Think different about Jobs

Think different about Jobs
james.cridland.net

From Malcolm Gladwell's "The real genius of Steve Jobs" [1]:

Jobs, we learn, was a bully. "He had the uncanny capacity to know exactly what your weak point is, know what will make you feel small, to make you cringe". Jobs gets his girlfriend pregnant, and then denies that the child is his. He parks in handicapped spaces. He screams at subordinates. He cries like a small child when he does not get his way. He sits in a restaurant and sends his food back three times. He arrives at his hotel suite in New York for press interviews and decides, at 10 pm ... the flowers are all wrong: he wanted calla lilies. When his public-relations assistant returns, at midnight, with the right flowers, he tells her that her suit is "disgusting". Machines and robots were painted and repainted as he compulsively revised his color scheme, Isaacson writes, of the factory Jobs built, after founding NeXT, in the late nineteen-eighties. He insisted that the machinery on the 165-foot assembly line be configured to move the circuit boards from right to left as they got built, so that the process would look better to visitors who watched from the viewing gallery. ...when Jobs returns, in the late nineteen-nineties, and our natural expectation is that Jobs will emerge wiser and gentler from his tumultuous journey. He never does. In the hospital at the end of his life, he runs through sixty-seven nurses before he finds three he likes...

...Even within Apple, Jobs was known for taking credit for other's ideas. Jonathan Ive, the designer behind the iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone, tells Isaacson, "He will go through a process of looking at my ideas and say, 'That's no good. That's not very good. I like that one.' And later I will be sitting in the audience and he will be talking about it as if it was his idea."

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If Jobs was really such an A-level asshole, I think he was goddamned lucky to have Steve Woz as his co-founder. From what I know about Woz, in addition to being a first rate engineer, he is also a very good guy. Maybe if Woz was even half (milli-Jobs?) the asshole that Jobs seems to be, he would have kicked him out before Apple went public (à la Saverin in The Social Network) and Jobs would have been just another tantrum throwing hippie hanging around some starbucks in Berkeley or wherever it is angry hippies like to hang about these days.

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/14/111114fa_fact_...

I don't know which Kindle the author is talking about, but it seems weird to me, I never heard of a Kindle crash and I have 4/5 around, not counting colleagues'.

And, maybe it is off-topic, but maybe it is not. Why would the author add this parenthesis if it was not a necessary adjunction to his point? Maybe it was a way to underline how non-Apple products have the bad habit of crashing randomly just for the purpose of annoying their owners?

It is the same with "I’ve yet to encounter a businesswoman, on any level, who treats people in an unpleasant way". This is a way to say, "I am a very gentle guy, I don't want to discriminate against women, love me please", but this apparently innocent statement is 1) pure and simple sexism 2) plain wrong.

Then the main point, Job being a "detestable human being", well, it seems obvious. Let's just hope no too many people idealize him for too long a time.

He was much more low-key about the 'products' at Pixar, he mostly was an enabler and negotiator for them. In Pixar's early days he invested an awful lot of his then-fortune into keeping it alive, and it was his cunning negotiation skills that kept Pixar from being swallowed by the then flailing Disney.

If you contrast his behaviour at Pixar and at Disney, I think it illustrates that he didn't consider the work at Pixar to be 'his art'. There were other people at Pixar who were leading the 'art' there and it was all in hand.

At Apple on the other hand, it's completely clear that Jobs' considered the products to be 'his art' and his conviction was such that he literally was going to drag everyone, kicking and screaming, to realise his vision. And that he did, in a world of horrible consumer electronics he would not abide, he set out and truly lead the creation of some very awesome and uncompromising products. It was his Art.

Imagine if Andy Warhol or Piccasso or any other famous artist relied on the expertise of many individuals to realise their creations. Do you think they'd be considering that all you want is your 9-5 job and your 401k and 4 weeks holiday a year. Nope, they'd be behaving in exactly the same way: aggressive and fervent conviction. Work ceases to become merely a job and you're no longer working, you're crusading.

In a world of unambitious and mediocre individuals, you have to move mountains to do great work that requires multi-disciplined collaboration. You're going to upset people along the way but that just comes with the territory.

I don't think it's fair to blame him for his behaviour. The world needs more people like him: true leaders who will stand up for their convictions, no matter what the cost.