Watch a recently rediscovered Steve Jobs lecture where he talks about leaving Apple and what he's learned about management (AAPL)

Steve Jobs 1993

In 1992, Steve Jobs was in exile.

The Apple founder had been kicked out of the company and had been building his new computer company, NeXT. (Apple bought it in 1996, bringing Jobs back.)

That's the context in which Jobs gave a wide-ranging lecture to MIT MBA students in the spring of 1992, set up by one of Laurene Powell's siblings.

The man who would end up spearheading the development of the iPhone ended up talking for over an hour and taking questions about several topics he didn't address later in his career, including his management style, his closest competitors, and how he felt when he left Apple.

MIT recently unearthed the video and uploaded it to YouTube. If you don't have an hour, we've pulled some of our favorite highlights below:

On the Macintosh's killer app and how he didn't see it coming (10:30):

"We never anticipated desktop publishing when we created the Mac. Sounds funny because that turned out to be the Mac's compelling advantage, the thing it did, not 1.5 or 2 times better than everything else, but 4, 5 times better than anything else, where you had to had one."

"We anticipated bitmap displays and laser printers but we never thought about Pagemaker, that whole industry really coming down on the desktop. Maybe we weren't smart enough. But we were smart enough to see it happen 9-12 months later. And we changed our entire marketing and business strategy to focus on desktop publishing, and it became the Trojan Horse that finally got the Mac into corporate America."

On why hardware is a hard business (13:15):

"The greatest thing is hardware churns every 18 months. It's pretty impossible to get a sustainable competitive advantage from hardware. If you're lucky, you can make something 1.5, 2 times better than your competitor, which probably isn't enough to be quite a competitive advantage. And it only lasts for 6 months."

"But software seems to take a lot longer for people to catch up with. I watched Microsoft take 8 or 9 years to catch up with the Mac, and it's even arguable they've even caught up."

On consultants (15:28):

"A mind is too important to waste.

...

The only consultants I've seen that I think are truly useful are the ones that help us sell our computers. 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 someone has a chance to take responsibility for one’s recommendations, where one has to see one’s recommendations through all action stages and accumulate some scar tissue for the mistakes and pick one’s self up off the ground and dust one’s self off, one learns a fraction of what one can.

...

It's like a picture of a banana. You might get a very accurate picture, but it's only 2-dimensional."

See the rest of the story at Business Insider