Posted by Soon after Steve Jobs returned to Apple as CEO in 1997, he decided that a company wasn’t delivering spare parts fast enough. The shipper said it couldn’t do better, and it didn’t have to: Apple had signed a contract granting it the business at the present pace. As Walter Isaacson describes in his best-selling biography, Steve Jobs, the recently recrowned chief executive had an easy response: Break the contract. When an Apple manager warned him that this decision would probably mean a lawsuit, Jobs responded, “Just tell them if they fuck with us, they’ll never get another fucking dime from this company, ever.”
The shipper did sue. The manager quit Apple. (Jobs “would have fired me anyway,” he later told Isaacson.) The legal imbroglio took a year and presumably a big amount of cash to resolve. But meanwhile, Apple hired a replacement shipper that met the expectations of the company’s uncompromising CEO.
What lesson should we draw from this anecdote? in any case , we address the lives of successful people for inspiration and instruction. But the lesson here might make us uncomfortable: Violate any norm of social or business interaction that stands between you and what you would like . Jobs routinely told subordinates that they were assholes, that they never did anything right. consistent with Isaacson, even Jonathan Ive, Apple’s incomparable design chief, came certain rough treatment once in a while . Once, after checking into a five-star London hotel handpicked for him by Ive, Jobs called it “a piece of shit” and stormed out. “The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don’t apply to him,” Ive explained to the biographer. Jobs’ flouting of these rules extended outside the office, to a family that rarely need to spend much time with him also on strangers (police officers, retail workers), who experienced the CEO’s verbal wrath whenever they displeased him.
Jobs has been dead for nearly a year, but the biography about him remains a trade book . Indeed, his biography has emerged as an odd kind of Bible for entrepreneurs—a gospel and an antigospel at an equivalent time. To some, Jobs’ life has revealed the importance of sticking firmly to one’s vision and goals, regardless of the psychic toll on employees or business associates. To others, Jobs is a cautionary tale, a person who changed the planet but at the worth of alienating almost everyone around him. The divergence in these reactions may be a testament to the 2 deep and sometimes contradictory hungers that drive numerous folks today: we would like to achieve the planet of labor , but we also want satisfaction within the realm of home and family. For those that , like Jobs, have pledged to “put a dent within the universe,” his thorny biography has forced a reckoning. Is it really worth being like Steve?
In one camp are what you would possibly call the acolytes. They’re businesspeople who have taken the lifetime of Steve Jobs as license to become more aggressive as visionaries, as competitors, and in particular as bosses. They’re giving themselves over to the joys of being a general—and, at times, a dictator. Work was already the middle of their lives, but Jobs’ story has made them resolve to double down thereon choice.
Steve Davis, CEO of TwoFour, a software company that caters to financial institutions, was wanting to mention Jobs’ influence on his own life and career. But first he had to seek out a free half hour. When he finally did steal a couple of moments to talk , he explained that he had consciously put aside certain aspects of his family life, since he believes that startups fail when those involved aren’t committed to being available 24 hours each day . Luckily, Davis told me, he was blessed a wife who picked up the slack.
Davis detailed these choices matter-of-factly, but his voice rose with fervor when he described the intensity and uncertainty of entrepreneurship. He loved every minute of it. He didn’t operate with a company safety net. His lawyer was calling him at that very moment with a contract question, and Davis needed to select a direction and just accompany it. What should he decide? He admitted he didn’t know. the joys came from the likelihood that he could be wrong. “Guys who start companies are different from people ,” he said. “We’re willing to fail. check out Jobs. He got knocked down, and he kept going. He’s totally unconventional, driving on his particular path, and either you join him or get out of the way.”
Join or get out of the way—it’s a phrase that sums up what Jobs’ life has taught his admirers today. Andrew Hargadon, a professor at UC Davis and author of How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth About How Companies Innovate, points out that Jobs’ brashness has helped inspire a bigger reaction to many decades of conventional wisdom about the importance of worker empowerment and consensus decision- making. “Jobs is showing us the worth within the old-school, autocratic way. We’ve gone thus far toward the opposite extreme, toward a bovine sociology during which happy cows are alleged to produce more milk.” that's , it took a hippie-geek like Jobs to offer other bosses permission to be aggressive and domineering again.
This isn’t aggression for its own sake except for the great of a corporation . Tristan O’Tierney, a Mac and iPhone software developer, helped Twitter creator Jack Dorsey found the credit-card-swiping startup Square three years ago. O’Tierney says that he now sees the worth in bluntly telling people their work is crap. “You don’t make better products by saying everything is great,” he explains. “You make them better by forcing people to try to to work they didn’t know that they had in them.” Aaron Levie, a self-described Jobs “wantrepreneur,” started Box, which allows cloud-based file-sharing, in his USC dormitory in 2005. To new hires, he quotes Jobs—”Some people aren’t wont to an environment where excellence is expected”—to explain to them that Box is simply such an environment. “My lesson from Jobs,” Levie says, “is that I can push my employees further than they thought possible, and that i won’t rush any product out the door without it being perfect.” He adds: “That approach comes with fatal accident on the people side.”
It’s true that Apple employees rarely quit when Jobs called them shitheads, or maybe when he took credit for his or her ideas. An early manager on the Mac team told Isaacson about the abuses Jobs heaped on employees. But she said, “I consider myself absolutely the luckiest person within the world to possess worked with him.” These kinds of testimonials are the proof, for several entrepreneurs and executives, that strong leadership and impressive results will lead employees to tolerate, even to embrace, unpleasant work conditions. Ray Dalio, founding father of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s most profitable hedge fund, has been called the “Steve Jobs of investing,” partially because his firm practices a sort of radical forthrightness. All Bridgewater employees are expected to clash with each other , to talk without filters or concerns about sensitivities. Dalio says he shares Jobs’ belief within the benefits of a troublesome , brutally candid office environment, though he requires his employees to dish it bent him even as very much like they take it. He likens the mode of dialog he practices—not just at Bridgewater but altogether his personal relationships—to twisting one’s limbs into a difficult yoga position or training as a Navy SEAL . “Pretty soon the pain becomes pleasure and you can’t live without it,” he says.
What acolytes want most of all is to possess an equivalent certainty about their vision that Jobs felt about his. Neal Sales-Griffin, 25-year-old cofounder and CEO of Code Academy, a programming school in Chicago, says that after studying Jobs’ life, he doesn’t waste time anymore with the intricacies of etiquette. He openly denigrates projects that aren’t working, albeit others have already invested countless hours in them. He recalls Apple’s inauspicious launch of MobileMe, the subscription service that was alleged to sync a user’s entire online existence within the cloud. From a stage in an Apple auditorium, Jobs berated the MobileMe employees for his or her inability to make a far better product—”You should hate one another for having let one another down”—and then fired the team leader on the spot. “Jobs’ passionate approach has empowered me to be myself, with my flaws and difficulties and limitations,” Sales-Griffin says. “Look what came of it for him.”
The second camp is what you would possibly call the rejectors. These are entrepreneurs who, on reading about Jobs since his death, have recoiled from the entire picture of the man—not just his treatment of employees but the dictatorial, uncompromising way that he approached life. Isaacson’s biography is filled with stories of Jobs as an unpleasant individual—the fits he would throw over the foremost picayune-seeming details, just like the sort of flowers in his bedroom or the way an aging Whole Foods barista made his smoothie. He would park in handicap spaces; he refused to urge a car place for his car. And he abandoned his oldest daughter, applying his “reality distortion field” to the question of his own paternity.
Jeff Atwood was once an acolyte. He had subsumed the entire of his identity into the corporate he created: Stack Exchange, a network of online Q&A sites. “You gird for war,” he says about the ethos of running a startup. “You need a spiritual fervor, an almost religion within the mission, to throw yourself on the shores and attack.” So it came as a surprise to Atwood—and everyone else—when he realized that he had to go away behind Stack Exchange and therefore the startup life. and therefore the Isaacson biography was what prompted his epiphany, turning him into a devout rejector.
He already knew all the stories about Jobs the businessman and innovator. But what he found harrowing, almost too painful to read, were the small print about Jobs’ family and private life. Atwood was delivered to tears by a passage during which Jobs showed drawings for the new Apple campus to his son reception one night, and it didn’t even occur to him to call over his daughter, who had expressed interest in becoming an architect. “He paid less attention to Erin,” Isaacson writes about Jobs and his daughter, “who was quiet, introspective, and seemed to not know exactly the way to handle him, especially when he was emitting wounding barbs.” Atwood, 41, recently became a father to twin daughters, and he said what Jobs did was “the opposite of parenting. Parenting is being there, man. It’s exposure .” The biography forced him to ascertain that he, like Jobs, had allowed work to dominate his life. Atwood groaned as he recalled how Jobs would respond directly and rudely to some random customer’s email within the middle of the night: “Here’s why you’re an idiot.” Atwood would do the precise same thing. He really didn’t want to quit, but he saw that nuclear option because the only thanks to disrupt the cycle. “If you’re getting to fail at building something,” he says, “fail at building the fucking iPad. Don’t fail at building children.”
For some of those more repulsed readers, it’s the tales of managerial cruelty that have gotten under their skin. Verinder Syal—a former executive at Quaker Oats who bought a coffee franchise, sold it, and now runs a consulting company and teaches business-school students—expected to adore the biography. He greatly admired Jobs’ ambitions, and he regularly extolled him to students as a paragon of leadership. The book saddened him, though: Syal couldn’t understand why Jobs felt the necessity to be right all the time and responsible others, why he had to say other people’s ideas as his own. Syal says he went back to his classes and admitted that he was wrong. “Jobs was like dynamite,” Syal says. “Dynamite clears paths, but it also destroys everything around it.” Syal didn’t think much of Gates before, but he does now. “Gates evolved from an asshole into a person's being,” he says. “Jobs remained an ass.”
To some, the Steve Jobs story reveals the worth of sticking to one’s vision. To others, it’s a study in cruelty and alienation.
Photo: Gregg Segal
But most of the rejectors are, like Atwood, entrepreneurs who worry about their roles as fathers. a couple of of them single out one particular moment near the top of the book, when Jobs explains why he asked Isaacson to write down it. “I wanted my kids to understand me,” Jobs said. “I wasn’t always there for them, and that i wanted them to know why and to understand what I did.” Brad Wardell, CEO of the software and computer-game-design company Stardock, was shaken when he realized that an equivalent powers of reality distortion that allowed Jobs to make the iPod also led him to deny the seriousness of the carcinoma that killed him. (For nine months, Jobs delayed undergoing conventional treatment.) Wardell, 41, says his youth corresponded to the increase of Jobs, and Jobs’ influence helped him “put every ounce of energy and focus into Stardock.” That translated into 80- and 90-hour workweeks, maniacally testing every version of each piece of software, reviewing all ASCII text file , writing notes nonstop. “But i noticed that, like Jobs, I could die. Jobs omitted on his kids, and I’d have omitted on mine too.” Wardell now often works from home, and he has hired people to manage aspects of the business he previously handled himself.
Many of those former fanboys are reconsidering their allegiance to Jobs partially because they're not boys. Now in their forties, they’re confronting the top of their young-adult selves—they have children, and their own parents became senior citizens or died. Matt Haughey, founding father of the community weblog Metafilter, addresses now directly during a presentation called “Lessons From a 40- Year-Old,” which he delivered last February at the web-design conference Webstock. Haughey remarked that he was grayer, his daughter was turning 7, he had recently put down a longtime pet, and he had experienced his own near-brush with cancer (a brain tumour that clothed to be benign). Haughey heard many in his cohort—most of them devoted Jobs followers—saying, “It is time to not find yourself like Steve.” So instead of trying to make subsequent Apple, he proposed building a “lifestyle business,” a smaller-scale enterprise that rejects risk capital and funds itself, leaving its owner time for pursuits outside of labor . He displayed a graph of his mid-twenties existence, with the bar representing work towering over the one for private life. Now that he’s 40, the bar heights are reversed.
It’s worth remarking that these male rejectors have aroused where most female entrepreneurs are right along . Women CEOs and managers didn’t need a biography of an absent father to start out brooding about balancing work and family; unlike the fortysomething dudes, they’ve been having conversations about this trade-off most of their lives. Rashmi Sinha, CEO of the presentation-sharing service SlideShare, was pregnant with twins when she devoured the Isaacson book. She read it to know how Jobs created great products, but the likelihood of gleaning any personal lessons from his life didn’t even cross her mind. Similarly, Heidi Messer, cofounder of the affiliate-marketing firm LinkShare, has told her entire marketing staff to read the biography, but with none thought that they’d construe Jobs to be her own model as a manager. She does suggest one personal lesson from Jobs’ life: “If he could do Apple and Pixar—two multibillion-dollar companies—then I should be ready to handle one business and also my family.”
The rejectors all know that quelling their Jobs-like tendencies are going to be a struggle. they're naturally strivers, perfectionists. They also know that their retreat from the struggle—adopting a lifestyle-centric approach to business—means they're going to never accomplish the maximum amount as they might have otherwise, including the maximum amount as Jobs did. If they wont to release six products a year, now they produce only two. If previously they sent out three dozen emails during the dinner hours, then now they create do with sending just a couple of . instead of getting to take their startups public, they're shooting for enough profit to sustain their employees and themselves. to make the life-style they need , or need, these entrepreneurs are reining in their compulsions, imposing limits on themselves.
When he’s not writing best-selling biographies, Walter Isaacson runs the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan think factory based in Washington, DC, that covers everything from business development to education and policy . At his office there, Isaacson proves to be a gracious New Orleanian, easeful and attentive—in short, nothing like Steve Jobs. He says that readers of the biography are seeking him bent discuss their uncanny similarities to Jobs or their desires to behave more like him. Two executives visited the author separately just hours before me. one among them was Bridgewater’s Dalio, who came specifically to confer about people he called “shapers,” those that overcame tremendous opposition to rework vision into reality. Dalio hoped that he and Isaacson could check a couple of of the traits shared by such shapers as Jobs, Franklin , Einstein , Thatcher , and maybe also Dalio himself. once I asked Isaacson about the life lessons of Jobs, he ducked behind his desk and returned with articles that had recently been forwarded to him, all about the merits and demerits of emulating Jobs’ jerkiness.
Isaacson himself has published what he deems a corrective, writing in Harvard Business Review that readers hoping to draw meaning from Jobs’ life should fixate less on his petulance as a boss and more on his remarkable achievements at Apple and Pixar. Isaacson distilled the important leadership lessons of Steve Jobs right down to 14 business proverbs, like “Bend reality,” “Push for perfection,” and “Tolerate only A players.” “Long after their personalities are forgotten,” he remarks of Jobs, along side the pantheon of Edison, Ford, and Disney—not one a saint—”history will remember how they applied imagination to technology and business.”
The author admits that he now tends to defend Jobs against personal attacks, since his book has provided much of the ammunition. Isaacson sees Jobs as being hardly more blameworthy, even in his worst moments, than other powerful people. Readers he knows personally claim to be shocked that Jobs would brazenly park in handicap spaces, but Isaacson says a number of them are bankers who created the derivatives that screwed clients out of their life savings and helped cause worldwide recession. When other readers express their contempt for the way Jobs treated his family, Isaacson asks them, “Then why you’ve been married 3 times and this particular daughter doesn’t fucking speak to you?” Indeed, Isaacson rejects the premise that Jobs failed together with his family. He points out that Jobs ended up with a robust marriage and 4 loving children, all of whom were at his side during his illness. A wooden table filled much of Jobs’ kitchen, and for the last 20 years of his life he came home almost nightly and sat down for dinner. “Jobs could are a far better father,” Isaacson concedes. “But I check out that family, and it’s perfectly wonderful. It couldn’t be a far better family.”
Yet Isaacson understands how genius worship has led to multiple interpretations. “It’s like arguing the gospels with a fundamentalist,” he says about the futility of trying to rebut what he sees as misreadings of Jobs’ life. He tells me what he’s told many people that have sought him bent catechize about the book—that his biographies aren’t how-to manuals for the great life. He isn’t arguing that readers not search for guidance within the story of Jobs; he knows it's the character of biography-reading to try to to so. But Isaacson stresses that Jobs’ life was complex, the teachings to be found myriad.
At least since Plutarch illuminated the moral character of famous Greeks and Romans, readers have looked to biographies for guidance and inspiration. My father still recites a corny Longfellow poem he learned as a child back within the ’50s:
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall buck up again.
Some intimate portraits are meant to debunk the long-lasting figure, their anecdotes served up as exposé. But usually the readers of biographies are alleged to recognize some aspect of themselves, or a wished-for better self, within the footprints of the eminent subjects. The genre is extremely individualistic, rebuffing sociology and collective history, and therefore the reading experience finishes up being no less personal.
Ironically, in Jobs’ remarkable story of self-creation we will see why the remainder folks are so hungry for a task model to light our own paths. Whether it had been within the youth , when he manipulated Steve Wozniak into building products for him to sell, or later in his career, when he was struggling to shape NeXT from scratch, or maybe after returning to Apple, when he created entirely new products, Jobs had nobody to inform him the way to realize his vision. He made high-stakes decisions on his own, with little to believe besides his well-honed intuition. And on a smaller scale, isn’t that true folks all? In life, as in business, there really aren’t any concrete answers or clear guides. We can’t help but see a biography like Steve Jobs as a rare road map to the uncharted world we aware of every morning.
So what, then, is Jobs’ real legacy as a person's being? “It’s his passion,” Isaacson says, after some deliberation. “We all want to steer the passionate life. we would like a lifetime of emotional connections. If that’s what you get by saying, ‘I are going to be more like Steve Jobs,’ then that’s great .”
The gospel of Steve Jobs has spread faraway from Silicon Valley to the touch people in every field of business. My cousin Jason may be a yoga entrepreneur in Asheville, North Carolina; he makes foam accessories to assist people stretch more ergonomically. When he came to go to shortly ago, he brought his copy of Steve Jobs along side him. “I care about of these tiny design details nobody else does,” he says, nodding at the book because it sat between us on my dining room table. “I get frustrated, catching myself telling people that work on behalf of me that their ideas are shit.” Our respective children within the next room celebrated their reunion by putting on a succession of princess and monster costumes. Motioning toward them, Jason said he now accepts that traveling constantly and spending less time with family may be a necessary trade-off if he, too, wants to supply an excellent product. “When your karma and your lila meet, you discover your dharma—your one true path,” he tells me, citing a precept which may have sat well with Jobs, a lover of Eastern religions. “It’s a gorgeous concept. You discover your thanks to contribute to the planet . That’s what Jobs found. He contributed such a lot to humanity together with his products.”
In the end, that is still the paradox within the lifetime of Steve Jobs. He put his uncompromising and sometimes brutal personality into the creation of products that strike us as beautiful, even uplifting. But the historical moment that he helped to create—a magical intersection of technology and commerce and culture, as our computers and computerized gadgets matured from purely functional items to expressions of ourselves—is unique to his biography . Without his unyielding approach to style , we'd never have had our iPods and MacBooks and iPads. But most folks don’t need, or want, to require such an unyielding approach. We don’t operate Apple-sized corporations and redefine industries. Our employees, if we've any, will quit or undermine the corporate if they're repeatedly called shitheads who suck. relations will find ways to administer payback if persistently ignored or mistreated. Jobs operated on a completely different plane from almost anyone else. For the remainder folks , trying to behave like him will make us and everybody around us miserable.
As he was writing his 2007 book, The No Asshole Rule, Robert Sutton, a professor of management and engineering at Stanford, felt obligated to incorporate a chapter on “the virtues of assholes,” as he puts it, in large part due to Jobs and his reputation even then as a highly effective bully. Sutton granted during this section that intimidation are often used strategically to realize power. But in most situations, the asshole simply doesn't get the simplest results. Psychological studies show that abusive bosses reduce productivity, stifle creativity, and cause high rates of absenteeism, company theft, and turnover—25 percent of bullied employees and 20 percent of these who witness the bullying will eventually quit due to it, consistent with one study.
When I asked Sutton about the divided response to Jobs’ character, he sent me an excerpt from the epilogue to the new paperback edition of his Good Boss, Bad Boss, written two months after Jobs’ death. In it he describes teaching an innovation seminar to a gaggle of Chinese CEOs who seemed infatuated with Jobs. They began debating in high-volume Mandarin whether copying Jobs’ bad behavior would improve their ability to steer . After a half-hour break, Sutton returned to the classroom to seek out the CEOs still hollering at each other , many of them emphatic that Jobs succeeded because of—not in spite of—his cruel treatment of these around him.
Sutton now thinks that Jobs was too contradictory and contentious a person , too singular a figure, to supply many usable lessons. because the tale of these Chinese CEOs demonstrates, Jobs has become a Rorschach , a screen onto which entrepreneurs and executives can project a justification of their own lives: choices they might have made anyway, difficult traits they already possess. “Everyone has their own private Steve Jobs,” Sutton says. “It usually tells you tons about them—and little about Jobs.”
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