jobs is also a mature baby-boomer, with an impressive if offbeat store of business experience, plus the typical worries that go with...