5 ms·

While you can point at how he conducted himself at Apple and scream "Monster!", what isn't mentioned in this post but is dealt with at length in his biography i

While you can point at how he conducted himself at Apple and scream "Monster!", what isn't mentioned in this post but is dealt with at length in his biography is how he conducted himself at Pixar. He was much more low-key about the 'products' at Pixar, he mostly was an enabler and negotiator for them. In Pixar's early days he invested an awful lot of his then-fortune into keeping it alive, and it was his cunning negotiation skills that kept Pixar from being swallowed by the then flailing Disney. If you contrast his behaviour at Pixar and at Disney, I think it illustrates that he didn't consider the work at Pixar to be 'his art'. There were other people at Pixar who were leading the 'art' there and it was all in hand. At Apple on the other hand, it's completely clear that Jobs' considered the products to be 'his art' and his conviction was such that he literally was going to drag everyone, kicking and screaming, to realise his vision. And that he did, in a world of horrible consumer electronics he would not abide, he set out and truly lead the creation of some very awesome and uncompromising products. It was his Art. Imagine if Andy Warhol or Piccasso or any other famous artist relied on the expertise of many individuals to realise their creations. Do you think they'd be considering that all you want is your 9-5 job and your 401k and 4 weeks holiday a year. Nope, they'd be behaving in exactly the same way: aggressive and fervent conviction. Work ceases to become merely a job and you're no longer working, you're crusading. In a world of unambitious and mediocre individuals, you have to move mountains to do great work that requires multi-disciplined collaboration. You're going to upset people along the way but that just comes with the territory. I don't think it's fair to blame him for his behaviour. The world needs more people like him: true leaders who will stand up for their convictions, no matter what the cost.

ditojim 15y ago
even if the cost is other people? your last statement is a dangerous stance.
- Game_Ender 15y ago
  It's a greater good kind of thing. Eisenhower, Patton, Roosevelt won WW2, but were directly responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands. In most case people no their chances when they decide to work under these kinds of people.
  - spacefungus 15y ago
    I think that's different. Steve Jobs' innovative use of fonts in the early Macs wasn't squashing an alliance of tyrants bent on world domination...
- junk2312313 15y ago
  (Assuming that his behavior was necessary to the quality of the product (an assumption neither Steve nor his biographer were willing to make)): He didn't "kill" them. He hurt their feelings. Weigh a few bruised egos versus hundreds of millions of people with delightful, time-saving devices. As the book points out, yes, there is a real and measurable cost to wasting people's time with a badly designed device. And there is a benefit to delighting people. I see a lot of people fixated on the, let's face it, pretty mundane human costs, unable to see what he actually accomplished. I don't want these people to be leaders, and in my opinion we are in a worse position when these people become leaders. They harm the rest of us because they cannot overcome their fixation on a few pitiable people to see the larger picture.
  - spacefungus 15y ago
    That's a pretty clear way of looking it. The problem I have is that these attitudes are fragile. If you have a monarch, for example, with complete control over a country and who has tons of money and doesn't need to ask for permission, he can build a great nation of he's a good person. When he dies and his son, who's an asshole but equally determined and powerful, takes over, now you have a bad situation. Fortunately Steve Jobs wasn't in such control. But the point is that, yeah, if someone that determined and set in their ways and they're right...awesome! But when people are like that and they're wrong, which happens a lot...god damn it's not good. So I guess the question is whether this sort of "riskiness" is good? Like, when you win a horse race it's badass. The other 9 times out of 10 when you lose it sucks. Is that the human behavior we should model ourselves after? Interesting...
    - mikeash 15y ago
      There are tons of behaviors which are great if you're right and bad if you're wrong. Should we never stand up for what we believe in? Should we let others decide things because we might be wrong? And keep in mind that bad people won't care about these arguments. Only good people with reasonable and healthy self-doubt will be convinced to make less of an impact, and that's the opposite of what we should want.
- ryan-allen 15y ago
  I should have qualified the last statement. I was mostly thinking about how Jobs' was unequivocally indifferent to hurting people's feelings, taking their opinions into consideration or firing them for being what he deemed incompetent. Specifically I wanted to contrast between populist politicians and business leaders who'd rather save face and avoid admitting to mistakes. As someone mentioned in this post all he did was hurt people's feelings. Boo hoo!
  - spacefungus 15y ago
    Pretty sure the Foxconn suicide casualties didn't just have hurt feelings.
    - ceejayoz 15y ago
      I'm amazed people still trot this out. Foxconn has more employees than many mid-sized cities. Their per-capita suicide rate is lower than that of China as a whole. They make electronics for many of the big consumer electronics manufacturers, not just Apple.
      - spacefungus 15y ago
        I tried to post a reply last night from an iPhone app but it didn't go through. Maybe if it had my Karma would not have gone from 11 to -10... Anyway, the reason I'm "trotting this out" is because to say all he did was hurt feelings is ignorant. He hurt feelings and perpetuated a supply chain with a lot of negative elements to it. And no, Apple is not the only company doing it. But I'm looking at some of the negative elements Steve Jobs had. Yes, he was rude to people. Also, he took part in a labor practice that I think is messed up, personally. That's all.
    - sipefree 15y ago
      What does that have to do with Apple?
    - ryan-allen 15y ago
      Suicide rates in populations around the world is much higher than you think. [1] The media don't report on them generally (if they did, there'd be more stories about them than horrific car crashes that the news outlets report on). Car crashes in the US kill 40,000 people per year [2], and the US has a suicide rate of 11.1 per 100,000. With a population of 300 million, that's over 300,000 suicides in the US per year. 260,000 more than car crashes. Does that surprise you? What do the media report? Car crashes! Given the number of Foxconn employees [3] (over 1 million) and the average suicide rate in China (13.8 per 100,000 per year), that's potentially 138 suicides of Foxconn employees per year. Wired did an article on the suicides, there were 11 of them [4], to paraphrase the article "The nets went up after the 11th jumper took their life in less than a year.". So there were another 127 people to kill themselves to get up to the national average in that year. The whole issue was a load of FUD. I bet you own heaps of junk that was made in China in factories with worse conditions. If you live in a first world country, it's inevitable. You my friend, in Jobs' parlance, are a bozo! [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_ra... [2] http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,146212,00.html http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,146212,00.html [3] http://www.zerohedge.com/article/foxconn-employees-exceed-1-million http://www.zerohedge.com/article/foxconn-employees-exceed-1-... [4] http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/ff_joelinchina/all/1 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/ff_joelinchina/all/1
spacefungus 15y ago
Hitler exemplifies your last statement beautifully. The world needs people who stand strong with their ideas but constantly think about others and be open-minded. And not douchebags.
- ahoyhere 15y ago
  Yes, you just Godwinned on Hacker News. You need an Internet Time Out.
  - spacefungus 15y ago
    Pretty much everyone knows about the whole Nazi = bad thing. So, because so many people know about it, I'm pointing to an example where the original commenter's ideal behavior went wrong. Godwin and Glenn Beck just threw "Hitler" around to get a reaction. That's not what's going on here.
jeffdavis 15y ago
"I don't think it's fair to blame him for his behaviour." Then who should we blame?
jronkone 15y ago
> The world needs more people like him: true leaders who will stand up for their convictions, no matter what the cost. The true costs of these peoples' behavior is never on themselves.
- unalone 15y ago
  I think you make a good point. People who are so convinced of their own rightness frequently turn into destructive monsters. But I also think that there's a difference between standing up for your convictions by insisting that people make a product right and standing up for your convictions by inflicting active harm on people. The people of Apple could have quit. Many of them did. I suspect that the ones who remained felt the trade-off was acceptable. And Jobs didn't use his power to pursue people and inflict pain on them, so his dictatorial process had very clear limits. When you're trying to realize a vision, compromise ruins everything. That said, not all visions deserve to be realized, and sometimes compromise avoids a lot of hurt. Jobs's hurt was not especially severe, and his vision was astonishing, so in his specific case I think it was justified; that ruling doesn't extend to everybody else who wants to push relentlessly towards a goal, because many goals are horrible and many pushes are just as bad.
imathrowaway123 15y ago
Hear hear. You make a point that is true as the day is long - one which nobody wants to hear. Not long ago I became a boss and tried to be a textbook good one: paying generously, being generous in general (e.g. vacation/sick days on the honor system), being a real sweetheart, asking nicely, giving credit, supporting their initiatives, giving control… My employees were smart, capable, and hard-working, so I should trust them. So I thought. I ended up having to fire all of them. When they freelanced for me before I hired them, they were on the ball and contributing. Then I made the mistake of hiring them and it all went to shit. They were not contributing anything like the kind of value I paid them for, wasting my time & money, generally spoiled, ungrateful, and clearly contemptuous of me and what I asked of them, never considering my position as the person responsible for their salaries and keeping the company alive. Somehow I accidentally led them to believe that they were "partners" in decision-making, even though they had none of the risk. Not that they acted like partners, of course. But they came away with the idea that it was "our" business, and proceeded to do jack all with it except act entitled. And when I fired them, they were shocked. They apparently spent quite a lot of time bitching about me to other people (while not doing their jobs) but were caught completely unawares that the feeling went both ways. Shocking. I certainly have learned a valuable lesson: When you're a driven, exacting person, you have to either hope you will find somebody just like you (fat chance!!) -- or you have to make them. And the making of a driven, exacting person from the outside is never going to be pleasant for the one being made. (And no matter how much better it makes them, they will whine about it.) What are the chances that the "beleaguered" employees Jobs upset would have done work half as good without a cruel taskmaster? Pretty low, based on my experience. Me, I have to admire somebody who can keep the pressure on another person and force them to do great work. I don't have it in me.
- powertower 15y ago
  You should give a good instance / concrete example of what your previous employees did that demonstrates your provided view... 1. It entertains us even more! 2. Half the time it turns out the problem is really with the person talking (there is a reality distortion field turned on).
  - 15y ago

ditojim 15y ago

even if the cost is other people? your last statement is a dangerous stance.

Game_Ender 15y ago
It's a greater good kind of thing. Eisenhower, Patton, Roosevelt won WW2, but were directly responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands. In most case people no their chances when they decide to work under these kinds of people.
- spacefungus 15y ago
  I think that's different. Steve Jobs' innovative use of fonts in the early Macs wasn't squashing an alliance of tyrants bent on world domination...
junk2312313 15y ago
(Assuming that his behavior was necessary to the quality of the product (an assumption neither Steve nor his biographer were willing to make)): He didn't "kill" them. He hurt their feelings. Weigh a few bruised egos versus hundreds of millions of people with delightful, time-saving devices. As the book points out, yes, there is a real and measurable cost to wasting people's time with a badly designed device. And there is a benefit to delighting people. I see a lot of people fixated on the, let's face it, pretty mundane human costs, unable to see what he actually accomplished. I don't want these people to be leaders, and in my opinion we are in a worse position when these people become leaders. They harm the rest of us because they cannot overcome their fixation on a few pitiable people to see the larger picture.
- spacefungus 15y ago
  That's a pretty clear way of looking it. The problem I have is that these attitudes are fragile. If you have a monarch, for example, with complete control over a country and who has tons of money and doesn't need to ask for permission, he can build a great nation of he's a good person. When he dies and his son, who's an asshole but equally determined and powerful, takes over, now you have a bad situation. Fortunately Steve Jobs wasn't in such control. But the point is that, yeah, if someone that determined and set in their ways and they're right...awesome! But when people are like that and they're wrong, which happens a lot...god damn it's not good. So I guess the question is whether this sort of "riskiness" is good? Like, when you win a horse race it's badass. The other 9 times out of 10 when you lose it sucks. Is that the human behavior we should model ourselves after? Interesting...
  - mikeash 15y ago
    There are tons of behaviors which are great if you're right and bad if you're wrong. Should we never stand up for what we believe in? Should we let others decide things because we might be wrong? And keep in mind that bad people won't care about these arguments. Only good people with reasonable and healthy self-doubt will be convinced to make less of an impact, and that's the opposite of what we should want.
ryan-allen 15y ago
I should have qualified the last statement. I was mostly thinking about how Jobs' was unequivocally indifferent to hurting people's feelings, taking their opinions into consideration or firing them for being what he deemed incompetent. Specifically I wanted to contrast between populist politicians and business leaders who'd rather save face and avoid admitting to mistakes. As someone mentioned in this post all he did was hurt people's feelings. Boo hoo!
- spacefungus 15y ago
  Pretty sure the Foxconn suicide casualties didn't just have hurt feelings.
  - ceejayoz 15y ago
    I'm amazed people still trot this out. Foxconn has more employees than many mid-sized cities. Their per-capita suicide rate is lower than that of China as a whole. They make electronics for many of the big consumer electronics manufacturers, not just Apple.
    - spacefungus 15y ago
      I tried to post a reply last night from an iPhone app but it didn't go through. Maybe if it had my Karma would not have gone from 11 to -10... Anyway, the reason I'm "trotting this out" is because to say all he did was hurt feelings is ignorant. He hurt feelings and perpetuated a supply chain with a lot of negative elements to it. And no, Apple is not the only company doing it. But I'm looking at some of the negative elements Steve Jobs had. Yes, he was rude to people. Also, he took part in a labor practice that I think is messed up, personally. That's all.
  - sipefree 15y ago
    What does that have to do with Apple?
  - ryan-allen 15y ago
    Suicide rates in populations around the world is much higher than you think. [1] The media don't report on them generally (if they did, there'd be more stories about them than horrific car crashes that the news outlets report on). Car crashes in the US kill 40,000 people per year [2], and the US has a suicide rate of 11.1 per 100,000. With a population of 300 million, that's over 300,000 suicides in the US per year. 260,000 more than car crashes. Does that surprise you? What do the media report? Car crashes! Given the number of Foxconn employees [3] (over 1 million) and the average suicide rate in China (13.8 per 100,000 per year), that's potentially 138 suicides of Foxconn employees per year. Wired did an article on the suicides, there were 11 of them [4], to paraphrase the article "The nets went up after the 11th jumper took their life in less than a year.". So there were another 127 people to kill themselves to get up to the national average in that year. The whole issue was a load of FUD. I bet you own heaps of junk that was made in China in factories with worse conditions. If you live in a first world country, it's inevitable. You my friend, in Jobs' parlance, are a bozo! [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_ra... [2] http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,146212,00.html http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,146212,00.html [3] http://www.zerohedge.com/article/foxconn-employees-exceed-1-million http://www.zerohedge.com/article/foxconn-employees-exceed-1-... [4] http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/ff_joelinchina/all/1 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/ff_joelinchina/all/1

spacefungus 15y ago

Hitler exemplifies your last statement beautifully. The world needs people who stand strong with their ideas but constantly think about others and be open-minded. And not douchebags.

ahoyhere 15y ago
Yes, you just Godwinned on Hacker News. You need an Internet Time Out.
- spacefungus 15y ago
  Pretty much everyone knows about the whole Nazi = bad thing. So, because so many people know about it, I'm pointing to an example where the original commenter's ideal behavior went wrong. Godwin and Glenn Beck just threw "Hitler" around to get a reaction. That's not what's going on here.

jeffdavis 15y ago

"I don't think it's fair to blame him for his behaviour." Then who should we blame?

jronkone 15y ago

> The world needs more people like him: true leaders who will stand up for their convictions, no matter what the cost. The true costs of these peoples' behavior is never on themselves.

unalone 15y ago
I think you make a good point. People who are so convinced of their own rightness frequently turn into destructive monsters. But I also think that there's a difference between standing up for your convictions by insisting that people make a product right and standing up for your convictions by inflicting active harm on people. The people of Apple could have quit. Many of them did. I suspect that the ones who remained felt the trade-off was acceptable. And Jobs didn't use his power to pursue people and inflict pain on them, so his dictatorial process had very clear limits. When you're trying to realize a vision, compromise ruins everything. That said, not all visions deserve to be realized, and sometimes compromise avoids a lot of hurt. Jobs's hurt was not especially severe, and his vision was astonishing, so in his specific case I think it was justified; that ruling doesn't extend to everybody else who wants to push relentlessly towards a goal, because many goals are horrible and many pushes are just as bad.

imathrowaway123 15y ago

Hear hear. You make a point that is true as the day is long - one which nobody wants to hear. Not long ago I became a boss and tried to be a textbook good one: paying generously, being generous in general (e.g. vacation/sick days on the honor system), being a real sweetheart, asking nicely, giving credit, supporting their initiatives, giving control… My employees were smart, capable, and hard-working, so I should trust them. So I thought. I ended up having to fire all of them. When they freelanced for me before I hired them, they were on the ball and contributing. Then I made the mistake of hiring them and it all went to shit. They were not contributing anything like the kind of value I paid them for, wasting my time & money, generally spoiled, ungrateful, and clearly contemptuous of me and what I asked of them, never considering my position as the person responsible for their salaries and keeping the company alive. Somehow I accidentally led them to believe that they were "partners" in decision-making, even though they had none of the risk. Not that they acted like partners, of course. But they came away with the idea that it was "our" business, and proceeded to do jack all with it except act entitled. And when I fired them, they were shocked. They apparently spent quite a lot of time bitching about me to other people (while not doing their jobs) but were caught completely unawares that the feeling went both ways. Shocking. I certainly have learned a valuable lesson: When you're a driven, exacting person, you have to either hope you will find somebody just like you (fat chance!!) -- or you have to make them. And the making of a driven, exacting person from the outside is never going to be pleasant for the one being made. (And no matter how much better it makes them, they will whine about it.) What are the chances that the "beleaguered" employees Jobs upset would have done work half as good without a cruel taskmaster? Pretty low, based on my experience. Me, I have to admire somebody who can keep the pressure on another person and force them to do great work. I don't have it in me.

powertower 15y ago
You should give a good instance / concrete example of what your previous employees did that demonstrates your provided view... 1. It entertains us even more! 2. Half the time it turns out the problem is really with the person talking (there is a reality distortion field turned on).
- 15y ago