Steve Jobs once took an 18-second pause before answering a straightforward question, a moment that underlined the Apple Inc. co-founder’s habit of thinking long before talking.
Steve Jobs’ Measured, Deliberate Pause
The exchange, which has caught the social media eye in a resurfaced clip, happened during a 1992 Q&A at MIT's Sloan School of Management, where Jobs was then NeXT's CEO. An audience member asked Jobs, "What's the most important thing that you personally learned at Apple, that you're doing at NeXT?"
Jobs sat silently, then began, "Good question," before offering a compact philosophy of management: "I now take a longer-term view on people." The clip's timing shows an 18-second beat between the question and his reply.
Lessons On Patience And Building Durable Teams
“I'm not sure I learned this when I was at Apple, but I learned it based on the data when I was at Apple. And that is, I now take a longer-term view of people,” Jobs first said.
He elaborated that he’d learnt that when something isn't done right, his first instinct shouldn't be to "go fix it," but to help a teammate learn "so that the person that's screwing up learns," because the goal is a durable team "for the next decade, not just the next year."
Parallels To Jobs’ NeXT Era And Apple Return
The response echoed his status at NeXT, the company he founded after leaving Apple in 1985 and led until Apple acquired it in 1997, an acquisition that brought Jobs back to Cupertino and, later, to the CEO role.
According to a report by Inc.com, it wasn't the only time Jobs chose silence before jumping back at a question. At Apple's 1997 Worldwide Developers Conference, he paused after a member in the audience told him, "You don't know what you're talking about"— and then delivered a measured answer about focus and starting with the customer experience, a moment widely cited as emblematic of his return-era leadership.
Jobs’ learning of taking a long view on employees also echoes a view that he shares with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos that patient talent development beats quick fixes. Bezos is known to frequently frame decisions in long-horizon terms, from "regret-minimization" to pairing "stubborn relentlessness" with flexibility.
Photo Courtesy: Anton_Ivanov on Shutterstock.com
Read Next:
