131–140 of 175 posts
Easy to talk smack about a dead man. (Also in bad taste.) Funny how vocal and frequently critical Woz has been since Steve Jobs died.
Funny how vocal and frequently critical Woz has been since Steve Jobs died.
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…
He certainly spent a lot of time thinking about his own thoughts; trying to express them, trying to revise them. Like he was his own life's work in a way. It's a skill in itself isn't it?
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Would you care explaining?
Not OP, but that's a solipsistic method of "debate", similar to "your pointing out racism is the real racism". It's a way to delegitimize an opposing view by making the position seem insincere or possibly meaningless (in the semantic satiation sense). The person using this tactic may cynically thinks its just a game of words, and the other side really doesn't genuinely hold the views they communicated; so they too wi…
Leadership is a science, most people suck at it without training except for the very gifted few. The good news is you can train on it.
Because a norm exists of believing leadership is a "have it or not" vs. a "have it or train it" skill like any other, second order effects like toxic leadership being mistaken for difficult but acceptable genius are common. The whole industry suffers for it.
In the same way a horrible design pattern might work but will make your app a nightmare to maintain, in the soft sciences like leadership understanding these "architectural differences for similar outcomes" come down to understanding the semantic differences - well what really is "toxic" in a toxic leader. What are the traits of that? Are they repeatable? Doesn't make it any less true to state though as the science is sort of settled on a lot of this.
To mirror some of the snark in this response, once you start looking, you'll see clear leadership style, which can be taught, and their impacts everywhere you look (transformational leader, servant leader, toxic leader, transactional leader). I'm not saying the OP is playing semantic games, but I'm saying the OP doesn't understand how leadership works under the hood and as a science.
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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…
I recall Google in the early days was, not jobs level hostile, but rather combative to the point the founders later regretted it. The Netscape crew got crushed by Microsoft. Despite Jobs allegedly shredding his teams, they kept producing hit after hit for him. You’re not really making your point whatsoever. You’re just vaguely alluding to unspecified science.
Why is this? It's because exactly what I said above. The right feedback loops and the right incentives, they'll keep rising.
Science can be discovered here, to start: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C31&q=tox...
To talk to your implied point more with an edit - the real question becomes how do orgs excel if they're not doing the slash and burn technique that seems to get rewarded in the economic system we have. For what it's worth, this is a great question to ask.
There are similar continual questions/counterpoints like yours re: toxic leadership instead about leadership and ethics. Aside from the occasional Enron, there really doesn't seem to be much accountability for doing bad in the corporate world, or more commonly it's dealt with a mucky in-between ground of virtue signals/corporate activism and employee support groups internally that's pretty easy to spot and very distasteful because it feels so surface and hypocritical.
Short answer - not being a toxic leader does not mean failing at producing a good product, standing up for oneself/beliefs and related candor, and general aggressive pursuit of an outcome with a bias for action. It gets difficult to find these types out in the wild, but that's sort of my point. It's hard to learn how to do this, and there isn't a good training pipeline either, so prior to pointing out "here's a great example of a non-toxic, transformational leader who ships great products and wins at corporate life," we're still by and large at the stage of "hey, there are other ways to do this, stop idolizing Jobs to start." It's also important not to idolize the individual behind the leader. Someone can lead teams and be great to work for, but they might be really awful in their personal life. Jobs is an interesting example of this as well oddly enough.
That said, counterpoints you're basically asking for proof of do show up in the wild. If you've ever worked for someone who was (a) great to work for and with and (b) had the vibe just passing through your team onto some serious success in tech, those types tend to fit the bill of non-toxic, transformational leaders. Zelensky is another example of someone really grokking this well. I haven't worked for Brian Armstrong at Coinbase, but some of what he signals seems to fit the transformational, non-toxic bill and it'd be interesting to learn more about his day-to-day style. Google founders in their later iterations are good examples possibly. Anyway, lots of practical and academic resources out in this direction.
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 c…
Both were confirmed by other apple engineers. Steve rehearse his keynotes weeks and months before it even started. And the backup machine was once used in an OSX keynote presentation.
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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…
If you wanted to learn to lead without the military or consultant banking, how would you?
Stanley McChrystal's Leaders: Myth and Reality is a great exception. It's by both someone who's done the real deal of leading, but also controls for the above.
It covers a roster of leadership case studies that span personalties, time frames, and situations for the events one has to lead in, or the background of the leader. Examples are like Harriet Tubman/Civil War, Martin Luther/Protestant Reformation, MLk/Civil Rights, Einstein/science in the early 1900's, etc.
It does a very good job of showing that leadership isn't so much a personality and getting a team to a target outcome, but about high EQ and understanding the times, levers/tools, and people involved to build community and drive outcomes. It sort of sounds like I'm saying "it's not A, it's more about.. A" with that sentence. What I mean it it's a skill that grows from understanding nuance and how to leverage it. Not just a personality and focus on outcomes. If you focus on the team and how to resource, empower, and guide it, the outcomes take care of themselves.
Cool examples that stood out were Martin Luther and dealing with the follow-on peasant revolts that his movement started and that he didn't really support (iirc? been a bit of time since I read it), and Einstein and the role his extensive letter writing and his hub/spoke role in the scientific community as they contributed to the breakthroughs of the time from him and his peers.
The other huge part is understanding EQ, and how to deploy it tactically (but not cynically). You can define a basic leader as anyone trying to aggregate the support and resources to get a certain outcome. This often involves external resources and people to do, even if you're a solo operator. In that sense, where the basic leader fails is letting pride and short term wants get in the way of building that required support that requires other people. It's learning to manage the impulse to be right/valued/seen in the short term with valuing/seeing the other in support of ~the midterm... if that sort of makes sense.
Daniel Coleman: Emotional Intelligence is often recommended for this. I haven't read it yet, but plan to.
For a one stop shop, anything about "servant leadership" is a good move to study. Is it discussing resourcing and coordinating for a team and serving as the umbrella from stupid stuff from higher levels of the org? Is it a focus on mentorship and "training one's replacement." Is it elevating consistent performers who support their team and themselves over rockstars that go it totally alone? All usually good signs of a good leadership study. There was a link floating around HN a few days ago about like 40 bullet points for new EMs that hit all this very well.
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 c…
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/and-then-steve-s...
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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 o…
Not to belittle Nokia or anything, they took already available eg. smart calculators' digital displays adopted to GSM phones. Steve Jobs (Apple) did something no one ever expected, knew, or supported at the time (Steve Ballmer reaction*) Although they make great objects of desire, Toyota is no Tesla, Nokia is no Apple. Wozniak is acting like an ex partner probably because he owes his entire identity to Jobs, an ident…
Folks have a tendency to overlook the inevitability of certain technologies. The light bulb, for example, was going to happen regardless of whether or not Edison's lab came up with it. There were tons of people pursuing it. You could say the same thing about the airplane, the telephone, phonograph etc. Tons of competition and prior art for each thing existed at the time of the thing we identify in retrospect as "the invention". The singular-genius model of invention is essentially never correct.
As smartphones go, the iPhone's specific instantiation was remarkable, but the idea was in the gestalt. Apple had shipped the ROKR already, and lots of people (myself included) looked at the then-current color iPod and said "boy, it would be great if this were my phone, too". So there was lots of speculation about the idea, years before it became real. It wasn't at all surprising that a smartphone would emerge. Jobs even made a joke about it during the original iPhone launch presentation (there was a photoshopped iPod with a rotary dial on it).
That's not to say that there weren't lots of innovative things about the iPhone, just that the claim that "no one ever expected" it isn't really true.
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> 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 would say perhaps he was better at pivoting failures early Right. Good at deciding, throwing weight behind even a wild and dramatic choice (like his sort of pirate-captain-and-pirate-crew with the original Mac team) and committing. And then unusually brave at cutting losses or finding a new use for failures. He cut a hell of a lot of losses when he returned to Apple. But in interviews he was also sort of a studen…
When Jobs returned to Apple, how much of it was from when he left?
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Long term motivation is a very, very rare characteristics. I'd say it is almost born or influenced by childhood experience, not grown.
Artist Jenny Holzer wrote in 1999: "Monomania is a prerequisite of success", that quote has stuck with me. Most people (myself included) get distracted and change focus easily, which I think is healthy, but being long-term obsessed probably helps your chances of being really successful in late capitalism.