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"[Steve] Jobs imagines his garbage regularly not being emptied in his office, and when he asks the janitor why, he gets an excuse: The locks have been changed,

by GuiA 10y ago

"[Steve] Jobs imagines his garbage regularly not being emptied in his office, and when he asks the janitor why, he gets an excuse: The locks have been changed, and the janitor doesn't have a key. This is an acceptable excuse coming from someone who empties trash bins for a living. The janitor gets to explain why something went wrong. Senior people do not. "When you're the janitor," Jobs has repeatedly told incoming VPs, "reasons matter." He continues: "Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering." That "Rubicon," he has said, "is crossed when you become a VP." https://www.macstories.net/news/inside-apple-reveals-steve-jobs-anecdotes-apples-little-known-facts/ https://www.macstories.net/news/inside-apple-reveals-steve-j...

kristianc 10y ago
I'm quite relieved that the trend for 'Steve Jobs was an asshole; therefore to succeed I need to be an asshole' line of management thinking is now dying out.
derefr 10y ago
I've heard this from a lot of business-management types, but I've always felt they have the causality backwards. It's not that "reasons don't matter", so therefore you can know your job is now in the executive suite. It's rather that once you're an executive, you are (presumably) granted enough power and authority to actually fix problems on your own initiative, before they become visible to the people above you. So if a problem becomes visible to the people above you, it means you didn't exercise all that power and authority at your disposal to prevent that. I think this causal direction is more useful, because it suggests that there sometimes still are "reasons" that can matter as justifications for failure—as long as those "reasons" are things outside of the reach of the executive's power+authority. For example, a COO won't usually be fired if an political/military emergency grounds all flights and so nobody's stuff gets delivered—because there's nothing they really could have done about that, no amount of planning that would have circumlocuted the problem.
- Mz 10y ago
  No, I think the OP is correct. My father and ex husband were career military and I was a full time mom. Both the military and parenting have this in common: You may not be in control of certain things, nonetheless, you are responsible for the outcome. In other words, kids are autonomous beings and may do things the parent does not want them to do. When the law says money is owed due to the child breaking something, they come after the parents. In the military, if you are in charge, you take the fall when things go wrong, even if it wasn't your fault. The world gives us endless obstacles between us and our goals. If you want to make excuses, there is never any shortage of them to be found. But if you want a thing to happen, at some point, you just have to decide that "The buck stops here" and not accept excuses.
  - sdiupIGPWEfh 10y ago
    Now imagine you as a parent are robbed of any authority over your children: not even so much as calling time-outs, sending them to their room, groundings, suspending electronic devices, or whatever. You're as good as an officer who can't discipline his own troops. Responsibility for outcomes when you have no control at all is no way to run a family, a military unit, or a business, yet many businesses happily create such situations and expect us to suck it up.
    - Mz 10y ago
      yet many businesses happily create such situations and expect us to suck it up. In the long run, such businesses tend to reap what they sow. http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/02/i-met-one-of-founders-of-aflac-once.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/02/i-met-one-of...
  - derefr 10y ago
    > When the law says money is owed due to the child breaking something, they come after the parents. In the military, if you are in charge, you take the fall when things go wrong, even if it wasn't your fault. Ah, but these are both situations where, to my phrasing, there could have been "enough planning [to] circumlocute the problem." In other words, the punishment falls on the parents or the officer who trained those who failed, to complete the feedback loop back to their training style. If they had trained their children/soldiers better, the event in question perhaps could have been prevented. And it might be prevented in the future, due to that negative feedback. A CIO of a large corporation usually would be fired if the company's business halts for 48 hours (losing money) because a datacenter got hit by a meteor. This is not because the CIO could have seen a meteor-strike coming, but rather because they could have put processes in place for fault-tolerance/high-availability, such that any random act-of-god that takes out the data-center wouldn't have mattered to the business. It's not the CIO's fault if a datacenter blows up, but it is the CIO's fault if "a datacenter blowing up" is able to halt their business, when there is something they could have thought of that and put in place, long ago, that would have interrupted that causal chain in the present. But a parent, or a military officer, or a corporate executive, usually isn't blamed for what amounts to "enemy action"—where something intentionally malicious out-thinks every preparation you've made and goes ahead and ruins your day anyway. Parents, for example, aren't blamed for what their children do when they've been told to do that thing by another authority figure. Executives aren't blamed for rival companies' industrial sabotage. Generals aren't blamed if a sudden trap is sprung during a retreat, turning it into a rout.
ForHackernews 10y ago
This isn't really true at all. CEOs give excuses in their earnings reports all the time ('economic headwinds', 'unfavorable regulatory climate', 'manufacturing complications'). Sometimes investors will punish the share price, but only rarely does the board consequently penalize the executives, and only in cases of really severe screwups.
- kristianc 10y ago
  Quite. More often it's a case of 'You really fucked this up. Here, have a $1.94m bonus.'
- valuearb 10y ago
  More good arguments for A No Excuses culture.
icebraining 10y ago
Funny, coming from Steve "you're-holding-it-wrong" Jobs.

by GuiA 10y ago

kristianc 10y ago

I'm quite relieved that the trend for 'Steve Jobs was an asshole; therefore to succeed I need to be an asshole' line of management thinking is now dying out.

derefr 10y ago

I've heard this from a lot of business-management types, but I've always felt they have the causality backwards. It's not that "reasons don't matter", so therefore you can know your job is now in the executive suite. It's rather that once you're an executive, you are (presumably) granted enough power and authority to actually fix problems on your own initiative, before they become visible to the people above you. So if a problem becomes visible to the people above you, it means you didn't exercise all that power and authority at your disposal to prevent that. I think this causal direction is more useful, because it suggests that there sometimes still are "reasons" that can matter as justifications for failure—as long as those "reasons" are things outside of the reach of the executive's power+authority. For example, a COO won't usually be fired if an political/military emergency grounds all flights and so nobody's stuff gets delivered—because there's nothing they really could have done about that, no amount of planning that would have circumlocuted the problem.

Mz 10y ago
No, I think the OP is correct. My father and ex husband were career military and I was a full time mom. Both the military and parenting have this in common: You may not be in control of certain things, nonetheless, you are responsible for the outcome. In other words, kids are autonomous beings and may do things the parent does not want them to do. When the law says money is owed due to the child breaking something, they come after the parents. In the military, if you are in charge, you take the fall when things go wrong, even if it wasn't your fault. The world gives us endless obstacles between us and our goals. If you want to make excuses, there is never any shortage of them to be found. But if you want a thing to happen, at some point, you just have to decide that "The buck stops here" and not accept excuses.
- sdiupIGPWEfh 10y ago
  Now imagine you as a parent are robbed of any authority over your children: not even so much as calling time-outs, sending them to their room, groundings, suspending electronic devices, or whatever. You're as good as an officer who can't discipline his own troops. Responsibility for outcomes when you have no control at all is no way to run a family, a military unit, or a business, yet many businesses happily create such situations and expect us to suck it up.
  - Mz 10y ago
    yet many businesses happily create such situations and expect us to suck it up. In the long run, such businesses tend to reap what they sow. http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/02/i-met-one-of-founders-of-aflac-once.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/02/i-met-one-of...
- derefr 10y ago
  > When the law says money is owed due to the child breaking something, they come after the parents. In the military, if you are in charge, you take the fall when things go wrong, even if it wasn't your fault. Ah, but these are both situations where, to my phrasing, there could have been "enough planning [to] circumlocute the problem." In other words, the punishment falls on the parents or the officer who trained those who failed, to complete the feedback loop back to their training style. If they had trained their children/soldiers better, the event in question perhaps could have been prevented. And it might be prevented in the future, due to that negative feedback. A CIO of a large corporation usually would be fired if the company's business halts for 48 hours (losing money) because a datacenter got hit by a meteor. This is not because the CIO could have seen a meteor-strike coming, but rather because they could have put processes in place for fault-tolerance/high-availability, such that any random act-of-god that takes out the data-center wouldn't have mattered to the business. It's not the CIO's fault if a datacenter blows up, but it is the CIO's fault if "a datacenter blowing up" is able to halt their business, when there is something they could have thought of that and put in place, long ago, that would have interrupted that causal chain in the present. But a parent, or a military officer, or a corporate executive, usually isn't blamed for what amounts to "enemy action"—where something intentionally malicious out-thinks every preparation you've made and goes ahead and ruins your day anyway. Parents, for example, aren't blamed for what their children do when they've been told to do that thing by another authority figure. Executives aren't blamed for rival companies' industrial sabotage. Generals aren't blamed if a sudden trap is sprung during a retreat, turning it into a rout.

ForHackernews 10y ago

This isn't really true at all. CEOs give excuses in their earnings reports all the time ('economic headwinds', 'unfavorable regulatory climate', 'manufacturing complications'). Sometimes investors will punish the share price, but only rarely does the board consequently penalize the executives, and only in cases of really severe screwups.

kristianc 10y ago
Quite. More often it's a case of 'You really fucked this up. Here, have a $1.94m bonus.'
valuearb 10y ago
More good arguments for A No Excuses culture.

icebraining 10y ago

Funny, coming from Steve "you're-holding-it-wrong" Jobs.