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Think different about Jobs

james.cridland.net

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Re: Think different about Jobs

#51

Post by sipefree »

andrewcooke wrote: post #43
sjs wrote: post #31

I hope he also avoids products and media made my anyone who has not been an absolute saint their entire life. It's perfectly acceptable to dislike Jobs, no question about that whatsoever. It's also acceptable to stop buying Apple stuff for any reason. But if you're going to put a proverbial line in the sand on moral grounds then you had better stick to your guns and apply that to everything or you just end up looking…

you really think that "anyone who has not been an absolute saint their entire life" is a equivalent to "Devoid of any kind of feelings towards anyone else, he shouts, screams, cries and sulks his way through his petulant life"? because i don't. i think there's quite a difference. everyone can be an arsehole sometimes, sure. but that doesn't excuse those that are consistently unpleasant. there's a clear difference. so…

> Devoid of any kind of feelings towards anyone else, he shouts, screams, cries and sulks his way through his petulant life

Sounds like full-on Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

Various people who knew Steve have also said that he must have had this.

As far as I can see, it's probably true.

I don't think it's right to attribute malice to the man if it's the case. Neither is it right to insist that someone be prevented from being successful in business because they have something wrong with their brain.

Re: Think different about Jobs

#52

Post by sipefree »

spacefungus wrote: post #16

I'm a fan of Steve Jobs for his vision and ability to see things we all blatantly are unaware of. He changed technology, but also advertising, movies, music, etc. But I'm glad to see someone holding him accountable for his life and the consequences of his actions. The iPhone rocks, but the Foxconn factory it was made in is so fucking hard to work in that they have suicide nets on the roof; almost a dozen have killed…

> But I'm glad to see someone holding him accountable for his life and the consequences of his actions.

Have you been on the internet for the past month? There are at least 5 highly upvoted threads on Reddit per day calling him an asshole.

Re: Think different about Jobs

#53

Post by richcollins »

I doubt many will try to emulate his sociopathic behavior unless they themselves are sociopaths.

Hopefully all entreprenuers will try to emulate his focus on product and his refusal to accept anything other than the best work that the company can do.

Re: Think different about Jobs

#54

Post by theshadow »

maratd wrote: post #36
comedian wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copy the good qualities. Learn from and ignore the bad ones.

The "bad" qualities are what made them effective. If they didn't have them, you would never have heard of them. Just be yourself. You don't really have a choice in the matter. You are you. You can only be you. If you try to graft aspects of somebody else's personality onto your own, you will find that it's a rather futile effort. You can't. Find out who you truly are, discover yourself, and then embrace yourself in t…

>>The "bad" qualities are what made them effective. If they didn't have them, you would never have heard of them.Please justify the above statement. How could you possibly know that? What is to say that these people would not have gone to achieve even greater heights if it had not been for their bad qualities? There is something incredibly depressing about this attitude that pretty much states that it's okay to be a complete and utter jerk if you have achieved some level of success. Maybe it's cool to say that because it's counter-cultural thing or maybe we as a society have reached a state where people have a knee jerk tendency to apotheosize those who are successful and explain away their flaws as somehow critical to their success (also read the Mark Pincus stuff to further observe this phenomenon). Either way it's depressing.

Re: Think different about Jobs

#55

Post by rdl »

The main thing I learned from the book (having read a lot about Jobs in the past), is that he actually seems like a good father, especially to his son Reed, toward the end; after being horrible to Lisa early on.

Re: Think different about Jobs

#56

Post by rdl »

puredemo wrote: post #30
mikerg87 wrote: post #10

Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, they're all sausage factories. You really don't want to look too close at how all this stuff is made.

How is Google a sausage factory? Just curious..

The internal politics are pretty bad, from what Google employees have reported. For an organization originally without politics, in the mid-2000s there was a whole mess of PMs and managers.

Re: Think different about Jobs

#57

Post by wallawe »

theshadow wrote: post #54
maratd wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "bad" qualities are what made them effective. If they didn't have them, you would never have heard of them. Just be yourself. You don't really have a choice in the matter. You are you. You can only be you. If you try to graft aspects of somebody else's personality onto your own, you will find that it's a rather futile effort. You can't. Find out who you truly are, discover yourself, and then embrace yourself in t…

>>The "bad" qualities are what made them effective. If they didn't have them, you would never have heard of them. Please justify the above statement. How could you possibly know that? What is to say that these people would not have gone to achieve even greater heights if it had not been for their bad qualities? There is something incredibly depressing about this attitude that pretty much states that it's okay to be a…

Ex. 1: People would go the length of the world making sure that they accomplished every minute detail of what he had asked to perfection. Had he not been such a hardass and callous type person, I highly doubt things would have been done in the time frames and to the scope that he required. It's the tragedy of success in his circumstance. Take the bad with the good.

Re: Think different about Jobs

#58

Post by ryan-allen »

spacefungus wrote: post #39
ryan-allen wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should have qualified the last statement. I was mostly thinking about how Jobs' was unequivocally indifferent to hurting people's feelings, taking their opinions into consideration or firing them for being what he deemed incompetent. Specifically I wanted to contrast between populist politicians and business leaders who'd rather save face and avoid admitting to mistakes. As someone mentioned in this post all he did…

Pretty sure the Foxconn suicide casualties didn't just have hurt feelings.

Suicide rates in populations around the world is much higher than you think. [1] The media don't report on them generally (if they did, there'd be more stories about them than horrific car crashes that the news outlets report on).

Car crashes in the US kill 40,000 people per year [2], and the US has a suicide rate of 11.1 per 100,000. With a population of 300 million, that's over 300,000 suicides in the US per year. 260,000 more than car crashes. Does that surprise you? What do the media report? Car crashes!

Given the number of Foxconn employees [3] (over 1 million) and the average suicide rate in China (13.8 per 100,000 per year), that's potentially 138 suicides of Foxconn employees per year.

Wired did an article on the suicides, there were 11 of them [4], to paraphrase the article "The nets went up after the 11th jumper took their life in less than a year.".

So there were another 127 people to kill themselves to get up to the national average in that year. The whole issue was a load of FUD. I bet you own heaps of junk that was made in China in factories with worse conditions. If you live in a first world country, it's inevitable.

You my friend, in Jobs' parlance, are a bozo!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_ra... [2] http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,146212,00.html [3] http://www.zerohedge.com/article/foxconn-employees-exceed-1-... [4] http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/ff_joelinchina/all/1

Re: Think different about Jobs

#60

Post by zobzu »

furtivefelon wrote: post #2

If people think that the reason for Job's success is because of his attitude is indeed lacking in intelligence. It is more correct to say that Job succeed in spite of his attitude. This trait is perhaps the easiest to emulate, therefore it will be sad if people emulate Job's worst trait and think that it will make them successful.

actually its both "thanks" to his attitude and other traits (intelligence, etc. putting it all in the same bag)

if you aren't an asshole, at least a little bit, it's difficult to manage a company successfully. you'd be seen as weak and/or other sharks would eat you anyway.

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