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Steve Jobs: Thank you for disobeying me
- ghshephard 15y agoSkunkworks, underground, and off-the-radar initiatives are a lot more common in large technology organizations than people might imagine. While you may have "Product Action Committee's" and "Executive Commits" and "Roadmaps" that theoretically set the mandate/budget and resourcing for the company, many of the best projects occur because a few (sometimes only one) smart engineer or manager gets it in their mind to do their own thing. I will admit, it takes a little gall to hide an entire T&E budget to Japan on a skunkworks project though. Great Story.
- vault_ 15y agoIt kind of reminds me of the story of the development of the Graphic Calculator application. http://www.pacifict.com/Story/ http://www.pacifict.com/Story/
- mikle 15y agoI work at a huge tech company and in the new SVN repo I've created last week there's a folder named skunkworks. It's just easier to acknowledge these projects will happen. The repo hasn't hit it's 50th commit yet and there are already two projects there.
- gaius 15y agoIf you're a CEO and you discover your engineers are running projects under the radar, then it's time to take your axe to the org chart and get swinging on those middle managers.
- brisance 15y agoThis is a great story. Not only were the engineers brave enough to defy Jobs, but also Jobs being able to admit his own mistake and not fire the entire team upon finding out. Signs of true leadership all round.
- wnoise 15y agoYou know what would have been better leadership? Not making the wrong decision in the first place. Yeah, obviously, backing down gracefully when proved wrong is quite important, but so is not betting the product on being able to make a new component...
- random42 15y agoGuess what, people are wrong all the time. Only in the hindsights, it is easy enough to tell which decisions/risks worked out, and which did not.
- wnoise 15y agoGenerally, yes. There are a lot of hard decisions out there, where even if there is a right choice, it is only obvious in retrospect. This isn't one of those cases. The engineers involved knew it was a bad idea. They were so convinced it was a bad idea that they defied their boss to ensure there was a backup plan. And they were right to do so. Jobs had to admit he was wrong. Good for him. But this story is silent on the question of whether he took the next step: figuring out how he was blinded, and why he made this mistake so that he would not make the same mistake in the future. Some mistakes are inevitable. Many are not.
- philjr 15y agoUnfortunately, you've just missed the hundred other cases where Jobs was correct and persevered. People will always be wrong, this doesn't show anything about good decision making or bad decision making because you can find examples of both in everyone. It does show a little bit of humility on Jobs part though, which I think was the point. Arguing about the merits or demerits of the decision itself is irrelevant IMHO.
- wnoise 15y agoI wasn't trying to slag Jobs. I was responding to someone saying that this specific instance was an example of "true leadership". I disagreed. The hundreds of other instances where Jobs did indeed make the right decision are irrelevant as to whether this particular incident was one.
- kabdib 15y agoHee. We used to find Twiggy drives in various places (typically in the back of labs when we moved, or when some older cow-orker quit and left boxes of crap behind). We'd send the drives via inter-office mail to one of the original hardware guys responsible for the Twiggy. We were still finding the damned things and shipping them off to him in 1993. The H/W guy had a pretty good sense of humor about it. What future albatrosses are /you/ working on? :-)
- 6ren 15y agoThe poor guy's name couldn't really be Hide Kamoto?
- abdulhaq 15y agoAnyone who wants to read a fascinating insight into the early days of personal computer development should read this entire site - it evokes wonderful memories for me of how exciting it all was in those days, and how a few guys can develop a historical product all on their own.
- wazoox 15y agoAlternatively, it exists in a nice, convenient and well-illustrated dead tree version, "Revolution in the Valley".
- damncabbage 15y agoDo you mean "Fire in the Valley", or is it a different book?
- wazoox 15y agoNo the title is "Revolution in the valley", subtitled "the insanely great story of how the Mac was made": http://www.amazon.com/Revolution-Valley-Insanely-Great-Story/dp/0596007191 http://www.amazon.com/Revolution-Valley-Insanely-Great-Story...
- protomyth 15y agoThey are different books, but both are great.
- EGreg 15y agoBrave enough to defy Steve Jobs! And y'all said it was suicide. Refreshing!
- misterbee 15y agoSo, Steve Jobs wasn't always above secretly copying another company's product the way he claims to be now. "Cupertino, start your photocopiers." (http://www.macnews.com/content/wwdc-apple-blasts-microsofts-longhorn http://www.macnews.com/content/wwdc-apple-blasts-microsofts-...)