Steve Jobs

In 1985, Apple's board fired the man who had built the company. He started over with an overpriced computer company few remember and a struggling animation studio he bought from George Lucas for roughly $10 million. Twelve years later, with Apple weeks from bankruptcy, the same board brought him back. He inherited a product line so fragmented that even Apple's own people could not explain it, and he walked in and started cutting.

For founders and operators, this is a case about focus as a weapon, not a virtue. It forces the hardest discipline in building anything: deciding what to kill while it is still alive, and refusing to ship anything that fails a standard most teams quietly lower. What he actually cut, and the rule he used to decide, is the part the app holds back for you to put to work.