Success Quote by Steve Jobs

Jobs is doing something sly here: he’s reframing leadership as subtraction, not command. In the mythology of Silicon Valley, the CEO is the visionary auteur. Jobs flips that script just enough to make the point that matters inside a company: the “moving force” is the engineers and designers actually shipping the thing. His “job,” he claims, is to protect them.

That protection is the tell. “Create a space” sounds airy until you hear the implied threat: the rest of the organization. Jobs is naming a familiar corporate gravity - committees, process, turf wars, middle-management metrics - and casting it as an invading force. “Clear out” isn’t collaboration language; it’s almost military. The subtext is that bureaucracy is not neutral. Left alone, it will colonize a product team’s time, attention, and taste until the work turns into consensus sludge. So the leader’s role becomes a kind of bouncer: keep distractions, politics, and premature compromises away from the people who still have their hands on the clay.

Contextually, this fits the Macintosh era’s insurgent posture inside Apple, where the Mac team was famously treated like a semi-separate unit, complete with pirate metaphors and an us-versus-them identity. Jobs isn’t just praising labor; he’s manufacturing a protected enclave where intensity can survive. It’s also a warning: great products don’t fail only because of bad ideas. They get smothered by the organization that claims to support them.