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Jobs talks about this in https://youtu.be/l4dCJJFuMsE https://youtu.be/l4dCJJFuMsE. I wish more leaders understood this. I interpret his words that people who

• smackeyacky 3y ago
  Nobody else got to fail as much as Jobs and kept getting free passes though. I feel like he eventually got smart but he got very, very lucky first. We could all be Jobs level if we had the sandboxes he was gifted in the 1980s Rod Canion from Compaq was always a better CEO
  • signatoremo 3y ago
    > but he got very, very lucky first. Which period are you referring to? Because he got fired from a company he founded, that’s the ultimate humiliation. It’s hard press to say Jobs was given free passes. Compaq piggybacked on IBM’s success. Not much of vision there, and ended up being swallowed by HP. Apple is the most valuable company today, in large part thanks to Jobs’s vision and execution (iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, OS X)
    • FullyFunctional 3y ago
      Apple very nearly catered. Nobody would be quoting Job had that happened (NeXT was dying too which is why Apple could buy it). There is a crazy amount of survivor bias here.
      • jen20 3y ago
        The quote could equally have been about Pixar, another wildly successful company of which he was the CEO.
        • bart_spoon 3y ago
          And yet isn’t Pixar famous for their intensive, structured process for movie development?
          • JKCalhoun 3y ago
            Yeah, from what I've read Pixar's success seems to have had more to do with "management" getting completely out of the way.
      • JKCalhoun 3y ago
        I'm not sure. The first success (Apple) may have been in large part right-place/right-time (and by right place: friend of Wozniak). But his second big success (Apple's rebirth) I kind of have to give Jobs all the credit. It looks as though none of the CEO's that came before Jobs could save the company the way Jobs seemed to single-handedly come back and do it. To be sure though he had wandered the desert for years and learned a lot of hard truths. That no doubt made him the capable decision maker he turned out to ultimately be in the end.
    • elzbardico 3y ago
      Being fired at that time was the best thing that could happen both to Apple and Jobs. If it didn't happen, our business mythology today would full of tales about Jobs, the lose cannon that destroyed apple with his megalomanic and narcissistic ego. The Steve from the Second Advent of Jobs was a dramatically improved version of him, seasoned in no small part by this "humilliation".
      • signatoremo 3y ago
        > Being fired at that time was the best thing that could happen both to Apple and Jobs. Easy to say in hindsight. Canion, who was worshipped by the GP, also got fired by Compaq but never bounced back. Or may be that’s a testament to Jobs’s ability to learn and adapt. > the lose cannon that destroyed apple with his megalomanic and narcissistic ego. I doubt it. Apple was Jobs’s number one priority, even to the detriment of its employees, including himself. He literally worked until his death. He has been labeled many things. Apple destroyer wouldn’t be one.
        • smackeyacky 3y ago
          It's true Canion got fired by the board of Compaq, but before that he ran the company such that it was the fastest to a billion in revenue in history. Nobody wants to remember the boring business IBM compatible market but not only did Compaq make the first 386 (redefining what a PC was) they also got the other manufacturers to rally around things like the EISA bus which abruptly stopped IBM's dominance of the PC standard and made a truly open market that not only swallowed PCs, but took the minicomputer industry out at as well and everything you have on your desktop and server room is still rooted in those seminal Compaq products. It was Eckhard Pfieffer who eventually screwed the pooch and put Compaq into HPs grasp. If Canion had been allowed to flesh out his strategy for lower cost PCs that might never have happened. Apple was always a 10% of the market sideshow until they made the iPhone.
    • kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
      Getting Woz to design something for Atari he could take credit for was the first free pass.
  • kragen 3y ago
    i am not a fan of jobs but i don't see how you can look at his career and see a string of failures. breakout, apple ii, lisa, macintosh, laserwriter, next, pixar, ipod, iphone, ipad. he was an asshole who cheated and abused other people to manipulate them into realizing his visions, but he manipulated them successfully. astoundingly successfully actually
    • smackeyacky 3y ago
      In the 80s it was an astounding success with the Apple ][ then it all went to shit funded by that machine. He didn’t invent the LaserWriter. Jobs was great at seeing the potential of tech but he was a terrible CEO until NeXT fell to pieces and he learned some humility to go with that famous reality distortion field. Canion is so underrated. Unlike Jobs he simply kicked IBM in the nuts and redefined the entire computer business.
      • kragen 3y ago
        he didn't invent shit, he certainly didn't invent the apple ii, he didn't even invent the blue box he and woz sold! but he did force apple to do the adobe deal to ship the laserwriter even though it meant sinking a large chunk of cash into risky startup equity. i don't think apple's post-apple-2 jobs-driven trajectory in the 01980s (bringing guis, desktop publishing, vector graphics, and laser printers to the masses) can be fairly described as 'it all went to shit' in terms of jobs's goals. from the perspective of user freedom and empowerment, plausibly, and that improved dramatically when they kicked jobs out next didn't fall to pieces. it birthed the world-wide web, then merged with apple, replacing apple's then ceo, and provided the software stack that currently powers the macintosh line, ipod, iphone, and ipad. i can understand why you would describe next as a failure if it was 01996 and we were having this conversation on compuserve or fidonet, but in retrospect it seems obvious that next was at least the second most important software firm of the 80s and early 90s
        • xp84 3y ago
          I find this an interesting debate. I think both are true: NeXT was a failure: because it didn’t make a profit, and its products were wildly overpriced for everyone but a tiny niche market like university CS departments and researchers, which didn’t provide it enough of a market to survive on its own. If it had been successful, NeXT could have bought Apple, not the other way around. Or more likely, just carried on by itself, IPO’d or whatever. NeXT was a huge success: because tech developed there was hugely influential to future technology used even decades later.
  • duxup 3y ago
    Failure is the best way to learn.
  • grecy 3y ago
    > Nobody else got to fail as much as Jobs and kept getting free passes though Stephen King had his first book Carrie rejected 30 times. The author of Dr Seuss had his first book rejected by 27 different publishers. Walt Disney was fired from one of his first animation jobs. Everyone fails. Not everyone gives up.
    • pdpi 3y ago
      > Everyone fails. Not everyone gives up. The flipside is that not everyone can afford to not give up. It's very easy to dimiss successful people as lucky without acknowledging the perseverance that goes into pushing through all the failures until you get a success, but it's also easy to dismiss people who never hit that success as lacking that perseverance.
      • grecy 3y ago
        Without a doubt people give up for a host of different reasons, but I don't actually think that is what we should focus on or is the key takeaway. The important part to focus on is not giving up.
      • adventured 3y ago
        It's an important point. In the broader context, most new businesses fail in relatively early stages due to running out of capital, ie time. Which is to say, most entrepreneurs fail due to running out of money. There is no doubt that there is a diminishing return factor that kicks in, but it would be interesting to see how many more success stories are produced if the runway is N longer (for each increment of capital, how many more successful outcomes are there). You'll see some cynical takes such that: well if an entrepreneur had a really great thing, they'd have no terminal money problem to begin with (just show it to a VC, insta check). That's pretty blatantly false however, as the capital equation is a whole 'nother skillset and luck/chance/network factor that goes to work for or against your efforts.
  • AlbertCory 3y ago
    > We could all be Jobs level if we had the sandboxes he was gifted in the 1980s easily disproved by John Sculley, among others. Or you could look at all the PC companies that launched in the early 80's (Eagle Computer, looking at you). Or Digital Research. Or Lotus. Or WordPerfect.
  • WalterBright 3y ago
    Apple in its early days nearly failed at every stage of its development. See "Return To The Little Kingdom" by Moritz. Jobs was a very quick learner, though. For example, he soon realized he needed outside management help. > We could all be Jobs level if we had the sandboxes he was gifted in the 1980s Jobs saw opportunity where everybody else did not (including Woz). I worked at a company in the 70s that was far better positioned to develop an Apple-like computer, but utterly failed to see the opportunity. This was hardly unique.
• sangnoir 3y ago
  > Steve Jobs has great points again. I love to hear him talk about what really matters for success of great tech companies You should read his email to Eric Schmidt, he outlined his bold, bout-of-the-box ideas on keeping great talent.
  • fredski42 3y ago
    Do you have a link?
    • mediumsmart 3y ago
      Maybe it is this email exchange: https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1443263744906305543 https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1443263744906305543 second result on Kagi using “steve jobs email to eric schmidt”
      • chris_wot 3y ago
        Yup, cost Apple a bucket.
        • soperj 3y ago
          Cost the rest of us a lot more.
          • chris_wot 3y ago
            Sadly, that is also true.
• icelancer 3y ago
  Process is required to get mediocre talent to churn out reasonable content, which is Steve's references to HP/IBM/etc. Most people think they're putting out great content. But that's obviously false. One side of Steve's point about letting elite talent do their work presupposes that the talent is elite. Mediocre talent will do much worse work if not bound to process, and Steve was very, very good at rooting out what he thought was mediocre talent.
  • xp84 3y ago
    Insightful, and it’s worth also pointing out that even if 90% of your staff are unquestionably elite, the rest can easily (without process and guidance) make mistakes whose consequences will overshadow everything else you accomplish, for instance by checking in code which causes a catastrophic data breach because your code review policies are casual and optional. Of course, this is a contrived example and even rockstars make mistakes too, but many mistakes are detectable/foreseeable and that’s the kind of thing good process is meant to help with.
  • hef19898 3y ago
    And even elite talent needs to be professional enough to - accept the need guidance - follow some standards and rules to make work reproduceable and understabdable by others - be able to work in teams People tend to ignore the finer points in whatever Steve Jobs said, especially after his return to Apple.
    • NickC25 3y ago
      I think this dynamic is different depending on 1. how elite that elite talent actually is (I think of elite athletes here, where one might be elite enough to be on the roster of a top level team, but not elite enough to be the de-facto best on the team - they have a whole bunch of rules to follow, but the best of the best on that team can effectively do as they please); and more importantly, 2. what stage the company is at. A small company with an elite team or elite performer has a whole different set of challenges or structure to deal with versus an elite team or performer at a large established behemoth like Apple.
• duxup 3y ago
  I feel like I'm experiencing this in a distant way at a small company I'm working at. We're working at instituting some process, it's a good thing as we've been cowboying out code for a long time, it's not sustainable, it's hard on everyone for all the usual reasons when a small company begins to grow and there haven't been a lot of processes. Tech debt, weird code, poor code reviews (if any ... mostly none), what is testing?, what documentation?, everything is in a few people's heads, and so on. Having said that, I'm working on a new feature with another programmer and asking questions about this new feature we're working on together. Some of the ideas behind it just don't jive, I don't believe this thing will do what the customer needs (possibly not at all)... and certainly not in the best possible way. Now we're on the same page about a few things, mostly that we don't have enough information, but the response is different. The other programmer thinks that we just need a better and more detailed user story as per the processes we're trying to put in place. To them that's the start and end of it. However, even that won't be good enough to me. A "better" user story built out of the ideas we have so far is just as flawed, there are already issues with what we've been told. At worst this will end up re-written because it does nothing the customer needs, or it does it in a really awkward and wonky way. The other programmers response is "well that's the fault of the person who wrote that user story" and they would seem to just rather we write it as requested and roll on. Not entirely wrong as far as just the business process goes ... but I'd rather actually solve the problem, and talk to the customer, get the details, talk it out with all involved so we can construct something more flexible, re-usable, and ... works. But there is that process, that "it's this group's responsibility, not ours" that is such an easy out, entirely how things could work "correctly", and also in this case a plan for failure. Steve said the folks who care about the content are a pain in the butt to work with, and I've got a few dozen questions I need to hammer some folks with about this new feature... they're not going to like it (they thought they were done with this when they made the request), but the questions need to be asked to do it right.
  • wombatpm 3y ago
    Your coworkers have a large company attitude prematurely living in a small company. “That’s not my job” is how a company loses time, customers, and money. A large company has customers, time, and money to spare. How much runway or VC money can the company afford to spend going in the wrong direction? Hammer away with you questions. Because if they can’t convince you of their correctness, how can they convince a customer who is under no obligation to shift through their bullshit?
• 3abiton 3y ago
  Despite his ruthlessness (or maybe because), Jobs greatest skilks seemed to be his ability to read people and assign them to the right position. Leaving Tim Cook behind as a CEO was a phenomenal move.
• randombits0 3y ago
  Steve Jobs killed himself with his own hubris. Seeing that, at which point in his life should you stop considering his advice?