Friday, March 07, 2008

Steve Jobs on managing through the economic downturn

Apple's Steve Jobs, from the current issue of Fortune:
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.
The bold facing is mine. Memo to trust departments: This might be a great time to boost your marketing budgets and outreach to prospects.

I went to Fortune's website to create this link after I read the article in the print version, and discovered that there is a bit more to the interview online. It starts here.

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