Here are excerpts from the Commencement Address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005 at Stanford University.

Connecting the dots?

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography

Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

About Love and Loss?

We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired.

?So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation?On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”

Thanks Gautam for pointing it out.

Bill Gates goes on a “Think Week” period of seclusion where he ponders the future of technology and to decide on the future direction of Micrsoft.

“It’s a twice-yearly ritual that can influence the future of Microsoft and the tech industry. A Think Week thought can give the green light to a new technology that millions of people will use, or send Microsoft into new markets”

“Think Week’s reading and thinking spawns a flood of e-mail and comments from Gates. A paper might inspire an e-mail to dozens of employees around the world.”

“Employees anticipate the week with hopes that their projects will get a green light or influence the company’s direction. “It’s the world’s coolest suggestion box,” says Stephen Lawler, a Microsoft general manager of the MapPoint group”

Read Bill Gates daily routine during “Think Week” here

Movies primarily allow for teaching left brain concepts with right brain simulation. The visual impact offers insights on human behavior under various situations that is retained for a longer time. If movies promote discussion with colleagues, allow for people to share their learnings and examine ways in which they can be translated into behaviours that can be applied at the work place, then it can become an extremely powerful tool of learning.

While there are a number of movies that present great management lessons, Apollo 13, perhaps ranks the highest among the most memorable of movies that offer lessons that can be applied back at the workplace.

“Houston, we’ve had a problem” is a line ingrained among many who have watched the movie “Apollo 13″

It was the year 1970, nearly a year after Apollo 11 had safely landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon. Two days into the mission, 320,000 kilometres from Earth, one of the two oxygen tanks broke down and the crew started losing oxygen and power supply.

With the crippled space craft still hurtling its way to the moon, the team at the ground under the leadership of Flight Director Eugene Kranz had to take some critical decisions to bring with three men on board, safely back to earth.

Does the team at the ground succeed in bringing the three men on the spacecraft back? How does the team work under extreme conditions of stress, with the burden of the knowledge that three lives depend on them. The team also know that the supply of oxygen and power were limited and what would work in the space-craft was not known.

Read some of the lessons the movie “Apollo 13″ holds for leaders and for people at the workplace in this issue of HR News and Views

• Deepa