Steve Wozniak: Steve Jobs wasn’t a natural-born leader

I see people who have good ideas but are contrarian and weird discovering why engineers are trained how to communicate effectively all the time.

I count myself relatively lucky that although I'm very autistic-y and not-normal by regular standards, I'm quite social and communicate for a nerd. I like writing, I like explaining things. Albeit in a self-serving way, I think.

That's such a disgruntled take. Having a "smart friend" was merely a nice advantage.

Jobs' strength was in how he saw the world. His intuition, ability to imagine the future, inspire others and execute on that vision. Marketing and communications skills then almost felt like a by-product of such rare personality traits. I suggest reading "Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products" or any interviews with Jony where he talks about the interactions they had with Steve.

The level of product and design thinking Steve and Jony had is so outside of some measurable 'data' that engineers often tend to underestimate its importance.

You can see some evidence of it when he uses same analogies over the years e.g., Computer as a bicycle of mind. It's same with Jeff Bezoes; he has 4-6 go-to concepts (e.g., regret minimisation framework) that he repeats in almost every talk.

Anyway; that's just my observation. My take is no one's natural-born leader. Of course some traits such as good looks help but most of the foundational aspects that matter such as communication, critical decision making, recognising and seizing moments are skills just like any other and need to be practiced.

Investors want strong personalities so they can create a self-fulfilling prophecy, that's most of what's behind it.

A person that is likeable by investors (someone with big, crazy ideas/promises, temper, charisma, good self-advertising skills), and that investors can internally justify handing money.

This is also how someone like Musk can exist.

Some 15 years ago or so? I don't remember. I was working at Apple on the color and graphics team. I don't even to this day remember what the exact circumstance was, but for some reason me and another engineer were urgently called into a conference room just a week or so before some big Apple product reveal. I feel like it was when the "Aqua" UI was to be revealed — I feel like it was something about the seven label colors used in the Finder to label files.

Anyway, we went to a section of a building that I had never been to before and a conference room with no windows. When we were led in there were detailed notes all over the wraparound white boards — what features to be demoed, what order. All sorts of notes and annotations (and also sticky notes?) added to the items on the whiteboards. Something like a conspiracy theory nut's HQ, ha ha. There were machines lined up against a wall on long desks running the software to be demoed, people scurrying around (designers? marketing types?). (I believe that Phil Schiller was there — the only time I have been in a room with him.)

Jobs was not there when I was there, but this room/show was all about Job's keynote.

It amazed me the degree to which this was a major operation, not at all an after-thought (not that I think anyone would expect that of an Apple keynote presentation).

Yeah, we lowly engineers were brought in to look at a specific issue they were seeing with the OS in the demo. I don't think we were expected to fix it, maybe we offered a suggestion on how to work around it?

Related: I was told by my manager (so this could be bullshit) that Jobs never went off script. Never. Everything you saw on stage, every step of a demo, was exactly planned that way — was rehearsed precisely. A single "ad-lib" in a demo of course could have exposed a hitherto-not-seen bug that would be hugely embarrassing. But Jobs was very good at following a script he had helped create, make it look natural.

I had also heard (so this could also be bullshit) that a 2nd machine was set up behind the stage and someone was stepping through the demo at the same time Steve was. If something locked up Steve's machine, in an instant the displayed hardware could be switched to the 2nd demo machine with only a small skip of a beat. I am not aware that it was ever needed.

I guess my take away is that Steve Jobs worked very hard at being Steve Jobs. If he made it look easy then — it worked.