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

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

#51

Post by late2part »

dogman144 wrote: post #41
zcw100 wrote: post #2

What really set Steve Jobs apart is that he never should have gotten to where he did. I don't mean he didn't deserve it or anything but based on that structures that exist to filter people who attain the positions that he did. By luck, or accident, or raw determination, he became a person in the drivers seat that no one would have chose to put there. He was so much not the person they would have chosen that they kick…

No, it doesn't make Jobs remarkable, it makes him a toxic leader... a textbook one at that. > treated people in ways they felt uncomfortable with and achieved things that people thought were out of reach. The biggest misunderstanding about leadership from people and orgs who don't appreciate that it's a science vs. an art is that to do the impossible, to stretch orgs and do it in unorthodox fashions, that "make peopl…

Your comment is toxic and offensive to me.

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

#52

Post by echelon »

dhosek wrote: post #49
echelon wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luck, skill, hard work, grit, vision. You still need luck to discover opportunities with the correct growth slope in the market gradient landscape, funding landscape, etc. Some of this is intelligence, but it's also "right place, right time" and "who you know". But you also need the skill and hard work to execute, grit when facing headwinds, and vision to see the gradient landscape as it ascends and unfolds into the…

In short, luck is necessary, but not sufficient.

Bingo.

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

#53

Post by hnlmorg »

mrtksn wrote: post #33
zcw100 wrote: post #2

What really set Steve Jobs apart is that he never should have gotten to where he did. I don't mean he didn't deserve it or anything but based on that structures that exist to filter people who attain the positions that he did. By luck, or accident, or raw determination, he became a person in the drivers seat that no one would have chose to put there. He was so much not the person they would have chosen that they kick…

I disagree, Steve Jobs didn't luck out. Instead, he never went through the filters. Had he tried to become an Aircraft Engineer or a Doctor, he might get filtered out but he and Woz ventured into an unestablished field that was about to boom. There were no filters to keep him out and though he lacked a scholar formation he was exceptionally brilliant and managed to walk the path better than the most. Peter Thiel says…

> instead of making better phone than Nokia he would make something that no one at Nokia or anywhere else even dreamed of.

The interesting thing about the iPhone is that people assume that was always the vision when in fact it was an idea that evolved and matured through the R&D process. Just as Android started out as a camera OS and pivoted to smart phones, the iPhone started out as a tablet, which was already a market that Apple, Microsoft and many others had several attempts at cracking.

It's very easy to assume someone is brilliant if you assume they didn't go through the same iterations that everyone else did. Iterations of trial and error before hitting upon brilliance.

Jobs was great at marketing. He had some great people work under him. But he also had plenty of swing and misses too. I would say perhaps he was better at pivoting failures early than most CEOs but I don't think that's true either.

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

#55

Post by dogman144 »

hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #9
zcw100 wrote: post #2

What really set Steve Jobs apart is that he never should have gotten to where he did. I don't mean he didn't deserve it or anything but based on that structures that exist to filter people who attain the positions that he did. By luck, or accident, or raw determination, he became a person in the drivers seat that no one would have chose to put there. He was so much not the person they would have chosen that they kick…

I think in times of distress/startup such charismatic leaders were often chosen to lead. Basically he WANTS to lead while others just lead because they rise up. He has stronger will than the others. Modern people are rarely trained for this kind of things, and leadership is probably not trained in classes, but born and through childhood experience.

Leadership is trained is classes, just not in a lot of forums. Usually can only find it in a focused, curriculum-style way out of the military or situations like the consultants bankers get assigned by their companies when they are about to hit Managing Director.

The concept that leadership can only come from those born with it keeps many competent individuals out of those roles that (especially) tech needs in those roles. Take the inverse approach that is most common - bubbling up the most competent IC or founder (Zuckerberg for example) without any regard for leadership training is one of the biggest issues tech has an industry. You commonly end up technically sound but low-EQ, low-leadership individuals in long term EM tracks who will never leave because the comp is so good. And teams suffer for it.

This impacts everyone though beyond tech. Whenever people "hate their manager," the manager's traits that are hated usually come from a visible lack of leadership capabilities and by extension focused education. However, how possible and pragmatic it is to train every middle manager in leadership without click-through HR slides is a different topic.

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

#56

Post by throwanem »

yyyppp wrote: post #24
JKCalhoun wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I disagree. I think Jobs personality was such that he would have either ended up founding a company (or perhaps ended up in prison for selling narcotics). I sense his manipulative personality (my words, for other's you can substitute "reality distortion field") was always there. I'm not disputing Wozniak of course, but I think Jobs growth was in learning how to channel that personality toward selling product.…

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 J…

Wasn't Ive also the genius behind the Touch Bar, the butterfly keyboard, and USB-C ports for everything because of their beautiful symmetry? If we're talking about swings and misses, we should talk about those, too.

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

#57

Post by kobalsky »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #50
kobalsky wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Jobs got to where he was because he had a smart friend You can dislike the man, but saying that is not fair, he was far from a one hit wonder. Apple, NeXT, Pixar? those are the ones I recall. Luck won't get you there.

As I replied in another comment, I didn't mean to come across as dismissive of Jobs — if anything I am trying to make the case that Jobs rose to the occasion when others in the same "lucky seats" did not. But just to be pedantic with your list, NeXT's success is debatable and not likely to have happened at all if Apple had not happened first. And from what I've read, Pixar did its best when Jobs got out of the way an…

> Pixar did its best when Jobs got out of the way

he got out of the way and became disney's biggest shareholder in the same deal...

when talking about Job's nose for success that's a big detail skip around.

the deal with NeXT left him with control over the board of directors on Apple.

I don't like him and I don't like how Apple operates in the developer's landscape, but I HAVE to acknowledge that what Jobs touched turned into gold.

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

#58

Post by myfavoritedog »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #44
GeekyBear wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a supposedly unrecognized genius I think his floppy disk controller for the Apple II was pretty widely recognized as real stroke of genius. >The Apple II disk controller, designed six months after the Apple II itself was complete, was Steve Wozniak's crowning achievement. His five chip disk controller card out-performed competitive controllers that were four times as expensive by shifting most of the responsibiliti…

And the floppy drives for the C64 were too, a whole computer that could do magic things on it's own. And dozen of other magic things, like Sophie Wilson who I admire most and who did magic things with the Acorns (and of course ARM). The difference is that those people don't spend decades on bad mouthing others. Also the difference is Sophie Wilson does astonishing things all the way until today. Everyone says Wozniak…

No post body was provided.

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

#59

Post by KerrAvon »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #50
kobalsky wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Jobs got to where he was because he had a smart friend You can dislike the man, but saying that is not fair, he was far from a one hit wonder. Apple, NeXT, Pixar? those are the ones I recall. Luck won't get you there.

As I replied in another comment, I didn't mean to come across as dismissive of Jobs — if anything I am trying to make the case that Jobs rose to the occasion when others in the same "lucky seats" did not. But just to be pedantic with your list, NeXT's success is debatable and not likely to have happened at all if Apple had not happened first. And from what I've read, Pixar did its best when Jobs got out of the way an…

Yes, NeXT was in fact a notorious failure by 1997, which had a lot of us scratching our heads at Amelio paying $400M for it. (And that the x86 version of the OS was slow and fragile. But, yes, unlike BeOS, you could print. And that still mattered at the time.)

The lessons Steve learned at NeXT enabled the huge success of his second tenure at Apple.

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

#60

Post by mrtksn »

hnlmorg wrote: post #53
mrtksn wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, Steve Jobs didn't luck out. Instead, he never went through the filters. Had he tried to become an Aircraft Engineer or a Doctor, he might get filtered out but he and Woz ventured into an unestablished field that was about to boom. There were no filters to keep him out and though he lacked a scholar formation he was exceptionally brilliant and managed to walk the path better than the most. Peter Thiel says…

> instead of making better phone than Nokia he would make something that no one at Nokia or anywhere else even dreamed of. The interesting thing about the iPhone is that people assume that was always the vision when in fact it was an idea that evolved and matured through the R&D process. Just as Android started out as a camera OS and pivoted to smart phones, the iPhone started out as a tablet, which was already a mar…

I don't assume that Steve Jobs thought of the iPhone when having a shower or anything.

As with every idea, it must have evolved as people worked on other stuff. In the case of iPhone, we know how it came to existence, it is a story told countless times.

Didn't Nokia had R&D department? Of course they did and I'm sure that they also had brilliant designers and engineers who did amazing work. They simply lacked a Steve Jobs to weed out and steer their work to make it whole. In my opinion, Nokia failed due to poor leadership but not poor talent. Once Nokia was gone, the talent pool in Finland transformed and once again managed to do great things and be a hotspot.

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