The Steve Jobs effect is often taken to justify being an asshole. No. It's the other way around, in fact. Yes, Jobs was an asshole in many ways. By being such,

The Steve Jobs effect is often taken to justify being an asshole. No. It's the other way around, in fact. Yes, Jobs was an asshole in many ways. By being such, he kept bikeshedding executives and bullshitters in line. That is the Steve Jobs Effect, right there. If you have a sniper on the bridge to shoot young wolves before they become a problem, you'll have a much more effective company than if you let the young wolf conflicts happen. It's not that executive assholes are good per se; it's that they're better than young wolves. Most large companies hire a pretty-faced do-nothing to be the CEO and leave the nastiness to the lieutenants at lower levels. The CEO gets to be everyone's friend. It's the VPs who play nasty games and carve out political fiefs (because, if they don't, they won't get groomed to be future CEOs, there or elsewhere). That makes the organization a lot more ineffective because they all fight each other as they assert their own career agendas. One of the Tories during the American Revolution wrote that he'd rather have 1 tyrant 3,000 miles away than 3,000 tyrants one mile away. I think there's something there. Apple was an effective company because it had one asshole far away from the people getting the work done, and he routinely made it so unpleasant to be higher-up that only genuine people would even vie for it. This kept the engineers and designers safe from the middle management and junior executives who'd otherwise make their lives a living hell. Look at Google. I know I pick on them a lot, but with a Steve Jobs that company would never have ended up with calibration scores. To lead any large group of people you have to be enough of an asshole to understand how assholes think. Google's founders are not assholes, and that's why they weren't able, when calibration scores were first proposed, to shoot that idea from a bridge. Ok, so am I pro-asshole? No, I'm not. Here's one thing to keep in mind. Steve Jobs's are very rare. Assholes are not. For every person with that kind of talent, there are 999 who think they do. Also, I don't think Steve Jobs was that much of an asshole. He had his demons, sure. On the other hand, he seemed to have a genuine interest in protecting engineers and designers from executives and managers. If you were an engineer, he was kind to you. It was only the VPs and above to whom he was known for being a jerk. I think something more like Valve (open allocation, constitutional anti-asshole employee autonomy provisions) is generally better than Apple (dictatorial control) for most people (but not all). If you want world domination like Apple, then maybe you need an asshole or two. If you just want to build a good company, I think that assholes almost always take away more than they bring. Steve Jobs really is a 4-sigma outlier. That's something that the "tech" industry is getting quite wrong right now. Most of these startups think there's something positive about hiring a few assholes while failing to realize that one can break a whole company. Also, Fake Steve Jobs's tend to be freakishly common in VC-funded startups where there isn't enough hierarchy for the Steve Jobs Effect to even make sense. In a 10,000 person company, it's better for the 1 person at the top to scare the next 99 enough that the leave the 9900 at the bottom alone so they can make the company great. In a 75-person company, assholes are just outright corrosive.