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I think Steve Jobs being a prick was directly related to his success. Jobs did many awful things, such as refusing to acknowledge the existence of his daughter

I think Steve Jobs being a prick was directly related to his success. Jobs did many awful things, such as refusing to acknowledge the existence of his daughter or effectively stealing money from Woz. But that's not where the perception of Jobs being a jerk comes from-many CEOs have done worse. The main reason people seem to have found found working for Jobs exhausting is because he'd always tell you your work was shit. But the effect of this was that Jobs managed to get top performers to perform 5 or 10 times better. He took 10x people and turned them into 100x. It may have been exhausting and emotionally draining, but quite a few people report producing the best work of their lives while working for Jobs. Can you imagine working with Woz, Jeff Dean, JK Rowling, or Marc Benioff and telling them their work wasn't good enough and they had to produce work that was 10x better? And being credible and convincing enough to get them to believe it? Obviously, just telling people their work sucks isn't enough. I've worked with a fairly large number of people, and I've met exactly one who managed to pull significantly better performance out of me than I could myself. It was exhausting, but in the end I produced work that was substantially higher quality and quantity than anything I'd done before (at least outside academia). Said manager was also considered very abrasive, and people tended to love him or hate him. And it's not hard to see why-when someone tells you that the quality of your work is a small fraction of what it can and should be, it hurts. Based on reports, it sounds like Steve Jobs was more or less capable of pulling those kind of performance increases out of anyone, or at least a huge variety of people. And based on the (very) small sample of people I've seen who can do the same, it seems like you need to be at least somewhat of a jerk to pull it off. (Not to say that pulling great work out of people was Jobs's only skill. He was also amazing at picking markets and product design, which probably don't require you to be a jerk.)

wpietri 14y ago
Cult leaders get their followers to do all sorts of extraordinary things through systematic abuse. I've read a number of bios of cult survivors and a consistent theme is their incredible dedication and accomplishment. The interesting question to me is whether there are other ways to do great work. People focus on Jobs and then generalize from their n=1 sample. They also take the visible correlations and turn them into causation. It's ridiculous. Even if Jobs's behavior towards subordinates is related to his success, it may not be in the way people think. Perhaps his abuse of engineers was valueless, and that the win for Apple was in him abusing management rivals so they were all afraid of playing the normal turf games. Or maybe his prickishness was only needed to get him back in charge of Apple as chief tastemaker, a CEO who was willing to spend on design until a product was fucking right. If we expand the sample size to n=2 and just add another Jobs company, Pixar, we can see that it's possible to produce an extraordinary amount of great work without anybody running around being a giant asshole all the time.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  Perhaps his abuse of engineers was valueless, and that the win for Apple was in him abusing management rivals so they were all afraid of playing the normal turf games. Or maybe his prickishness was only needed to get him back in charge of Apple as chief tastemaker, a CEO who was willing to spend on design until a product was fucking right. I think you nailed it. Most executives in most companies get to bike-shed and do little else. Jobs actually made bike-shedding the worst job in the company. Steve Jobs lived in the spotlight more than almost anyone else in this business, so every assholish thing he did got magnified. What I've heard is that he was very polarized: sometimes very nice, sometimes very mean. (I'm that way, so I can relate.) Apparently he was nice to engineers for the most part; it was the VPs and Directors that he tore to shreds. Jobs had this whole theory about the VP level being the threshold of responsibility that is a direct affront on the Effort Thermocline (in that VPs get more direct scrutiny, rather than, as is more typical, more power that gives them the ability to hide losses and make themselves invincible).
philsnow 14y ago
"Woz, Jeff Dean, JK Rowling, or Marc Benioff" successful troll is successful.

wpietri 14y ago

Cult leaders get their followers to do all sorts of extraordinary things through systematic abuse. I've read a number of bios of cult survivors and a consistent theme is their incredible dedication and accomplishment. The interesting question to me is whether there are other ways to do great work. People focus on Jobs and then generalize from their n=1 sample. They also take the visible correlations and turn them into causation. It's ridiculous. Even if Jobs's behavior towards subordinates is related to his success, it may not be in the way people think. Perhaps his abuse of engineers was valueless, and that the win for Apple was in him abusing management rivals so they were all afraid of playing the normal turf games. Or maybe his prickishness was only needed to get him back in charge of Apple as chief tastemaker, a CEO who was willing to spend on design until a product was fucking right. If we expand the sample size to n=2 and just add another Jobs company, Pixar, we can see that it's possible to produce an extraordinary amount of great work without anybody running around being a giant asshole all the time.

michaelochurch 14y ago
Perhaps his abuse of engineers was valueless, and that the win for Apple was in him abusing management rivals so they were all afraid of playing the normal turf games. Or maybe his prickishness was only needed to get him back in charge of Apple as chief tastemaker, a CEO who was willing to spend on design until a product was fucking right. I think you nailed it. Most executives in most companies get to bike-shed and do little else. Jobs actually made bike-shedding the worst job in the company. Steve Jobs lived in the spotlight more than almost anyone else in this business, so every assholish thing he did got magnified. What I've heard is that he was very polarized: sometimes very nice, sometimes very mean. (I'm that way, so I can relate.) Apparently he was nice to engineers for the most part; it was the VPs and Directors that he tore to shreds. Jobs had this whole theory about the VP level being the threshold of responsibility that is a direct affront on the Effort Thermocline (in that VPs get more direct scrutiny, rather than, as is more typical, more power that gives them the ability to hide losses and make themselves invincible).

philsnow 14y ago

"Woz, Jeff Dean, JK Rowling, or Marc Benioff" successful troll is successful.