- December 13th, 2008 -
Why Apple is Apple. Steve Jobs on managing through economic downturn:
“We’ve had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren’t going to lay off people, that we’d taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place — the last thing we were going to do is lay them off. And we were going to keep funding. In fact we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over. And that’s exactly what we did. And it worked. And that’s exactly what we’ll do this time.”
A lot of smart business people say when everyone is running one way, the smart thing to do is run the other way. Mr. Jobs is clearly one of those smart business people. Its too bad about his health, hopefully he pulls through ok.