3 ms·
I can't speak for academia - it's an island I have no wish to ever visit again. Great companies or teams aren't happy accidents. They require leadership, visi
by krav 16y ago
I can't speak for academia - it's an island I have no wish to ever visit again.
Great companies or teams aren't happy accidents. They require leadership, vision, and execution. I wouldn't want to work with Jobs - but I admire what he's done. Apple would not be here without his vision and leadership.
On leadership, yeah, I do believe that ultimately, a leader is responsible and accountable. Whether it's the leader of a fire-team in Iraq, the leader of a country, or a four-man startup in Mountain View.
My very personal view: we'd be better off as a society if leaders were held responsible for success and failure. I see too many leaders / ceos / politicians taking credit for success and pointing to anybody but them for failures.
- elblanco 16y agoWhat bothers me about the tone of his statement is that it puts down anybody who doesn't make something "great". Great being narrowly defined as "making a metric ass load of money". Additionally, he's presuming credit for the work Apple's engineers and designers have done. There is no doubt that Jobs guidance, and decision making has pulled Apple from the ashes. But he's not personally writing up engineering documents or slinging code. My wife made some meatloaf today for the very first time. I thought it was pretty "great". Does that mean Jobs thinks that she's worth his consideration now? Or only if she puts the recipe out and made a metric ass load of money? I gave her the recipe, should I just take all the credit? By defining "make" in a way that implies Jobs' participation in the process beyond those normally assigned to a CEO, and conflating credit and accountability with the process of actually "making" something, implies that he gets the credit for the late nights up writing code, testing out production designs, and all the other things that Jobs most certainly did not do is wrong. If the world worked that way, with people taking credit for other's work, it would make for a pretty shitty place.
- SoftwareMaven 16y agoI think you are stretching a little here. Jobs (to make sure we are talking about the same "he") never once brought in any mention of money. His point is a fairly common viewpoint: it's easy to tear things apart but much harder to build them; before tearing other people's things apart, try building something yourself first. I, obviously, can't say what Jobs would consider great. I think that question is meaningless, though. If somebody asked me the same question Jobs asked, the definition of great would be my own.
- elblanco 16y agoI took it as an allusion to the phrase "insanely great" for which only one thing fits -- Jobs' own, massively profitable, creations.