The Story of Steve Jobs: An Inspiration or a Cautionary Tale?

http://www.wired.com/business/2012/07/ff_stevejobs/all/

by vvnraman • 14 years ago

102 103 14 years ago

If we're still talking about him half a year after he's gone he must have gotten something right. I think something that techies don't see is that Jobs real gem is Pixar, a company that Lucas couldn't make work and a company that became Disney's animation studio. My bet is that as these devices go from being cool gadgets to the mundane that Jobs will be remembered for those Pixar films which will seem charming even if their technique is crude next to animation in the year 2032.

phaus• 14 years ago

No one doubts that he did some things right, but that doesn't excuse the fact that he mistreated nearly everyone who helped him make Apple the company it is today.

He should have been fired when he couldn't get along with anyone at Atari and he should have been fired the first time he ever called anyone a "shithead" at Apple.

I've worked for an abusive boss before, and no amount of success can excuse the fact that as a supervisor and as a human being he was a complete failure.

If someone thinks that I am being unreasonable, consider the fact that I have a disorder that basically acts as a get out of jail free card for me to be a total dick to everyone, yet I still find the time and energy to be respectful to everyone whom I work with, peers, subordinates, and even my abusive former boss.

sneak• 14 years ago

> consider the fact that I have a disorder that basically acts as a get out of jail free card for me to be a total dick to everyone

So did Steve - it's called "the ability to see a short distance into the future".

Someone• 14 years ago

Complete failure? Are you arguing that the products that came out during his reign are below par? Above par despite his supervision? Not worth the psychological damage he did?

I doubt Apple would be where it is today if he had played mr. Nice.

Also, is there data that supports a claim that, e.g. churn was higher under his leadership than under other managers in similar situations? I am not aware of any, and it would not surprise me if there is data supporting the claim that churn was lower (in some sense just as Napoleon was able to breed loyalty, even though he led his soldiers to war again and again). For example, from what I have read about Steve, when working for him, he could be very harsh, but you would not have to worry about being shot in the back. That is worth something.

jackbravo• 14 years ago

And yet, I remember seeing an article here on Hacker News where one of pixar's first employees said Pixar was not great because of Jobs, but in spite of him

k-mcgrady• 14 years ago

I remember reading that but if Jobs hadn't have taken a risk and continued ploughing nearly all of his money into Pixar it wouldn't be around today. I think I read that he put nearly all of his money into it, to the stage he didn't have much left, and at that point Toy Story came along.

I think the article you are referring to was about the actual movie making process. If Jobs had access to that side of things he would have exercised control over it and people like Lasseter wouldn't have been able to create the work they did.

soperj2• 14 years ago

The early guys at apple have said the same thing. Alot of the stories Andy Hertzfeld wrote on www.folklore.org describe pretty well how much of a "genius" Steve was.

edit: here's a good one. http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s... by Date&detail=medium

majormajor• 14 years ago

He certainly built multiple successful companies, but he's not the only one who's done that. Few people have done what he did with Apple the second time—that's what he got really right, in terms of why people are still talking about him so much—turning the company around not just into success but into a behemoth, but if you want to know how he did that, I'd look at what changed. He was always an abusive manager/colleague, yet that didn't make Apple in the early 80s or NeXT in the 90s dominate their markets in the same way Apple of the last decade did with the iPhone/iPad. The vision, the timing, the perfectionism... none of that depends on also being a colossal jerk.

biot• 14 years ago

  > If we're still talking about him half a year after he's
  > gone he must have gotten something right.

Godwin might disagree with this logic. :)

pooriaazimi3• 14 years ago

He almost did nothing for Pixar, except pouring money into it quarter after quarter and using Toy Story's success to rise again. He was a very big visionary, a great manager and he deserves every bit of praise he gets for what he did at Apple in his second coming, but his role at Pixar was only to negotiate and give them money; not that it's an unimportant thing. Pixar would most certainly not exist today if it wasn't for Jobs, but the creative mind at Pixar was John Lasseter.

Source: I've read two books about Pixar, more than 10 about Jobs/Apple and watched well over 20 documentaries about these subjects.

michaelpinto2• 14 years ago

Actually what he did right with Pixar was to let the creative people be creative. I realize that sounds like nothing, and yes it is nothing -- but it's everything and here's why:

A bad producer or studio head who isn't a creative will always get his or her paws all over the film projects and tend to ruin them. Or worse yet select projects not on the creative merits but on a perceived notion of how they'll do in the box office -- the result is all of the bad special effects and franchise movies we see today.

Instead Steve had the rare courage to do NOTHING except let the creative people "make a great film". That's something that's very rare in Hollywood and deserves a ton of credit...

CamperBob22• 14 years ago

Standing up to the stuffed suits at Disney would have been no job for the fainthearted. Jobs may not have done anything at Pixar, but he certainly did a lot for them.

VinzO2• 14 years ago

Could you recommend a good book about pixar?

snowwrestler2• 14 years ago

We're still talking about him, and so are his co-workers. Jonny Ive, for instance, obviously adored him, as did Tim Cook, Phil Schiller, etc. These were the folks who worked most closely with Jobs and according to the book were subject to his scorn and mind games. Yet they speak of him in glowing tones. So I think the story is much more complicated than "be mean to people if you are driven." Jobs could apparently also be very supportive and endearing to those for whom he developed respect.

victork2• 14 years ago

I have read Steve Jobs biography and this is definitively a cautionary tale and a great warning for anybody, but for other reasons that stated in this article.

I am no Apple fan, as a matter of fact I don't like the look and feel of their product but I gained a great admiration for Steve Jobs because he seemed like a man in immense suffering. I'm not talking about the obvious physical pain of cancer and all his crazy diets ( we share something in common ) but mentally he seemed like a sad sad person. I don't want to do bar stool psychology but it seemed pretty obvious that he was missing something in his life and he probably never found it.

But he's the paragon of the self made man, in the Ayn Rand sense and people ( especially here, where there's something approaching a cult ) look up to that and as soon as they encounter problems they imagine themselves in the shoes of this man and try to act tough... or act Steve Jobs.

If there's one paradoxical lesson that should be taken from his biography it is that you should never to listen to anybody that tells you how to act, don't try to fit in a mold, even in the mold of a great man, because you fundamentally don't have the same substance and thus you won't come out the same way: ie successful nor happy. Be your own man, forge your own mold and challenge the statu quo.

adavies42• 14 years ago

> But he's the paragon of the self made man, in the Ayn Rand sense [...]

I was just thinking this. I'm sure Jobs hated Rand, given his politics, but he sounds an awful lot like Hank Rearden in TFA.

s_baby3• 14 years ago

As a Buddhist maybe not. Buddhism and Enlightenment Era ideology are both anchored in the idea of the "self". There's a great synergy between the two. To get what I mean look at the former CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey. The staunchest of Libertarians, a legitimate Buddhist, and a pioneer of "Core Values" Branding( e.g Apple ).

seehafer• 14 years ago

According to the Woz, Atlas Shrugged influenced Steve:

http://www.quora.com/Steve-Jobs/How-influential-was-Atlas-Sh...

stcredzero5• 14 years ago

...I gained a great admiration for Steve Jobs because he seemed like a man in immense suffering

Russian? Hungarian?

it seemed pretty obvious that he was missing something in his life and he probably never found it.

Does it seem that he was in some sense, "alone?"

But he's the paragon of the self made man, in the Ayn Rand sense...

Many of Ayn Rand's characters seem to me to be tortured or somehow alone.

saraid2164• 14 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byronic_hero

CamperBob22• 14 years ago

I am no Apple fan, as a matter of fact I don't like the look and feel of their product but I gained a great admiration for Steve Jobs because he seemed like a man in immense suffering.

People tend to forget that the word "passion" itself is rooted in suffering and sacrifice. By (classical) definition you can't be passionate about something unless you sacrifice for it.

saraid2164• 14 years ago

Thank you. This is something I try to explain to people who think passion is merely generic but forceful emotion. Similarly, compassion isn't airy-fairy altruism but rather the capacity to suffer-with.

DirtyCalvinist• 14 years ago

It seems to me that being dictatorial and downright mean only works if you are right about whatever you've decided to be dictatorial about. So when Jobs dropped that iPod prototype in water to prove that it could be smaller still, this helped the iPod's success largely because Jobs was right about the smallness, not because he berated his engineers. That ability to be right about what people wanted, not his apparently capricious and unpleasant demeanor, is why we still talk about him a year after his death.

Incidentally, it is also the difficult to reproduce part of his success.

mrich• 14 years ago

Well said. Let's not produce more abusive bosses who, when their "brilliant strategy" doesn't work, just think they have to berate their employees harder.

mirsadm• 14 years ago

In my opinion the success of Apple with the more recent products is the only reason most people tolerated his shitty behaviour. It is easy to stay positive when everything is going so well.

imgabe5• 14 years ago

One of the things that struck me while reading Jobs' biography was how frequently he cried. Numerous times throughout he's described as weeping, sometimes at momentous occasions, like getting fired from Apple, and sometimes over relatively trivial matters. Think about it. When was the last time you saw a grown person cry about something at work? Ever?

I think one of the things that made Steve Steve, and made him capable of doing the things he did, was how deeply he felt things. When a design wasn't right it actually seemed to cause him great emotional pain. People in emotional pain tend to lash out angrily. Just like you might forgive your spouse for saying something awful in the heat of an argument (I honestly believe it affected him on that deep of an emotional level), I think people forgave Steve because they knew that even when he was being vicious, it wasn't because he literally hated them. He was just deeply, personally wounded that his expectations weren't being met.

Now, it's not normal for anyone to care that deeply about what most people consider minor details, like the angle a corner is beveled at or something like that, but he did. And that level of caring about the details is what made Apple's products great.

Think about the last time anyone has done any work for you. Was there anything that was off? Probably there was. Most people weigh the benefit of fixing whatever minor problem there might be against the hassle of explaining what's wrong and waiting for it to be redone and the possibility of insulting the person who did the work and decide it's not worth it. You probably do this without even thinking about it. Obviously, for Steve it was always worth it, and that probably had a lot do with how emotionally sensitive he was.

It's easy to look back and say that you could have achieved the same results while being a nicer person, but I think it's easier said than done. I'm not saying it's impossible in general, but I think the deeply emotional place that Steve's sense of design came from made it nearly impossible for him. The important thing to take away was how much he was able to achieve because he cared so deeply, not the tyrannical aspect. That was a side effect. If you seek to emulate his tyranny (because you like being a tyrant, maybe) assuming that you'll get the same results, you're bound to be disappointed.

hosh• 14 years ago

Thanks for writing this. It expresses how I see this. Steve Jobs went to the East looking for something, and it does not surprise me that he can go deep into these emotions and be OK with it.

nsns2• 14 years ago

What you describe is very childish behavior, infantile even, but I believe you are right about Jobs being like that, and I think this might explain why he was so good at making toys adults crave like children. But we shouldn't idolize someone like that, IMHO, this isn't healthy conduct. Even if he has made a lot of money during certain periods of his life, it does not vindicate his behavior or make him a proper role model. Being a responsible adult is a lot harder, and there are things more important than financial profit.

TheSOB88• 14 years ago

Maybe we can idolize him and not seek to become him, but try to be somewhere in the middle.

brandall10• 14 years ago

Who said anything about money? He changed the game multiple times in multiple industries, and had his greatest successes as he was fighting death. If you compare his net impact vs. actual wealth he was a pauper... and esp if you look at his stake in Apple, as the majority of his wealth was from Pixar/Disney.

There are too many 'responsible adults' wallowing in mediocrity who more than anything else actually drag the system down. Maybe you can look up to them as role models on how to raise a family (although I personally would disagree as the majority fail at that anyway)... but how to leave a mark on this world and push for excellence, I will look to people like Steve, Musk, Frank Lloyd Wright, Edison/Tesla, etc. Please don't conflate the two.

imgabe5• 14 years ago

It is childish. I think it would be nearly impossible for a normal adult to act that way, because part of growing up and becoming an adult is learning to repress emotional outbursts like that and most people are not even going to feel very strongly about design details in the first place.

The lesson is that design details do matter, and when you pay attention to them it has a cumulative effect that results in a much better product. You do have to develop a certain amount of callousness to pursue your vision. You don't have to scream and berate people, but when you're sending a design back for the tenth time, you're bound to start thinking "Gosh, this designer is going to think I'm an asshole." A lot of people will just accept something that's not exactly what they want just to avoid potential bad feelings from someone else.

The emotional aspect made it easy and natural for Steve to pursue the design until it was exactly what he wanted. Indeed, it probably made it nearly impossible for him to do anything else. The rest of us have to consciously override social impulses that value getting along and being liked higher than small details. The upside is that we get to manage our response so we can motivate with something other than fear.

stcredzero5• 14 years ago

> What you describe is very childish behavior...I think this might explain why he was so good at making toys adults crave like children.

The key is not the childishness. The key is that he cared about important things in the context of making and delivering a great product.

I've played at a number of Irish Traditional sessions around the country. In one town I lived, there was a very bad drummer who was there every week without fail. No one would say anything out of politeness. After about a half a year, I took it on myself to say something, not in a mean but in a matter of fact way. Her ego was bruised, but on doing that several other musicians immediately thanked me. It seems that everyone there prioritized politeness over the level of musicianship possible, even though they knew it compromised quality.

I think it's entirely possible to change one's priorities without being mean or childish, even to the extent of inverting socially accepted priority orderings. Not everyone is going to appreciate what you're doing, but if your heart is in the right place, and you are behaving constructively towards your craft, your customers may well appreciate you.

(As much as possible, leave out the childishness.)

EDIT: You can also invert this -- let emotional baggage leak into your "concern for craft" and your behavior will very much be counted against you.

dedward2• 14 years ago

Doesn't need idolizing - he made himself an icon, and there's the right-place-right-time factor. His biography never says "Be like me" by any stretch of the imagination.

Nobody is a perfect role model - everyone has faults. Is his attention to detail something we shouldn't forget? I think so. Is childish behavior the way to lead people? Not if it means tantrums and inappropriate responses - but then again, we may lose to much of the child in all of us when we hit the corporate world... there should be room for some playtime and wonder in the things we build.... nobody is perfect.

It's awfully hard to say a billionaire who made such an impact on people all over the place and died far too young isn't someone we should learn a bit about if we can, is it? (There are more out there than just Steve Jobs, of course... biographies exist. Jobs is just fascinating and current.)

jamesbritt• 14 years ago

Was it Steve Jobs himself who put in the time and made the extra effort to see that something was Just So, or was it the person Jobs ordered to put in the extra time and make the extra effort?

There's a world of difference between doing the work yourself and to keep doing it until it's exactly right, and demanding that other people make sure that what they do is done exactly right.

The important thing to take away was how much he was able to achieve because he cared so deeply, not the tyrannical aspect.

It seems more like he was able to get others to achieve so much because of the tyrannical aspect.

koglerjs2• 14 years ago

In my experience "the rules of social engagement" are as often used to entangle and obstruct as they are to create civility. Think of "foot-in-the-door" phenomenon.

Sometimes rudeness is respect, especially if it's an honest communication.

Jobs needed an on-time supplier, and it was arguably worth the cost of a legal battle in order to get one.

As others have said, though, it spawns imitators that think "Steve berated his employees, so I can too."

fusiongyro2• 14 years ago

> Sometimes rudeness is respect, especially if it's an honest communication.

I disagree, you fucking piece of shit.

koglerjs2• 14 years ago

See, I'd still buy this scummy dirtbag of an excuse for a human being a beer. ;)

nollidge• 14 years ago

I just wonder if he was happy.

ScottBurson• 14 years ago

This seems like one occasion when a headline question is correctly answered "yes" :-)

debacle• 14 years ago

How long are blogs going to milk the Steve Jobs thing?

mitchty• 14 years ago

Why can't it be both? The one thing I gathered was to be passionate, but it really seemed like he wished he had more involvement with his children in the end.

He was a person, complex in many ways. I choose to follow Bruce Lee's advice, take whatever good you can learn from his life and apply it. Be that the manager style if it works, or the tale of being a better parent. I reject this dichotomy.

snowwrestler2• 14 years ago

Just reacting to the first anecdote: Breaking a contract that is not optimal for your business is not the same thing as breaking a social norm like parking in a handicap space or berating people regularly.

Contracts exist to serve the business. If you are smart you will employ great lawyers to make sure your contracts are at least equitable, if not advantageous to your company. To do this effectively, the lawyers will provide advice and create internal rules.

However if you are not careful the lawyers can backdoor themselves into making business decisions. The optimal rate at which parts are shipped is a business decision. If you need to break a contract to improve the business, then break it. Calculate the risks and costs, then break it if it makes business sense. That's what Apple did and the results obviously speak for themselves. Their supply chain is the envy of the entire world.

padmanabhan01• 14 years ago

This article is Bullshit. It is heights of insanity that a no name wired writer can just assume himself to be qualified to make judgements on someone who has had a huge impact (positive) on the world. I use an iPhone, iPad and a mac and I can vouch that my life is better with them than what I would imagine it to be without them. And what is the accusation? that he bullied a few? for making hundreds of millions of lives better? bullied as in asking people who are free to quit whenever to work more? The writer of this article is nuts

rotw2• 14 years ago

From the article:

> Jobs has become a Rorschach test, a screen onto which entrepreneurs and executives can project a justification of their own lives: choices they would have made anyway, difficult traits they already possess. “Everyone has their own private Steve Jobs,” Sutton says. “It usually tells you a lot about them—and little about Jobs.”

This isn't about Jobs being good or bad for the world. It's about his managerial legacy. Essentially, nearly every account of Jobs' life devolves into a hagiography, espousing subjectively his deeds, trying to fit them into a theology of sorts, which distorts generations of entrepreneurs' views of Jobs. Many misread him being great because he was an asshole, but overlook the fact that if he was right, it's because he was right that the product succeeded. Not because he was an asshole.

hcarvalhoalves• 14 years ago

You sound mad.

crag3• 14 years ago

Wasn't he a buddhist? Not that that means anything. Buddhist's are more then capable of being shit-heads.

But if he was a practicing buddhist.. wouldn't he had recognized what leads to suffering? Desire of course. Desire to be be perfect. Or maybe his desire to prove he was right?

There are other words I'd use to describe him (and several other corporate giants); arrogance comes to mind.

Sometimes these men think there really did do it all on their own. Why I love hearing a billionaire say, "I'm a self made man". Oh really? So all the people who worked for you, cooked for you, kept your schedule, managed your companies, investments and life didn't do a damn thing? Really?

And that's what I think of Steve Jobs. No doubting he was brilliant and had amazing taste. But he wasn't the most important person in the room. At it's start Woz built Apple. Steve just sold it. And today, he didn't design the products, but he had vision of what he wanted. And many of us wanted the same thing. He was a damn good salesman. And he had a great ability of keeping everyone on focus. But he wasn't the most important person in the room. Apple could (and it does) go on without him. And I think he knew it. And it dogged him all his life.

I'm also believe in karma. And the way he died,, his long battle/suffering - leads me to believe he had debts to pay. I only hope, in the end he died clean.

mcantelon• 14 years ago

>Why I love hearing a billionaire say, "I'm a self made man". Oh really? So all the people who worked for you, cooked for you, kept your schedule, managed your companies, investments and life didn't do a damn thing? Really?

The individualist "self made man" notion seems a conceit designed to introduce the concept of aristocracy, which humans seem drawn to, to modern capitalism.

pyre• 14 years ago

aristocracy? The aristocracy were hardly 'self-made.' It was inherited. While a 'self-made' billionaire can't claim to have no employees, he probably did work for his money.

smsm423• 14 years ago

The idea of "self made man" is directly opposed to the concept of aristocracy - which derives its uniqueness and elevation from belonging to a long row of elevated ancestors and to a long-living tradition. No aristocrate would ever call oneself "self-made" - that's the same as calling oneself an impostor or a fraud. One can be made an aristocrat - e.g. by a royalty - and fresh-minted aristocrats always were considered the lowest form of aristocracy by the "old" and "true" ones, the length of the family tree always was the main source of aristocratic pride. But one can never be a "self-made" aristocrat, it's a direct contradiction in terms and concepts. I'm sorry, but your theory makes no sense at all.

smsm423• 14 years ago

Self-made man doesn't mean nobody did anything for you. If an olympic athlete wins a race, he didn't build the stadium, didn't sew his uniforms and shoes, didn't grow and squeeze his morning juice drink with his own hands, didn't build the car he used to get to the stadium and didn't personally extract the oil and made it into the gasoline to power his vehicle. All these things are done by other people. That does not mean these other people share the success of the olympic athlete and should get gold medals too, even though if he had no shoes, no clothes, no food, no car and no gasoline, he probably couldn't win the even he won.

There's a thing called separation of labor. It is one of the biggest advantage of civilization, one of the biggest thing separating people from most of the animals (some animals have primitive separation of labor, but most do not). It allows people to be much more prosperous and successful by offloading many tasks to other people and gaining enormous specialization and scale advantages. We - as the human race - literally could not exist in the current form without it.

However the existence of the separation of labor does not mean that we owe fruits of our labor to every other person on the planet, even if for many of those it is possible to trace their part to something you used to produce these fruits. People invented money for exactly this reason - if you want a car, you pay money for a car, and since that moment you do not owe anything to the car maker. The car is yours, and if you drive it to work that makes you a billionaire - it's your billion, not car maker's. If you hire somebody, you pay them money. If somebody cooked a meal for you and you became a billionaire, you owe him a decent cook's salary, but you do not owe him your success.

crag3• 14 years ago

" If an olympic athlete wins a race, he didn't build the stadium, didn't sew his uniforms and shoes, didn't grow and squeeze his morning juice drink with his own hands,"

Ahh, but he had a coach/trainer. And financial backing - allowing him to buy the equipment and travel that was need to compete.

No one lives in a vacuum. No one.

gruseom3• 14 years ago

I'm also believe in karma. And the way he died,, his long battle/suffering - leads me to believe he had debts to pay.

No human has the right to judge any other human this way. Since you believe in karma, hadn't you better stop?

crag3• 14 years ago

"No human has the right to judge any other human..."

I wasn't judging. I was making an observation. And we "humans" have the right to judge ourselves. :)

saraid2164• 14 years ago

Zen and the Art of Divebombing:

http://www.friesian.com/divebomb.htm

alaskamiller2• 14 years ago

If you believe in MBTI, Steve Jobs is pegged as an ENTJ.

This is the brief definition of an ENTJ:

"They tend to be self-driven, motivating, energetic, assertive, confident, and competitive. They generally take a big-picture view and build a long-term strategy. They typically know what they want and may mobilize others to help them attain their goals. ENTJs are often sought out as leaders due to an innate ability to direct groups of people. Unusually influential and organized, they may sometimes judge others by their own tough standards, failing to take personal needs into account."

Here's the kicker:

ENTJs are among the rarest of types, accounting for about 2–5% of those who are formally tested.

A generation of people are going to try really hard to emulate a cult status figure's personality but at the end of the day that's all it really is: a bad fidelity copy.

Don't live to be Steve Jobs, be you. And if it so happens that you turn out awesome then great. If not, then work on acceptance.

stcredzero5• 14 years ago

> A generation of people are going to try really hard to emulate a cult status figure's personality but at the end of the day that's all it really is: a bad fidelity copy.

Reminds me of what happens when I use Pandora. Instead of revealing a bunch of bands I like, Pandora gives me a bunch of bands that sound like bands that I like.

Don't imitate. Attune yourself to value.

alaskamiller2• 14 years ago

I never made that connection but that indeed is why I don't use Pandora anymore.

vectorpush2• 14 years ago

>Pandora gives me a bunch of bands that sound like bands that I like.

That's a feature, not a bug.

Aloha• 14 years ago

I think there are good examples to take from Jobs. It's all about a time and a place, sometimes you want to drive to resolution, and be a dick, because that is what will produce the most efficient best result, and for other things, good enough _is_ good enough, and additional pushing will not result in substantive improvement. Wisdom is the ability to pick those two situation apart.

stcredzero5• 14 years ago

> Soon after Steve Jobs returned to Apple as CEO in 1997, he decided that a shipping company wasn’t delivering spare parts fast enough. The shipper said it couldn’t do better, and it didn’t have to: Apple had signed a contract...But the lesson here might make us uncomfortable: Violate any norm of social or business interaction that stands between you and what you want.

I've heard that many Chinese regard contracts more as guidelines than as iron-clad rule sets to be interpreted like bytecode. The relationship between the parties and their needs are more important than the letter of the law. (Or the letters on the contract.) By this set of norms, the shipper was the transgressor in this case, and Steve did the right thing.

Take care of the customer, or someone else will.

sopooneo• 14 years ago

Did no one ever pull back and just punch him in the face? If not, why? Even the worst possible repercussions don't stop some people. And if so, did it have any effect?

state• 14 years ago

There are a number of things that I find annoying about stories like this about Jobs — but the most pronounced is that I doubt he would have condoned his own behavior as seen from the outside. Jobs' attitude is a side-effect of his convictions.

I think people seem to overlook how a personality like that actually works. Oftentimes this happens while overtly being assholes in an attempt to imitate someone they admire but could probably never become.

stretchwithme• 14 years ago

The market is absolutely ruthless. It doesn't sugarcoat things for you or hold your hand.

Startups know this and act accordingly.

Large organizations do not necessarily know this or act accordingly. There are too many layers insulating people from reality. But they ability to scale processes and that's why they survive.

Steve pushed reality hard and got through more of those layers. And that organization can really execute as a result.

That was just one of his abilities.

cageface2• 14 years ago

In the ten years I worked at Pixar I had the pleasure of seeing or hearing a couple of Jobs famous tantrums first hand. At least in Pixar's case, they always seemed childish and destructive to me.

Meanwhile, Ed Catmull, the CEO, commanded the instant respect of absolutely everybody in the company despite being unfailingly polite and soft spoken because we all had such enormous regard for his intellect and maturity.

codinghorror• 14 years ago

Well, this proves that you can be childish and destructive and still accomplish amazing things, right? So.. er.. yay?

(And yes, Ed Catmull is awesome.)

cageface2• 14 years ago

What I saw from Jobs at Pixar seemed largely counterproductive. Maybe it worked better at Apple?

danbmil99• 14 years ago

The outline of his personality should be quite familiar to anyone who has worked with a famous (or even semi-famous, or just in their own mind) creative person in a field such as music, fashion, movies, TV, publishing, or high-end food. It's the classic prima donna genius-in-pain trope.

I suppose it's just somewhat rare in tech, where you more often see the Brian Wilson, asperger type of personality -- the introverted genius-in-a-thick-shell.

projectileboy• 14 years ago

Whenever I read these articles tha have arisen lately about Steve Jobs' managerial style, I'm surprised that no one mentions the most obvious thing: the people working for Jobs were building the iPhone, and the iPad, and some of the other greatest products the world has ever seen. Why on earth would the executive of a second-rate financial services software company (or whatever) think that they could motivate people in the same way?

keeptrying• 14 years ago

How many of your bosses were assholes?

Asshole wise I think Jobs might have been on the gentler side than some I've worked for.

Ever worked in a bank for a trading desk or a trader? That trader will make Jobs look like father christmas.

Bezos, the old bill gates, jobs,Steve balmier, marissa Mayer, all of my bosses except 2, Bloomberg, - all mutherfucking ahole bosses. Hell During my first stint, I sucked at it too. Don't single out jobs here.

The Only one who has grown up is Gates. In my mind Gates beats all these guys fr the amazing foundation he as created and how he has reinvented himself completely and the vigorous passion with which he is helping humanity.

I never thought I'd defend gates-I hae windows mre than anyone I know.

nacker2• 14 years ago

The lasting cultural influence of Jobs seems to me to be that he made ruthless Machiavellian sociopathy acceptable to a large segment of the population. What does it really matter how shiny and "faux-zen" the design of the perishable toys he sold was? He was to business ethics what Kiefer Sutherland in the show "24" was to law enforcement.

nacker2• 14 years ago

No one said it better than RMS:

    “Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.

    As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, “I’m not glad he’s dead, but I’m glad he’s gone.” Nobody deserves to have to die – not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs’ malign influence on people’s computing.

    Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective.”

The Story of Steve Jobs: An Inspiration or a Cautionary Tale?

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