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What really set Steve Jobs apart is that he never should have gotten to where he did. I don't mean he didn't deserve it or anything but based on that structures

• hnthrowaway0315 5y ago
  I think in times of distress/startup such charismatic leaders were often chosen to lead. Basically he WANTS to lead while others just lead because they rise up. He has stronger will than the others. Modern people are rarely trained for this kind of things, and leadership is probably not trained in classes, but born and through childhood experience.
  • dogman144 5y ago
    Leadership is trained is classes, just not in a lot of forums. Usually can only find it in a focused, curriculum-style way out of the military or situations like the consultants bankers get assigned by their companies when they are about to hit Managing Director. The concept that leadership can only come from those born with it keeps many competent individuals out of those roles that (especially) tech needs in those roles. Take the inverse approach that is most common - bubbling up the most competent IC or founder (Zuckerberg for example) without any regard for leadership training is one of the biggest issues tech has an industry. You commonly end up technically sound but low-EQ, low-leadership individuals in long term EM tracks who will never leave because the comp is so good. And teams suffer for it. This impacts everyone though beyond tech. Whenever people "hate their manager," the manager's traits that are hated usually come from a visible lack of leadership capabilities and by extension focused education. However, how possible and pragmatic it is to train every middle manager in leadership without click-through HR slides is a different topic.
    • drBonkers 5y ago
      If you wanted to learn to lead without the military or consultant banking, how would you?
      • dogman144 5y ago
        I'll start with a caveat that you have to be filter ex-mil people writing leadership books. There's a real issue of thinking a 1:1 copy of combat leadership into corporate/tech leadership will work, and a mountain of leadership books take that approach. That aside... Stanley McChrystal's Leaders: Myth and Reality is a great exception. It's by both someone who's done the real deal of leading, but also controls for the above. It covers a roster of leadership case studies that span personalties, time frames, and situations for the events one has to lead in, or the background of the leader. Examples are like Harriet Tubman/Civil War, Martin Luther/Protestant Reformation, MLk/Civil Rights, Einstein/science in the early 1900's, etc. It does a very good job of showing that leadership isn't so much a personality and getting a team to a target outcome, but about high EQ and understanding the times, levers/tools, and people involved to build community and drive outcomes. It sort of sounds like I'm saying "it's not A, it's more about.. A" with that sentence. What I mean it it's a skill that grows from understanding nuance and how to leverage it. Not just a personality and focus on outcomes. If you focus on the team and how to resource, empower, and guide it, the outcomes take care of themselves. Cool examples that stood out were Martin Luther and dealing with the follow-on peasant revolts that his movement started and that he didn't really support (iirc? been a bit of time since I read it), and Einstein and the role his extensive letter writing and his hub/spoke role in the scientific community as they contributed to the breakthroughs of the time from him and his peers. The other huge part is understanding EQ, and how to deploy it tactically (but not cynically). You can define a basic leader as anyone trying to aggregate the support and resources to get a certain outcome. This often involves external resources and people to do, even if you're a solo operator. In that sense, where the basic leader fails is letting pride and short term wants get in the way of building that required support that requires other people. It's learning to manage the impulse to be right/valued/seen in the short term with valuing/seeing the other in support of ~the midterm... if that sort of makes sense. Daniel Coleman: Emotional Intelligence is often recommended for this. I haven't read it yet, but plan to. For a one stop shop, anything about "servant leadership" is a good move to study. Is it discussing resourcing and coordinating for a team and serving as the umbrella from stupid stuff from higher levels of the org? Is it a focus on mentorship and "training one's replacement." Is it elevating consistent performers who support their team and themselves over rockstars that go it totally alone? All usually good signs of a good leadership study. There was a link floating around HN a few days ago about like 40 bullet points for new EMs that hit all this very well.
• hef19898 5y ago
  I think, a quite recent thought, that the best thing to happen to Jobs, and Apple, was Jobs being fired. May sound stupid, but I think this break added some experience and humility that Jobs wouldn't have had if had just risen up to CEO and stayed there. And Apple was all the better of for it.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • dkislyuk 5y ago
    No need for conjecture — Steve Jobs said as much multiple times (e.g. "Getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.") One of the unintended consequences for Jobs was working with Ed Catmull at Pixar in the early 90s, who by all accounts was an exceptional manager and leader, and helped Jobs develop on this dimension.
    • hef19898 5y ago
      It seems I really have to get my hands on good Jobs biographie it seems.
      • bladegash 5y ago
        Creativity Inc, which was written by Catmull, is an equally good read if you’re interested in the subject.
      • dkislyuk 5y ago
        Becoming Steve Jobs by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli was a thoroughly enjoyable read for me, and captured the growth trajectory from the 1980s to the 2000s quite well.
  • dekhn 5y ago
    Yeah. It's a bit of a narrative rather than a fact, but from what I can tell he really did some big soul searching and learned a lot of useful, practical advice. IIRC there is some article describing him looking at a warehouse full of unsellable inventory and realizing that not storing computers, but building them near realtime based on demand, was a better way to not lose money.
• JKCalhoun 5y ago
  I think I disagree. I think Jobs personality was such that he would have either ended up founding a company (or perhaps ended up in prison for selling narcotics). I sense his manipulative personality (my words, for other's you can substitute "reality distortion field") was always there. I'm not disputing Wozniak of course, but I think Jobs growth was in learning how to channel that personality toward selling product. Jobs got to where he was because he had a smart friend. But there were a lot of smart people in the Home-brew Computer Club and elsewhere around the U.S. and world — and a lot of friends of these smart people. Maybe it was a happy accident of history, but I think Jobs was the right person with the smart friend, just looking desperately for "the next big thing". The Next Big Thing was not, as he found out, "blue boxes". But I bring that up as an example of his entrepreneurism showing itself at an opportunity even before Apple.
  • yyyppp 5y ago
    That's such a disgruntled take. Having a "smart friend" was merely a nice advantage. Jobs' strength was in how he saw the world. His intuition, ability to imagine the future, inspire others and execute on that vision. Marketing and communications skills then almost felt like a by-product of such rare personality traits. I suggest reading "Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products" or any interviews with Jony where he talks about the interactions they had with Steve. The level of product and design thinking Steve and Jony had is so outside of some measurable 'data' that engineers often tend to underestimate its importance.
    • stocknoob 5y ago
      It makes me chuckle when people dismiss the industry-defining success of Apple as just marketing. Gee, why don’t their competitors try that?
      • dragonwriter 5y ago
        It makes me chuckle when people dismiss the industry-defining success of Apple marketing.
      • 5y ago
• Accujack 5y ago
  Sadly, it's considerably easier to rise to power in any organization if you have sociopathic tendencies. Jobs had a significant lack of empathy among other traits, and that gave him a huge advantage. The only reason he's lauded as a leader is that he made a lot of money... which is also easier to do if you have a lack of empathy and ethics.
• amelius 5y ago
  Investors want strong personalities so they can create a self-fulfilling prophecy, that's most of what's behind it. A person that is likeable by investors (someone with big, crazy ideas/promises, temper, charisma, good self-advertising skills), and that investors can internally justify handing money. This is also how someone like Musk can exist.
• mrtksn 5y ago
  I disagree, Steve Jobs didn't luck out. Instead, he never went through the filters. Had he tried to become an Aircraft Engineer or a Doctor, he might get filtered out but he and Woz ventured into an unestablished field that was about to boom. There were no filters to keep him out and though he lacked a scholar formation he was exceptionally brilliant and managed to walk the path better than the most. Peter Thiel says "competition is for losers". I think Steve Jobs is an example of it. Even if Steve Jobs said he was competing, Apple rarely competed and won on equal terms under Steve Jobs. He had always maintained a startup mentality, instead of making better phone than Nokia he would make something that no one at Nokia or anywhere else even dreamed of. IMHO, his leadership style was exactly what it takes to drive bunch of brilliant people into the jungle where the great riches are hidden but he was no match to Tim Cook as a CEO. To this day, When I listen to his old interviews etc. I'm hypnotised by the clearness and the flow of his mind. It's probably because he was one of those who made what we have today but if you forget that for a moment he sounds like a time traveler from the 2000s explaining the value of computers to regular folks from the 70s. What an extraordinary man.
  • pavlov 5y ago
    I don’t agree with Thiel on a lot of things, but in this instance I do. When someone says “I’m very competitive,” I hear that they want to live inside boxes created by other people.
    • stocknoob 5y ago
      Thanks, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but something about the competitive mindset rubbed me the wrong way. It’s all about seeking external validation in the existing status quo.
    • mrtksn 5y ago
      I'm on the same boat. Really not fan of him but his speech on the subject felt like someone put the words together about something that I was thinking on but couldn't pin it down.
    • ksec 5y ago
• dogman144 5y ago
  No, it doesn't make Jobs remarkable, it makes him a toxic leader... a textbook one at that. > treated people in ways they felt uncomfortable with and achieved things that people thought were out of reach. The biggest misunderstanding about leadership from people and orgs who don't appreciate that it's a science vs. an art is that to do the impossible, to stretch orgs and do it in unorthodox fashions, that "make people uncomfortable," the Jobs-isms that made him awful part has to come along with it. This is just patently untrue. Where this trope comes from is understanding a bit more about toxic leadership. Toxic leaders tend to excel. They're very talented. They can produce. The thing is: they do it by shredding their teams. If the incentives are right and the feedback loops are a certain way, they'll rise all the way to the top (and possibly stay there) just on the back of their product/production sense, with a history of angry teams, colleagues, partners and "a rep." Just like jobs. That's all there is to it. What's happened is the growth of a narrative, in part via posts like this to be respectfully candid, that the toxic stuff has to come with the unothordox/visionary leadership stuff. It really does not. Kevin Mandia (showing up in another thread today on HN) is a good counter-example. If it's a stretch to compare Mandia vs. Jobs, and it definitely is outside of a lab setting, look at the Google founding team's reps vs. Jobs, or the netscape crew vs. Gates. Why this screed - leadership is important, and it's a science that goes beyond running on pure charisma or pure talent. Tech must learn it better.
  • late2part 5y ago
    Your comment is toxic and offensive to me.
    • numinos1 5y ago
      Would you care explaining?
      • sangnoir 5y ago
        Not OP, but that's a solipsistic method of "debate", similar to "your pointing out racism is the real racism". It's a way to delegitimize an opposing view by making the position seem insincere or possibly meaningless (in the semantic satiation sense). The person using this tactic may cynically thinks its just a game of words, and the other side really doesn't genuinely hold the views they communicated; so they too will "play that game"... or to add another layer of cynicism: they are fully aware of their minimization, but want to reframe such that other readers interpret the original speaker as playing semantic games, and nothing is real. You'll notice it a lot, once you start looking for it.
• blueprint 5y ago
  Apple kicked Jobs out, but they acquired NeXT years later because Apple really needed a good OS to replace Classic and Jobs just so happened to have hired some incredibly good OS people and they had built a very strong OS. Apple was also churning through CEOs at the time and losing the ability to innovate on hardware products. They apparently needed someone to revitalize the culture and Jobs, a co-founder, was right there after the acquisition. So it sounds like the choice actually made lots of sense. In fact it seems like it was a very smart move by the board, and I guess the only question was, is Jobs sufficiently mature now to give him another shot.
• bar_de 5y ago
  Would another Steve Jobs personality have a chance at today's corporate environment? I have doubts: leadership is a hot iron where laissez faire approaches are favoured. The cite from Kawasaki that he was "unpleasant and always scary" would surely give a today's Steve Jobs a date with HR. A leader like Steve would be today called "toxic" and probably never promoted at all.
  • elliekelly 5y ago
    Is that necessarily a bad thing? By all accounts he was a terrible person to work for and with.
  • Apocryphon 5y ago
    There are plenty of toxic executives and managers still in abundance in the corporate world, never mind toxic CEOs.
  • sumedh 5y ago
    > would surely give a today's Steve Jobs a date with HR. If he was running the company, HR would just bury the issues.
• yardie 5y ago
  The Apple (80s-90s) that we know of became a powerhouse under John Sculley. It was no longer a garage startup and was now a billion dollar company and had to be run like a billion dollar company. Even in his bio Jobs admittedly brought in Sculley from Pepsi to mentor him on running this large tech company. What he didn't anticipate was the board demoting him, the student, for his teacher. He would go on to learn those valuable leadership skills with Pixar and NeXT. We see this all the time in unicorns. The founder is no longer the right person as it transitions to bluechip and it takes a different skillset. In my mind Cook and Sculley are equivalent, they are operations people able to run large startups independent of their egos and feelings. Larry and Sergei did something similar when they brought aboard Eric Schmidt to run Google.
• agumonkey 5y ago
  I always try to bring to opposite view. The dude started from little, was lucky or tasty enough to start highly successful personal computing thing. That said he could have exploded a thousand times per year every year. Even when ousted he made next. He came back and turned apple around. You can't just luck all this out. Even with deep pocketa (remember duke nukem 2 fiasco ?) How many ~jobs fail on the floor ?
• zpeti 5y ago
  Jobs is the type of rockstar genius who is basically world famous by about 27, at which point they either overdose or are reborn in some way. People like this have some intuitive knowledge of the world that is right, and they know it. They don’t get wiser or more clever over time, they just are. Same as musical or chess prodigy children. Almost all of these people are assholes by definition, because you can’t be a 27 year old genius and have certainty in yourself without it. That certainty and genius also usually brings a big following, because most people want to follow people like this because they create things bigger than themselves. Its also a very high risk life path. For every Steve Jobs there’s 100 geniuses who probably die without ever getting famous. Or they die at 27 like cobain, winehouse or avicii.
• unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  Another thing sets Steve Jobs apart that people almost always forget: he was a child out of place, to some extent. He's the biological child of a Syrian muslim immigrant and an American of Armenian descent. And then he's adopted into a sort of purely American life. There's a whole lot of outsiderism to unpack there, and while he adored his adopted parents he seems to have struggled with his own fatherhood roles etc. He was aloof and had a sort of paradoxical relationship with conformism -- he was consistent to his own personal design (the wardrobe full of identical outfits, the repeated leasing of the same kind of car) -- but rejected the conformism of others. Really a lot of his manner -- including some of his more sociopathic traits -- could be explained by early disruption in life. He had quite a tough start.
  • throwaway_4ever 5y ago
    I think his anti-conformity is uniform. You definitely have to buck popular convention to repeatedly lease the same car and wear the same clothes everyday. No one does that.
    • unfocussed_mike 5y ago
      It is fascinating to me that Jobs did it and everyone was like like, hey, that's just what he does. At least he showers these days. But if anyone else consciously adopts that specific affectation they are definitely trying to rip you off. It's a tell.
• raydev 5y ago
  > treated people in ways they felt uncomfortable with He was outright abusive in many of his relationships and interactions, professional and personal. We shouldn't tip-toe around that fact.