Peter Williams of Jack Wills chooses Steve Jobs
Great Lives
BBC
4.2 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 1 June 2017
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Peter Williams - founder of British retail chain, Jack Wills - nominates Steve Jobs as his great life.
For Williams, despite the fact that Steve Jobs was an abrasive and difficult person, it was his ability to predict what people wanted.
It was his Apple products that have touched the lives of so many people world wide and for Peter it's his gadgets that have changed our attitudes to technology.
Presented by Matthew Parris.
To help Peter make his case, he's joined by Luke Dormehl, technology journalist and author of The Apple Revolution.
Producer: Perminder Khatkar
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in May 2017.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the |
| 0:03.8 | podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC. |
| 0:08.6 | It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world. |
| 0:15.3 | What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism |
| 0:19.8 | and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines. |
| 0:23.7 | And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject |
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| 0:40.1 | He wasn't an inventor, he wasn't a code writer and he wasn't a designer. |
| 0:45.0 | But he was a visionary and he saw things and he did things differently. |
| 0:50.0 | Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs, and the |
| 0:57.0 | the troublemakers, the round pegs and the square holes, the ones who see things differently. |
| 1:07.0 | Steve Jobs, speaking in 1997, the founder of the company Apple, the man who was widely loved and loathed by some |
| 1:15.7 | is this week's great life. Making the case for him is my guest Peter Williams, the |
| 1:21.0 | founder and chief executive of Jack Wills, the British clothing brand. |
| 1:25.6 | Peter, what is it about Steve Jobs? Do you see in him qualities, some kind of genius that many don't have and that you particularly admire. |
| 1:35.0 | He was fundamentally flawed from a personality perspective in the sense that he seemed to be relatively |
| 1:40.4 | dysfunctional, but in terms of his great asset, his great strength was his extraordinary vision. |
| 1:47.6 | He had no interest in market research because it was by definition retrospective looking. |
| 1:54.0 | He claimed that there was no point in asking the customer what they wanted because they didn't know. |
| 1:59.0 | And that they should create a product that the customer didn't even know they needed. |
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