A great many people seem to think we'd have been better off without Steve actually. They will tell you Steve/Apple set back the free software movement, and brought dictatorship to the world of software, when the web used to rule with anarchic democracy. They would tell you he sells closed devices that neuter people's creativity, and that the devices are hard to hack or dispose of.
I think he was a brilliant artist who made technology less imposing.
I think a great many other people--mainstream customers who don't read websites like Hacker News--would argue that they don't care about the free software movement or hacking devices. They think people using the term "dictatorship" in reference to computer software are extremists. They just want Shit That Works.
I guess I'm one of the few. While he headed a company that spearheaded internal innovation, it also stifled external innovation. He was also a jerk, as well documented.
How much of it was Steve Jobs, and how much of it was Apple's company. Surely he had a huge influence on the company, but there were a lot of people who did.
I definitely don't agree with this. Jobs' contribution to a whole lot of wallets, most of them already fat, was extremely positive. His role in many contributions to the advancement of technology was also significant.
"Society" is something he did not contribute much at all to. Workers' rights, work environments, corporate culture, none of these things benefited from Jobs at all; his contributions to them were largely negative.
I don't know about you but that seems to be an over-simplification. You can find some pretty strong trends from these stories and, while I'm not quick to derive value judgment, Steve did exhibit a distinct personality. It's not an accident that stories like this are, in some sense, predictable.
Any information you consume about a human being is going to be an over-simplification. What's really important is making sure that you're staying critical of the sources of this information.
I also think that you're missing the broader implication of your parent post: Steve didn't wake up every morning with the intent of embodying some kind of persona -- he just was. Sure, he may have done well to have some training by an HR expert on how to communicate more effectively, but he was just managing a company the way that 1) he knew how and 2) in a way that brought Apple success.
What I admire about Steve's Apple is that it was able to maintain a very clear vision and point of view despite growing exponentially. Look at huge corporations like IBM, HP, Microsoft, etc. What are there goals? Go to IBM's website and try to piece together a vision out of 80000 disparate research projects. HP makes...computers? printers? calculators? fax machines? cameras? Microsoft is a maker of operating systems, but are infamous for their spaghetti-style auxiliary product lines (throw it on the wall and see what sticks). These are three well-respected companies, and I don't know what the hell any of the 3 are about. Apple, by contrast? They're about delivering sleek computing products that are accessible and easy to use. Ask anyone on the street what Apple's mission is and they'd be able to give you some variation on good-looking products that are easy to use.
Absolutely everything I have read about Steve Jobs paints him as a narcissistic asshole who is impossible to work with. How is it that he was so successful and how did apple become the behemoth it is today if the man at the wheel was so insufferable?
I want to believe that this has only been a recent development and that he used to be an easier person to deal with in apple's early days, because to be quite frank the only way I could see such an individual being so successful with the attitude he had was if he was just riding the coattails of other forces in the company.
Hopefully someone can enlighten me as to how this kind of person could lead a successful company when everyone fears him and doesn't question anything he says.
> How is it that he was so successful and how did Apple become the behemoth it is today if the man at the wheel was so insufferable?
Strangely, it was partially because he was so insufferable that Apple became as successful as it is today. Steve Jobs was notorious for being in-your-face brutal about the quality of work being done simply not being good enough. Crying, screaming, throwing tantrums - all these histrionics went hand-in-hand with that.
What's interesting about this is that Steve had two things that most people lack: (1) vision in spades. And more importantly, very good vision. (2) an ability to push people beyond their limits by berating them, but then having really amazing work come out of that process.
Steve Jobs was awe-inspiring because he could dress people down and grill them on details that most other people either didn't notice or would gloss over. If you read many of the books about Steve Jobs, there's a common refrain said by many of those who worked under him.
"I'd never work for him again, but he pushed me to do things I never knew I was capable of."
[EDIT: forgot to add] The reason Steve was able to get away with all this negative behavior is that it produced amazing results. But for most people, being so belligerent and nasty without having an amazing vision to back it up will not get you very far. And, for the most part, such people are completely egomaniacal. (Steve was too, he just happened to be right a lot).
There's a third factor - Steve was very good at active listening. He oozed it in interviews.
I saw it big time when Walt Mossberg made some comment about "Oh, we can't say that". Steve latched onto him like a pitbull - "Why not?". Walt said "Well, people get annoyed. They write ... letters".
You could just see Steve's thinking - "I don't understand what he's saying, or why he's saying it. Figure out why."
You can also see it, indirectly, if you watch him when he was talking tech. He's well known to not be a great techie, but he knew quite a bit. Maybe he was just well briefed, but I think it was because he knew to ask questions to the guys who were briefing him.
I've worked for an insufferable narcissistic asshole who was impossible to work with, and we built an incredible company.
The guy at the top doesn't really DO anything. If the idea is good, and the coders/architects etc are good, a company can be built regardless of how insane the top is.
Note the difference between guilt and shame. Shame correlates negatively with leadership ability since it makes people shrink from challenges and disconnect from people. This may be why we get many high-functioning sociopaths in position of leadership: sociopaths are the only people who do not feel shame at all.
That non-scientific summary article is incredibly vague, but it appears to be saying that "problem solvers" are more leaderly than "problem fleers", based on the given definitions. "Guilt" and "shame" are the labels they tacked on without justification
"The market pulls the product out of the startup." -- Marc Andreesen [1]
Steve Jobs was remarkably good at finding new markets. And once you've found one, you can screw up a lot and still succeed. Because at the end of the day, people want to work on a successful product, and they'll put up with a lot of shit to do so.
Steve Jobs probably would've been even more successful had he not been so abrasive; who knows, maybe he wouldn't have gotten thrown out of Apple the first time and we would've gotten the iPhone 15 years earlier rather than the Newton. But he got the thing that matters most right, and then pretty much everything else fell into place despite his flaws.
Honestly, I don't think he could have been more successful no matter what he did. Apple's comeback is easily the most dramatic in the history of business.
True, but he's also responsible for Pixar and NeXT. NeXT had many of the ideas of the current Mac a decade earlier, but failed to take off. Whether that's because the market wasn't ready yet or because Steve failed to manage the company can't really be answered.
(Also: "most dramatic in the history of business"? IBM was about 3 months away from bankruptcy when Lou Gerstner took over - it's not a household name now because their comeback involved pivoting to big-business services, but they're solidly profitable. Intuit nearly died and all the employees went several months without salary in its early days, and now they basically own the accounting-software market.)
Jobs' first ouster is often credited as the reason for his vision and success when he got back. Believe it or not he was a much worse CEO the first time around
Ultimately, Steve Jobs had an insight into what computers could be, how technology could work, that was not only powerful but that Apple worked to execute throughout the entire stack of its product. From industrial design to operating system to software, his vision infused Apple's products in a way that very few other computer manufacturers have seen. Even now, as "well-designed products" are becoming a popular thing – due, in no small part, to Apple's influence – it is difficult to find products that are as thoroughly, nit-pickingly well-thought-out as Apple's stuff.
Back when nobody had much of a reason to believe in Steve Jobs and his vision, his tyrannical style was what got teams working outrageous hours, sacrificing personal lives, and shipping products that all sane people were convinced couldn't be done. So at a key moment in Apple's history, he provided a push that brought the company great success.
Very few people have that sort of all-pervasive vision; most of the people who think they do are deluding themselves. Most of the time you don't need an asshole on top driving things. Heck, it's possible that even Steve didn't have to be an asshole, that his dickish personality was just a shortcut he used to get things done conveniently.
Plenty of brilliant people have unpleasant or antisocial personalities. Sometimes it's because that's what it takes to make people who don't share your vision do what they're told. Sometimes it's because brilliant people are human too, and as flawed as any of us. Usually it's somewhere in between.
It seems less like coattails when you consider Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Jack Welch, John Rockefeller, etc. In fact, anecdotally it seems being a "narcissistic asshole" is an asset rather than a hindrance.
How is it that he was so successful and how did apple become the behemoth it is today if the man at the wheel was so insufferable?
Think about it like this - how many assholes are there running companies? If you assume there are hundreds or thousands, then eventually at least a few of them are going to be wildly successful.
The fact Steve Jobs was so successful does not prove being asshole causes success, it only proves being asshole doesn't prevent you from success. Whether it contributed positively or negatively is to be contested.
From what I've seen, he seemed to have a knack to attract top talent and push them to their limit.
He was able to charm those people he needed and knew just how to push their buttons so they'd deliver better work.
Contrary to what people thinks, assholes are not assholes 100% of the time; those people get their way by knowing when to be nice and charming. This is not antonymic with being an narcissistic asshole.
I'm fairly sure a lot of his collaborators had a honeymoon period with him, before he revealed himself to be the management equivalent of the abusive husband.
I recently saw the Woz speak at the University of Arkansas. He spent probably 30 minutes total (not all in one breath, but spread out) ripping on Steve Jobs. He really didn't say anything that was unarguably good about him.
>How is it that he was so successful and how did apple become the behemoth it is today if the man at the wheel was so insufferable?
Unlike the other commenters, I don't think the answer is vision, tho it certainly plays a part.
The reason people kept working with him is because when he wanted to he could be devastatingly charming. He was one of those people that can make you feel like what you have to say is the most important thing in the world. He was so good they coined a whole piece of slang just to describe him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field
It's so obvious I'm not sure how so many people on this thread, OP included, don't understand it: people who are very demanding, expect excellence and nothing else, do not settle for great or even good, do not compromise, etc, etc, are perceived by outsiders and some insiders as "jerks", "assholes" and "hard to work with". But they make amazing achievements.
Agreed, Sociopaths might have extreme qualities which might enable extreme outcomes, but that doesn't mean we need to enable them. It is overwhelmingly unhealthy and negative for anyone connected to them. Been there.
Interesting. I interviewed at Nest and was on the way to getting an offer, but in the end ended up doing something completely different. Do you have any writings about Fadell?
I didn't think I was going to like this from the opening paragraph but she quickly won me over. My take away is "You are not Steve Jobs. You are not a massive arsehole!" - pretty much in agreement with calinet6. However, actually it's a lot richer than that. I love this paragraph in particular:
"Now, regardless of whether no one in the inner sanctum of dudes-that-Steve-listened-to-at-the-time told him all the things we told our bosses, or who-up-the-chain-of-command was not brave enough to suggest we do something not-Apple-like — this was the system that Steve created. He made himself so fearful and terrible that an entire group of amazing, talented, hard working people, ended up getting screamed at wrongfully. It was his fault that the MobileMe launch went so poorly, not ours."
Even if that's not even remotely true (I wouldn't know), I find it a good lesson that a boss could be so terrifying that no-one wants to be honest with them and this flows down the hierarchy to the point of dysfunction. I've heard of it before, but I like the clarity of explanation this nth time around.
Agreed. And I think the article is less about "Steve Jobs" and more about the lessons to be learned from high-level project difficulties, and the people on the ground caught up in the line of fire when things don't go to plan. Or, when blame is unleashed unjustly from management, whose plan was flawed in the beginning, or whose chain of command failed to notice the red flags raised along the way.
The other article on her blog is also worth a look, and a good reminder about communication in the workplace. "How to handle conflict"....
https://medium.com/career-pathing/a713b75ad9bd
I believe he was successful in spite of his negative qualities, not because of them. What I mean by this is that we shouldn't worship his negative traits and spin them somehow to be positive qualities in a leader, such as some people have done. He was very much a human being. A highly-intelligent man and visionary in the right place at the right time, surrounded by the right people, making a lot of good, and a few poor, choices. Don't try to reverse-engineer his success so as to duplicate it.
I'm sorry, but you worked at Apple (doesn't matter if it had been only for a week) and you didn't know who it's CEO was? You worked at Apple, and you didn't know who STEVE JOBS was? or had seen a picture/video of him somewhere?
That does NOT compute!
There are plenty of 'Steve' stories (www.folklore.org) out there. Conclusions vary from person to person as to what kind of person was Steve Jobs, but most people wouldn't taken back the time they worked with him/or Apple. Apple's/his contributions to computer history really outweigh the means it took to get there. Sometimes it just takes a jerk (most-likely insane), human being to push people to achieve extra-ordinary things.
Absolutely absurd. She clearly knew who Steve Jobs was. She probably just didn't know what Steve Jobs looked like the year she got the job. There are a great number of people who I know by reputation, know by amazing reputation, but I have no idea what they look like. I know who Larry Page is, I have no idea what he looks like. I have a really really vague idea of what Sergey Brin looks like. But really, who cares what they look like?
She got the job in 2008... My point is, if you were to get a job at xyz company, wouldn't one of your initial moves be to find out who the major players were at your new job were/looked-like? What the environment/culture is? Some research would have suggested that she might expect this kind of behavior from a certain individual? I don't have to number the many reasons WHY you would want to do some research, or care to. Why is that absurd?
Knowing somebody's bio photo may not help you when they cut in front of you in the lunch line. Recognition cues there are very different.
Also, recognition is a lot about context. When you see him in a black turtleneck on stage, you're primed.
I was once visiting a pal Google and ran across Eric Schmidt. Turns out his office was right next to a development team. I could have easily picked him out of a set of photos, but I wasn't expecting him to walk out of a small office in a random part of the building. It wasn't until he was walking away that I said, "Wait a minute. Was that..." And that was seeing his face, rather than the back of his head.
I'm often frustrated at folks who take the wrong lesson from Steve Jobs.
As this piece describes, they look at the dude and take away that they should be jerks because that's how things get done. And that's a terrible lesson.
In my read, as a guy who's been following Apple since he was a kid, there's one principal lesson for leaders and entrepreneurs:
If you care about making exactly what you want, make sure you're the boss.
That's it. You can define the agenda, you can get the right people, you can motivate them according to your style. You get to win all the design arguments. You get to slip the deadlines for quality.
You can definitely be a jerk in that context, but you don't have to.
Steve Jobs is such a striking example because he was highly unusual in the business world, and especially in the tech business, and because he succeeded on such a massive scale. He was basically an artist. I don't mean that as a fawning compliment; I mean that as a description of his personality: for better and for worse. He was driven by a relentless aesthetic vision, he worked himself up into near-manic episodes, he was emotionally labile, and he was perfectionistic.
These are qualities you usually find in the arts. I've worked with and around writers and directors for most of my career, and I've seen "Steve Jobs" in a lot of the more successful ones. Consider the example of Stanley Kubrick, or, more recently, David O. Russell. Now, go watch the infamous David O. Russell temper tantrum video on YouTube. You could just about substitute Steve Jobs for David in that video and believe it.
I don't agree with the idea of the "mad artist," an elite diamond-in-the-rough character who cloisters himself away on manic episodes of hyper-creativity, becomes an alcoholic, and emerges with a genius piece of Art.
Art is a slog. Artists are the ones with enough endurance to churn out shit day after day, refining the best of what they produce. The best artists are social, because that's where the most ideas flow freely.
Most artists I know (writers, musicians, graphic artists) are like this. Perpetuating the myth of the great lone genius is elitist, which is a discriminatory and dangerous ideology.
Well, ok. I suppose anecdotal samples are not the best evidence for either side. I'd like to imagine that most artists are relatively well-adjusted.
Anyway, that's the kind of world I'd like to live in. Everyone can (and should) be an artist to some degree. While I do agree with the fairly obvious point that some people are more talented than others, I reject the idea that there are "genius artists", spikes of talent on an otherwise smooth talent-graph.
EDIT to add: Why Jobs stood out is because the closest equivalent to what he was is a film director. But business is not set up to hand out accolades like Hollywood does. So instead of everyone learning who did what in Apple -- as with film we find out about sound editors, foley artists, etc, etc. -- we just get the face of Jobs.
I didn't say that all artists, or even necessarily "the best" artists, fit a certain personality stereotype. Rather, I'm suggesting that the Steve Jobs personality paradigm is more commonly found among artists, and within the fields of the arts, than it is in business.
"The best artists are social, because that's where the most ideas flow freely."
Strongly disagree with this statement. History abounds with brilliant artists who were socially well adjusted and socially oriented. But it provides just as many examples, if not more, of artists who were introverted to the point of isolation, or who lived tempestuous social lives, or who wrestled with crippling mental illness (there is a shockingly highly incidence of bipolar disorder among history's great novelists, in particular).
I don't think one can make a categorical declarative about the personality types of "most artists," or "the best artists." There is too much variance within the set, and there are too many variables to consider. And "best" is a subjective minefield in its own right.
FWIW, it's an inevitable occurrence of cargo cult management, a sort of post-hoc reasoning, and it's not just young CEOs of tiny startups that are prone to it (but immaturity and inexperience do seem to be correlated with this particular brand of Jobs-envy).
Agreed. I can count multiple people I've worked with who decide that to be a leader/genius/visionary, you first must be a jerk, and that will lead to respect.
If you really are a genius, you're a huge pain to work with, but at least you're worth something.
I wonder if it's the amount of ineptitude or not being on the same page that they may experience on a daily basis - even if it's 1 of 100s of people they interact with? I can see that being very trying when you literally have hundreads of things you need to make sure get done daily.
Its a testament to his legacy that these "You are/not like/dislike Steve Jobs" articles keep popping up. Jobs is what you call an EXTREME OUTLIER. People like him come around once every 30 or 40 years. You don't compare outliers to the mean, because they skew everything.
Nothing anyone ever writes about what to do or what not to do like Steve Jobs is relevant, because he was so far off from any of the data points we have or probably ever will have to matter. You get people like this in history; ones that seemingly do so much wrong yet change the entire world. I don't know if we'll ever have a concrete explanation for it, but for some reason the bad things ARE part of the reason for their success.
Another more common example of this is Jim Morrison (or any really good drug addict musician). Do you have to be a drug addict to be a musician? Of course not. And I seriously doubt they're gonna start dropping acid at Juilliard. But somehow there's a few of them that make it work, and I would argue that if Jim Morrison wasn't a drug addict he wouldn't have been as successful as he was.
If Jobs wasn't such an asshole, he wouldn't be Steve Jobs. There's some mix assholishness and genius (that he got absolutely perfect) that creates a legendary figure.
Agree. Pursuing your Morrison analogy: so many artistic and literary figures are similarly hard to characterize. Polarizing their colleagues and fans, causing denunciations, feuds, embarrassment. Difficult to compare to anyone (i.e., outliers, as you say). Think of someone like Norman Mailer, or Gore Vidal. These people are not role models!
They don't have to be that way, but it's a lot more likely.
After they are gone, asking "were they a good person" is usually not the right question (unless you were close to them).
If you know them mainly through their work, the right question is, "do you value their work?" Here's the relevant quote from Auden:
Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.
Since when does taking drugs and going to heaps of parties, writing classic songs, performing in a band, learning and playing instruments, reading and studying literature, singing, having lots of sex, writing poetry, recording albums, and inspiring millions make someone a "bad person".
Just in case anyone is unclear, the answer to the question "was Jim Morrison a good person" is YES.
Your affection for the man, the legend, has nothing to do with the fact that the iCloud project launch went wrong, or that he was simply an asshole.
The bureaucratic blockages, and the failure of communication along the chain of command, was ultimately the responsibility of this legendary, line-cutting CEO, who you prop up as a God.
In the end, you have no idea whether Jobs could have been even more successful had he not been an asshole.
And please don't draw parallels with Jim Morrison, who died at 27 not 56. Morrison had an alcohol problem more than drugs. That you argue the drugs led to, or were the reason for his success is preposterous.
Steve Jobs' "mix of asshole and genius he got absolutely perfect" you say? Well, I'm glad you've found your idol, but the person who actually worked with him, and saw his methods first hand, doesn't see things through the same rose-colored glasses.
As a general rule, if you're a CEO and you find yourself assembling a group of people who don't directly report to you, so you can tell/yell them how they failed you... stop yourself.
The people who failed your are (a) your direct reports and (b) you yourself. Figure out how the correct information didn't get to you, or how you ignored it, and fix that problem.
There's zero chance a roomful of individual contributors all got it wrong at the same time -- the only way they all got it wrong was that they lacked the proper leadership.
Lets not forget that it's hard to imagine Steve being successful if he hadn't paired with the equally extraordinary Woz. Yes, Jobs got along just fine without Woz, but only after the Apple ][ gave him enough runway to continue pushing his vision. Jobs was special, but he still made errors that would've tanked lesser companies.
It should also be noted that Jobs should be given credit for dragging a reluctant Woz into the spotlight..their estrangement is to me one of the most bizarre and saddest mysteries about Apple.
In which case they should get fired. That's totally unacceptable behavior. If middle management is more concerned about saving face than delivering honest reports, it's their problem.
Many, if not most of Apple's innovations are not Steve's ideas, but from someone working under him. He seems to have learned the wrong lesson.
From the outside, the MobileMe fiasco looks like a standard failed software project, where nobody steps up to say the truth and management doesn't understand/care what's going on. How a huge group inside Apple got to that point is anybody's guess (and would probably make for a great lesson in project management).
As a counterpoint to the "you must be an asshole to be a successful leader" line of thinking, I put forward Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Sergey, et al. I don't think one can say they haven't helmed a successful company and commanded respect, but they are also not infamous for throwing angry tantrums and yelling at people.
Larry's practically so soft spoken you can't hear him sometimes. :)
I thought this was going to be about people who took the Steve Jobs route of design: "I know better than you, you'll use my design and like it, or go to hell."
People see Jobs' success in design and think they too can be successful by being merciless dictators of their design vision. Unfortunately 99% of people don't have Jobs' talent and they end up messing up their projects. (Gnome 3 and Unity, I'm looking at you, though this terrible phenomenon isn't isolated to those projects.)
37 Signals is also guilty of spreading that mindset, perhaps more so because they aggressively blog and write about it all the time and because they are (or at least were) startup darlings.
I've been in this situation before. The my way or the highway attitude is a bad mindset to have when managing engineers. Skilled engineers are free thinkers and will push back on bad design. If someone says they can write something better than your spagetti code you shouldn't yell at them or make them feel inferior. You should allow them to build a system that will be clean and maintainable for the sake of all engineers that have to work on the codebase. Good leaders should know humility and when to admit they are wrong.
That's a huge mistake.It means your not a natural and talented CEO or whatever job you aspire to get.A true leader will set a certain path not because he saw it at someone else but because he feels it's the right way.And most importantly what he feels is usually right.That instinct that very few people have, something that cannot be learned.
And you know what?I strongly believe that if Steve Jobs would've tried to become a technical guy he would've ruined his talent.Maybe some will not understand what I am saying but I believe it is true.
This puts a really interesting spin on the MobileMe story.
I wonder what would have happened if they had yelled back at Steve while he was dressing them down.
I also wonder who turned down their request for a more incremental launch. I'm not enough of an Apple-watcher to know what the org chart looked like, but could it have been Scott Forstall?
No it was not Scott... Scott was too busy with iPhone launch.
The VP in charge was John Martin former Microsoft and Starbucks... he came at .Mac with a bunch of ex-Microsoft and try to run the place most likely like Microsfot, but even worst only trying to show nice UX/UI without caring about performance.
Project Managers/Engineers/QA leads did their job and reported to their upper management (Director and then VP John Martin) but they instead decided to silence everyone and kick a bunch of engineers out of the group.
The cafeteria anecdote is interesting because I've been in line in a cafeteria with a billionaire (former) CEO - Phil Knight. Very personable (he certainly didn't cut in line) and he seemed comfortable in his Nikes and jeans.
Knight built his empire quite differently than Jobs. While it's not great being a developer at Nike, the company's atmosphere is somewhat laid back. Things still get done and they make a lot of money doing it.
I have been many times in the Apple cafeteria back when Steve was there, and I never saw him cutting lines as described.
I am not saying that it did not happen, but I will not make it a statement that he was always like that neither
I never saw him cut in line, either; he was always in a hurry, and could be short, but I didn't see him pull rank, ever. He did almost run me over once.
This lady would be shell-shocked and would need therapy if she ever went into construction. Not just the "boss", anyone that is not an apprentice will be yelling, cursing, and putting down your work on a regular basis.
There's no indication that she couldn't endure the silly dress down, just that it was a dick thing to do. Also, lady's been through a ton of shit, including cervical cancer (https://medium.com/lady-business/67303ff64202). So yeah, I think she could handle a little yelling. I'd do a little research before I put someone down. Guard your ignorance.
So she got a std, went through three procedures to get rid of the cancer, and you think that's a ton of shit? Try telling someone who is going through chemo if three procedures is a ton of shit. GUARD YOUR IGNORANCE.
I think the most mature thing to do here is get into a pissing match about whose cancer is worse rather than just agree that it's all probably worse than being yelled at. Let's meet under the bridge to discuss.
1) How can you be in tech and not know Steve jobs, more so given that you work at apple?
2) Steve was a dick... most of the times, especially when he wanted his way. nothing new.
3) You gripe should be with spineless middle management, not CEOs.
If it really was Steve Jobs's "fault that the MobileMe launch went so poorly" because of "the system that he created," and her team was really as "completely kick-ass" as she says it was, then why has Apple had so much success with so many projects run exactly the same way?
The problem with MobileMe was the engineering management, not the system.
If anything this shows how vulnerable the Apple "system" is to the quality of the people they hire, and why they spend so much effort trying to hire and hold on to A-grade people. That just doesn't jive with the tired lore of Jobs being an asshole all the time. They wouldn't be able to hold on to folks like they have.
I'm not so sure. Apple hires the best and their evaluations of new candidates are rigorous, so I doubt they have idiots running things. We all know there's a lot of the worlds best talent at Apple. But they struggle a lot with the web services they've tried to create. Mobile me, iCloud, game centre, ping, Maps; these have all fallen short of Apples promises. It's a repeating pattern that to me indicates a culture issue inside Apple.
If it was a culture issue it would extend to the successful product teams as well. Those failures point to the people in charge of those groups, not the Apple culture.
Unless by Apple culture we mean giving people lots of responsibility and autonomy.. then, yes. But that's also the key to their successes.
Is it possible that a culture which is effective at producing "good" outcomes in one domain is ineffective at producing "good" outcomes in another? Should managers use the same techniques to manage steelworkers as they do software engineers?
That's a good question, but in this case they're both software engineer domains. Apple does run some pretty successful online services, like the iTunes and app stores. If your theory were true they wouldn't be able to do that. Clearly they do have more problems with services than software/hardware. But that could be a function of the people at the top, not the management process, which but most accounts is minimal.
I'd argue that there are a few aspects of providing products and services for the web that are unique and not relevant to offline software development.
For example, scalability. Most of Apple's problems in this domain have been associated with scaling. iTMS and the App Store both scaled very well over time, but you have to consider the size of their audiences at launch. iTMS launched to a relatively small market of Mac and iPod users. The App Store launched to a relatively small market of iPhone users. Now that both the OS X and iOS user bases are significantly larger, Apple has struggled immensely to launch web services.
When developing for the web, your job is not done until you've released your product into the wild and figured out where the bottlenecks and weak points are with a massive user base. Apple's culture of secrecy doesn't facilitate this part of the process. Until that changes, they will be taking a huge gamble every time the release a new web service or improve an existing one. And, as with iClouds Core Data woes, developers who depend on these services are beginning to lose patience with Apple. This should be a major concern but it appears, from the outside looking in, that it isn't.
From what I know from a few engineers that were directly involved in the MobileMe launch, yes the failure was in the engineering management that did not want to listen to the engineers/project managers/qa folks, but instead wanted to please SJ by showing nice Ajax UI.
This is why the VP of MobileMe was let go soon after: he came from Microsoft/Starbucks, and did surround himself with various ex-microsoft folks.
If you know folks at Apple that were in that group at the time, you will find out that the failure did happen at the VP/Director level that didn't want to listen to the project managers / engineering leads / QA leads.
If the engineering management sucked, then that was also Steve's fault. You're not the iron fist of Apple and get all the credit without taking any of the blame.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 407 ms ] threadI think he was a brilliant artist who made technology less imposing.
"Society" is something he did not contribute much at all to. Workers' rights, work environments, corporate culture, none of these things benefited from Jobs at all; his contributions to them were largely negative.
I really treasure the man because he had a lot of both. Just more to learn from.
I also think that you're missing the broader implication of your parent post: Steve didn't wake up every morning with the intent of embodying some kind of persona -- he just was. Sure, he may have done well to have some training by an HR expert on how to communicate more effectively, but he was just managing a company the way that 1) he knew how and 2) in a way that brought Apple success.
What I admire about Steve's Apple is that it was able to maintain a very clear vision and point of view despite growing exponentially. Look at huge corporations like IBM, HP, Microsoft, etc. What are there goals? Go to IBM's website and try to piece together a vision out of 80000 disparate research projects. HP makes...computers? printers? calculators? fax machines? cameras? Microsoft is a maker of operating systems, but are infamous for their spaghetti-style auxiliary product lines (throw it on the wall and see what sticks). These are three well-respected companies, and I don't know what the hell any of the 3 are about. Apple, by contrast? They're about delivering sleek computing products that are accessible and easy to use. Ask anyone on the street what Apple's mission is and they'd be able to give you some variation on good-looking products that are easy to use.
I want to believe that this has only been a recent development and that he used to be an easier person to deal with in apple's early days, because to be quite frank the only way I could see such an individual being so successful with the attitude he had was if he was just riding the coattails of other forces in the company.
Hopefully someone can enlighten me as to how this kind of person could lead a successful company when everyone fears him and doesn't question anything he says.
http://folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&cha...
Other than that, I don't think being an asshole is a good strategy in general.
Strangely, it was partially because he was so insufferable that Apple became as successful as it is today. Steve Jobs was notorious for being in-your-face brutal about the quality of work being done simply not being good enough. Crying, screaming, throwing tantrums - all these histrionics went hand-in-hand with that.
What's interesting about this is that Steve had two things that most people lack: (1) vision in spades. And more importantly, very good vision. (2) an ability to push people beyond their limits by berating them, but then having really amazing work come out of that process.
Steve Jobs was awe-inspiring because he could dress people down and grill them on details that most other people either didn't notice or would gloss over. If you read many of the books about Steve Jobs, there's a common refrain said by many of those who worked under him.
"I'd never work for him again, but he pushed me to do things I never knew I was capable of."
[EDIT: forgot to add] The reason Steve was able to get away with all this negative behavior is that it produced amazing results. But for most people, being so belligerent and nasty without having an amazing vision to back it up will not get you very far. And, for the most part, such people are completely egomaniacal. (Steve was too, he just happened to be right a lot).
I saw it big time when Walt Mossberg made some comment about "Oh, we can't say that". Steve latched onto him like a pitbull - "Why not?". Walt said "Well, people get annoyed. They write ... letters".
You could just see Steve's thinking - "I don't understand what he's saying, or why he's saying it. Figure out why."
You can also see it, indirectly, if you watch him when he was talking tech. He's well known to not be a great techie, but he knew quite a bit. Maybe he was just well briefed, but I think it was because he knew to ask questions to the guys who were briefing him.
The guy at the top doesn't really DO anything. If the idea is good, and the coders/architects etc are good, a company can be built regardless of how insane the top is.
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/leadership-guilt-f...
Note the difference between guilt and shame. Shame correlates negatively with leadership ability since it makes people shrink from challenges and disconnect from people. This may be why we get many high-functioning sociopaths in position of leadership: sociopaths are the only people who do not feel shame at all.
Steve Jobs was remarkably good at finding new markets. And once you've found one, you can screw up a lot and still succeed. Because at the end of the day, people want to work on a successful product, and they'll put up with a lot of shit to do so.
Steve Jobs probably would've been even more successful had he not been so abrasive; who knows, maybe he wouldn't have gotten thrown out of Apple the first time and we would've gotten the iPhone 15 years earlier rather than the Newton. But he got the thing that matters most right, and then pretty much everything else fell into place despite his flaws.
[1] http://caps.fool.com/Blogs/the-pmarca-guide-to-startups/4104...
(Also: "most dramatic in the history of business"? IBM was about 3 months away from bankruptcy when Lou Gerstner took over - it's not a household name now because their comeback involved pivoting to big-business services, but they're solidly profitable. Intuit nearly died and all the employees went several months without salary in its early days, and now they basically own the accounting-software market.)
Back when nobody had much of a reason to believe in Steve Jobs and his vision, his tyrannical style was what got teams working outrageous hours, sacrificing personal lives, and shipping products that all sane people were convinced couldn't be done. So at a key moment in Apple's history, he provided a push that brought the company great success.
Very few people have that sort of all-pervasive vision; most of the people who think they do are deluding themselves. Most of the time you don't need an asshole on top driving things. Heck, it's possible that even Steve didn't have to be an asshole, that his dickish personality was just a shortcut he used to get things done conveniently.
Plenty of brilliant people have unpleasant or antisocial personalities. Sometimes it's because that's what it takes to make people who don't share your vision do what they're told. Sometimes it's because brilliant people are human too, and as flawed as any of us. Usually it's somewhere in between.
Think about it like this - how many assholes are there running companies? If you assume there are hundreds or thousands, then eventually at least a few of them are going to be wildly successful.
The fact Steve Jobs was so successful does not prove being asshole causes success, it only proves being asshole doesn't prevent you from success. Whether it contributed positively or negatively is to be contested.
He was able to charm those people he needed and knew just how to push their buttons so they'd deliver better work.
Contrary to what people thinks, assholes are not assholes 100% of the time; those people get their way by knowing when to be nice and charming. This is not antonymic with being an narcissistic asshole.
I'm fairly sure a lot of his collaborators had a honeymoon period with him, before he revealed himself to be the management equivalent of the abusive husband.
Unlike the other commenters, I don't think the answer is vision, tho it certainly plays a part.
The reason people kept working with him is because when he wanted to he could be devastatingly charming. He was one of those people that can make you feel like what you have to say is the most important thing in the world. He was so good they coined a whole piece of slang just to describe him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field
We have to stop enabling these sociopaths and vote with our feet (immediately) when this stuff happens.
"Now, regardless of whether no one in the inner sanctum of dudes-that-Steve-listened-to-at-the-time told him all the things we told our bosses, or who-up-the-chain-of-command was not brave enough to suggest we do something not-Apple-like — this was the system that Steve created. He made himself so fearful and terrible that an entire group of amazing, talented, hard working people, ended up getting screamed at wrongfully. It was his fault that the MobileMe launch went so poorly, not ours."
Even if that's not even remotely true (I wouldn't know), I find it a good lesson that a boss could be so terrifying that no-one wants to be honest with them and this flows down the hierarchy to the point of dysfunction. I've heard of it before, but I like the clarity of explanation this nth time around.
The other article on her blog is also worth a look, and a good reminder about communication in the workplace. "How to handle conflict".... https://medium.com/career-pathing/a713b75ad9bd
That does NOT compute!
There are plenty of 'Steve' stories (www.folklore.org) out there. Conclusions vary from person to person as to what kind of person was Steve Jobs, but most people wouldn't taken back the time they worked with him/or Apple. Apple's/his contributions to computer history really outweigh the means it took to get there. Sometimes it just takes a jerk (most-likely insane), human being to push people to achieve extra-ordinary things.
Also, recognition is a lot about context. When you see him in a black turtleneck on stage, you're primed.
I was once visiting a pal Google and ran across Eric Schmidt. Turns out his office was right next to a development team. I could have easily picked him out of a set of photos, but I wasn't expecting him to walk out of a small office in a random part of the building. It wasn't until he was walking away that I said, "Wait a minute. Was that..." And that was seeing his face, rather than the back of his head.
As this piece describes, they look at the dude and take away that they should be jerks because that's how things get done. And that's a terrible lesson.
In my read, as a guy who's been following Apple since he was a kid, there's one principal lesson for leaders and entrepreneurs:
If you care about making exactly what you want, make sure you're the boss.
That's it. You can define the agenda, you can get the right people, you can motivate them according to your style. You get to win all the design arguments. You get to slip the deadlines for quality.
You can definitely be a jerk in that context, but you don't have to.
These are qualities you usually find in the arts. I've worked with and around writers and directors for most of my career, and I've seen "Steve Jobs" in a lot of the more successful ones. Consider the example of Stanley Kubrick, or, more recently, David O. Russell. Now, go watch the infamous David O. Russell temper tantrum video on YouTube. You could just about substitute Steve Jobs for David in that video and believe it.
Art is a slog. Artists are the ones with enough endurance to churn out shit day after day, refining the best of what they produce. The best artists are social, because that's where the most ideas flow freely.
Most artists I know (writers, musicians, graphic artists) are like this. Perpetuating the myth of the great lone genius is elitist, which is a discriminatory and dangerous ideology.
Anyway, that's the kind of world I'd like to live in. Everyone can (and should) be an artist to some degree. While I do agree with the fairly obvious point that some people are more talented than others, I reject the idea that there are "genius artists", spikes of talent on an otherwise smooth talent-graph.
Keep imagining. But great ones aren't. Go read:
Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament by Kay Redfield Jamison http://www.amazon.com/Touched-With-Fire-ebook/dp/B001D1YCM2
The Outsider by Colin Wilson http://www.amazon.com/The-Outsider-Colin-Wilson/dp/087477206...
The Price of Greatness: Resolving the Creativity and Madness Controversy by Arnold M. Ludwig http://www.amazon.com/The-Price-Greatness-Creativity-Controv...
EDIT to add: Why Jobs stood out is because the closest equivalent to what he was is a film director. But business is not set up to hand out accolades like Hollywood does. So instead of everyone learning who did what in Apple -- as with film we find out about sound editors, foley artists, etc, etc. -- we just get the face of Jobs.
"The best artists are social, because that's where the most ideas flow freely."
Strongly disagree with this statement. History abounds with brilliant artists who were socially well adjusted and socially oriented. But it provides just as many examples, if not more, of artists who were introverted to the point of isolation, or who lived tempestuous social lives, or who wrestled with crippling mental illness (there is a shockingly highly incidence of bipolar disorder among history's great novelists, in particular).
I don't think one can make a categorical declarative about the personality types of "most artists," or "the best artists." There is too much variance within the set, and there are too many variables to consider. And "best" is a subjective minefield in its own right.
If you really are a genius, you're a huge pain to work with, but at least you're worth something.
If you're not, you just look like an ass.
So, maybe the rule isn't if you're a jerk you're a genius, but instead, if you're a genius, be a jerk. You just probably aren't a genius.
Nothing anyone ever writes about what to do or what not to do like Steve Jobs is relevant, because he was so far off from any of the data points we have or probably ever will have to matter. You get people like this in history; ones that seemingly do so much wrong yet change the entire world. I don't know if we'll ever have a concrete explanation for it, but for some reason the bad things ARE part of the reason for their success.
Another more common example of this is Jim Morrison (or any really good drug addict musician). Do you have to be a drug addict to be a musician? Of course not. And I seriously doubt they're gonna start dropping acid at Juilliard. But somehow there's a few of them that make it work, and I would argue that if Jim Morrison wasn't a drug addict he wouldn't have been as successful as he was.
If Jobs wasn't such an asshole, he wouldn't be Steve Jobs. There's some mix assholishness and genius (that he got absolutely perfect) that creates a legendary figure.
They don't have to be that way, but it's a lot more likely.
After they are gone, asking "were they a good person" is usually not the right question (unless you were close to them).
If you know them mainly through their work, the right question is, "do you value their work?" Here's the relevant quote from Auden:
Just in case anyone is unclear, the answer to the question "was Jim Morrison a good person" is YES.
The bureaucratic blockages, and the failure of communication along the chain of command, was ultimately the responsibility of this legendary, line-cutting CEO, who you prop up as a God.
In the end, you have no idea whether Jobs could have been even more successful had he not been an asshole.
And please don't draw parallels with Jim Morrison, who died at 27 not 56. Morrison had an alcohol problem more than drugs. That you argue the drugs led to, or were the reason for his success is preposterous.
Steve Jobs' "mix of asshole and genius he got absolutely perfect" you say? Well, I'm glad you've found your idol, but the person who actually worked with him, and saw his methods first hand, doesn't see things through the same rose-colored glasses.
The people who failed your are (a) your direct reports and (b) you yourself. Figure out how the correct information didn't get to you, or how you ignored it, and fix that problem.
There's zero chance a roomful of individual contributors all got it wrong at the same time -- the only way they all got it wrong was that they lacked the proper leadership.
It should also be noted that Jobs should be given credit for dragging a reluctant Woz into the spotlight..their estrangement is to me one of the most bizarre and saddest mysteries about Apple.
It's about utter failure of middle management, and how they can totally fuck both sides of the company.
The lesson here is not "don't be an asshole" (although you shouldn't), it's "don't hire ass-kissing assholes".
And she makes it clear in the article that she's a PM, not a SWE.
Just some dude who didn't write an article.
From the outside, the MobileMe fiasco looks like a standard failed software project, where nobody steps up to say the truth and management doesn't understand/care what's going on. How a huge group inside Apple got to that point is anybody's guess (and would probably make for a great lesson in project management).
Larry's practically so soft spoken you can't hear him sometimes. :)
People see Jobs' success in design and think they too can be successful by being merciless dictators of their design vision. Unfortunately 99% of people don't have Jobs' talent and they end up messing up their projects. (Gnome 3 and Unity, I'm looking at you, though this terrible phenomenon isn't isolated to those projects.)
37 Signals is also guilty of spreading that mindset, perhaps more so because they aggressively blog and write about it all the time and because they are (or at least were) startup darlings.
And you know what?I strongly believe that if Steve Jobs would've tried to become a technical guy he would've ruined his talent.Maybe some will not understand what I am saying but I believe it is true.
I wonder what would have happened if they had yelled back at Steve while he was dressing them down.
I also wonder who turned down their request for a more incremental launch. I'm not enough of an Apple-watcher to know what the org chart looked like, but could it have been Scott Forstall?
Project Managers/Engineers/QA leads did their job and reported to their upper management (Director and then VP John Martin) but they instead decided to silence everyone and kick a bunch of engineers out of the group.
Knight built his empire quite differently than Jobs. While it's not great being a developer at Nike, the company's atmosphere is somewhat laid back. Things still get done and they make a lot of money doing it.
If it really was Steve Jobs's "fault that the MobileMe launch went so poorly" because of "the system that he created," and her team was really as "completely kick-ass" as she says it was, then why has Apple had so much success with so many projects run exactly the same way?
The problem with MobileMe was the engineering management, not the system.
If anything this shows how vulnerable the Apple "system" is to the quality of the people they hire, and why they spend so much effort trying to hire and hold on to A-grade people. That just doesn't jive with the tired lore of Jobs being an asshole all the time. They wouldn't be able to hold on to folks like they have.
Unless by Apple culture we mean giving people lots of responsibility and autonomy.. then, yes. But that's also the key to their successes.
Edit: steel works -> steelworkers
For example, scalability. Most of Apple's problems in this domain have been associated with scaling. iTMS and the App Store both scaled very well over time, but you have to consider the size of their audiences at launch. iTMS launched to a relatively small market of Mac and iPod users. The App Store launched to a relatively small market of iPhone users. Now that both the OS X and iOS user bases are significantly larger, Apple has struggled immensely to launch web services.
When developing for the web, your job is not done until you've released your product into the wild and figured out where the bottlenecks and weak points are with a massive user base. Apple's culture of secrecy doesn't facilitate this part of the process. Until that changes, they will be taking a huge gamble every time the release a new web service or improve an existing one. And, as with iClouds Core Data woes, developers who depend on these services are beginning to lose patience with Apple. This should be a major concern but it appears, from the outside looking in, that it isn't.
This is why the VP of MobileMe was let go soon after: he came from Microsoft/Starbucks, and did surround himself with various ex-microsoft folks.
If you know folks at Apple that were in that group at the time, you will find out that the failure did happen at the VP/Director level that didn't want to listen to the project managers / engineering leads / QA leads.