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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

#71

Post by neolefty »

thenerdhead wrote: post #25

I really look up to both Steves. I met Woz once and he's such a humble guy in everything he talks about. I even studied Jobs because I really value his perspective of the world although many people believe he was an asshole (he probably was). The beauty of Jobs in my eyes is his ability to take what was in front of him and refine it until his liking. How do you do that? You become a world class communicator even if y…

Yes! Plus, great partnerships are a wonder to behold. The article quotes Woz:

> [Jobs] wasn’t really capable, engineering wise, you know, computer hardware, software

That's (almost) like Hawking saying you aren't a great physicist. I wonder how much Jobs was motivated by Woz's excellence in engineering.

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

#72

Post by WhompingWindows »

In a tech world with dozens of "amazing leaders", is it possible that some of them just got lucky? They took some shots in the dark, some got lucky, some got unlucky: can it be that simple?

If Steve Jobs was coming up today, could he have owned leetcode and tech interviews, would he have gotten a CS degree, could he have succeeded in a start-up today? Could many of us here in tech now have done what he did?

My point is: Maybe we don't have to fetishize individual people so much. Maybe the conditions around them, the timing of their career, the timing of their personal viewpoint, was simply a set of lucky circumstances. Maybe there exist a few hundred individuals in any given time with the potential, and it takes that last bit of random chance to make them the famous one over the others.

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

#73

Post by hef19898 »

dkislyuk wrote: post #14
hef19898 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think, a quite recent thought, that the best thing to happen to Jobs, and Apple, was Jobs being fired. May sound stupid, but I think this break added some experience and humility that Jobs wouldn't have had if had just risen up to CEO and stayed there. And Apple was all the better of for it.

No need for conjecture — Steve Jobs said as much multiple times (e.g. "Getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.") One of the unintended consequences for Jobs was working with Ed Catmull at Pixar in the early 90s, who by all accounts was an exceptional manager and leader, and helped Jobs develop on this dimension.

It seems I really have to get my hands on good Jobs biographie it seems.

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

#74

Post by hnlmorg »

mrtksn wrote: post #60
hnlmorg wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You say that as if Nokia didn't produce some world class products but they did. There was a era when Nokia handsets were the one everyone wanted. And they were instrumental in building GSM, of which without no mobile phones would exist, let alone iPhones. I'm not going to deny that Nokia lost their way with Symbian handsets but my point is I don't see Apple as being uniquely brilliant. You often see this tide where one decade company X will be on top and the follow decade another trend will follow. This is also true of Apple: they haven't always enjoyed the success they have now. They've been close to failing a few times. Microsoft even bailed them out once just to avoid ending up in a highly regulated monopoly.

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

#75

Post by agumonkey »

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 always try to bring to opposite view. The dude started from little, was lucky or tasty enough to start highly successful personal computing thing. That said he could have exploded a thousand times per year every year. Even when ousted he made next. He came back and turned apple around. You can't just luck all this out. Even with deep pocketa (remember duke nukem 2 fiasco ?) How many ~jobs fail on the floor ?

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

#76

Post by deutschew »

WhompingWindows wrote: post #72

In a tech world with dozens of "amazing leaders", is it possible that some of them just got lucky? They took some shots in the dark, some got lucky, some got unlucky: can it be that simple? If Steve Jobs was coming up today, could he have owned leetcode and tech interviews, would he have gotten a CS degree, could he have succeeded in a start-up today? Could many of us here in tech now have done what he did? My point…

Poker tournament is often called the microcosm of our own capitalistic "democratic" world and as I learn how to play it more and more I realize how true this is.

As you've said luck is a very very important factor. As you get lucky, you tend to continue getting lucky because the more chips (capital) the cost of failure or unlucky runs is a lot lower than somebody about to be knocked out of the tournament.

Playing tight (risk averse) or loose (risk tolerant) or mania (risk indifferent) can yield very different outcomes and often professionals adjust their appetite for risk throughout the tournament.

Similarily, yes Steve Jobs got lucky and because he kept getting lucky he was in a position to make other bets without really suffering vs someone who bootstraps their business and exposed to the fluctuations of the market is going to have a tough time.

Nassim Taleb explains this better but to me the biggest shock when I started playing poker was, how much of an impact it's made no my perception of randomness and risk.

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

#77

Post by fouc »

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…

The value systems & vision of the people leading the R&D have a huge impact on the final design.

Nokia phones went one way, iPhone went a different way.

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

#78

Post by allurbase »

I wanted to point out (and tag along with) the idea that Steve Jobs was an incredible speaker.

One example that comes to mind: https://youtu.be/oNC8LEj5X4U

Steve Jobs and his teams made a lot of the right decisions. It’s evident in the way that Steve Jobs can talk about topics like what is covered above, topics that we take for granted today and have accepted into our lives. Jobs would talk effortlessly in a matter-of-fact manner, years and sometimes a full decade before the ideas had matured. It’s really incredible to look back at in retrospect.

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

#79

Post by tinus_hn »

KerrAvon wrote: post #59
JKCalhoun wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don’t forget NextStep which in its Cocoa incarnation is a very important pillar under Apples success.

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

#80

Post by Decabytes »

I appreciate Wozniak saying this. For a lot of my teens and early twenties, I only worked on things that I perceived as my "strengths", and neglected things I wasn't "naturally" good at. I believe you can get to a level of competency even in areas you are weak in, so long as you put in the hours.
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