Summary/teaser
Apple and the art of business — Steve Jobs upended the notion that the consumer is king, to be served by a proliferation of choices. It was the businessman as artist who created the desires. In taking Apple to the peak of the industrial world, Jobs was the supreme artist - of innovation, of marketing, of boldness in following his own dream, and creating ours. - Sreeram Chaulia

August 31, 2011
Apple and the art of business
By Sreeram Chaulia
Sreeram Chaulia is Professor and Vice Dean at the Jindal School of International Affairs in Sonipat, India, and the first ever B Raman Fellow for Geopolitical Analysis at the Takshashila Institution. He is the author of the recent book, International Organizations and Civilian Protection: Power, Ideas and Humanitarian Aid in Conflict Zones (I.B. Tauris, London).
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Of all the stunning insights Jobs has bequeathed, the basic one is that entrepreneurship is an art, rather than a science to be learnt through formal education or training. A college dropout like Microsoft's founder Bill Gates and Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg, Jobs read the pulse of consumers like no other business titan of our times, and did so in an uncanny and instinctive fashion without meticulous market surveys, focus group discussions, or commissioned research reports.

One quote that epitomizes Jobs is his response to a journalist when asked how thoroughly he had analyzed market moods and tastes before introducing the iPad tablet computer: "None. It's not the consumers' job to know what they want."

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It's not the consumers' job to know what they want."

Yep
There are those who create new markets and there are those who just follows the cattle drive.

Some of those followers aren't even on a cattle drive... more like a Lemming Drive!

Yeah, and that's why Apple only hires college dropouts. Not a PHD in the bunch.

What about the people who work in Cupertino you are telling me there is not one executive or engineer with a Phd who is employed there?

Start going through this site and seeing the requirements:
http://www.job-search-engine.com/company/a/apple/california/santa-clara-county/cupertino/

Everything on page 1 requires at the most an MS, but some just experience.

On Apple's site, they say:
Amazing products come from amazing people.

Each year, we hire college graduates for a variety of positions throughout the company. Whether you’ve earned your bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoral degree, there are opportunities at Apple to apply your knowledge in areas that include finance, marketing, merchandising, operations, engineering, real estate development and design, and software.

real estate development and design

Humm
Thats odd for a computer company . I know they have a new campus under construction , but they hired a firm for all that planing.

Must be the Apple Stores, i imagine.

Humm good point - That must be it .
I always heard it called (acquisition) to purchase property.

The real estate development and design - is more traditionally thought of buying very large tracts of land or building a super high rise project. Certainly Apple would have needed a real estate development and design team in the very beginning before the first Apple Store . Now Apple only needs a acquisition team , since the stores are pretty much carbon copy.

I bet they sometimes buy a whole building for an Apple Store, divide the space into administrative offices, repair workshop, storage, show rooms, video theater, whatever, &c..

They probably need an interior designer to plan the space divisions and to plan how to implement the Apple Store standard visual id and trademarks.

Even though there is a standardised design, (i've only been to one AS, in San Francisco, CA in summer 2001,) i would imagine that every Apple Store has in some way "something different".