Steve Jobs on Consulting

I mean, you guys, most of you come from companies where you've had work experience, right? How many of you are from manufacturing companies? Oh, excellent! Where the rest of you from? Okay, so how many from consulting? Oh, that's bad; you should do something.

No, seriously, I don't think there's anything inherently evil in consulting. I think that without owning something over an extended period of time, like a few years, where one has a chance to take responsibility for one's recommendations—where one has to see one's recommendations through all action stages and accumulate scar tissue for the mistakes and pick oneself up off the ground and dust oneself off—you learn a fraction of what one can.

What you're coming in and making recommendations and not owning the results, not owning the implementation, I think is a fraction of the value and a fraction of the opportunity to learn and get it better.

So, what you do get is a broad cut at companies, but it's very thin. It's like a picture of a... I would go, I could use—I'm vegetarian—so when you steak, it's like a picture of a banana. You might get a very accurate picture, but it's only two-dimensional. Without the experience of actually doing it, you never get three-dimensional.

So, you might have a lot of pictures on your walls; you can show it off to your friends. You can't say, "I've worked in bananas, I've worked in peaches, I've worked in grapes," but you never really taste it. And I think that... [Applause].

But you're also a variable expense, and in hard times, you find yourself...