While the specter of Steve Jobs has largely faded, his legacy is one that still inspires controversy. In business and in his personal life, Jobs took an approach that could often fairly be labeled as both inspirational and bullying. This longread looks at the different ways of interpreting his leadership style and whether it can or should be applied by others.
"The Story of Steve Jobs: An Inspiration or a Cautionary Tale?" by Ben Austen
Published in Wired, July 23, 2012
Eric
I'm a big fan of learning from other business success and using biographies to glean facts about how other people gain power and do amazing things. I had the Jobs biography at the top of my list and am horrified to read this. I had no idea what an asshole he was. I firmly believe that success is worth the total and complete alienation of employees, friends and families. I'm also one of the few people that think ipads and pervasive technology have made things worse and not better. We now live in a world valuing "work" and "productivity" over relationships even though most of the time that work and productivity isn't really accomplishing anything in the long term. As a student of business as well as a person that has significant business interactions I think Jobs approach is 100% wrong. He may be a clear success example but how many have failed in that vein while at the same time making people miserable. He made people a pile of money so they accepted it but that doesn't make it acceptable.
ReplyDeleteI think the value of his work is hard to deny - he brought things like the graphical user interface and the mouse (both invented by Xerox, not Apple) to the personal computer way ahead of anyone else and really was probably THE most important figure in elevating the aesthetic of computing and desktop publishing. Stuff we take for granted (layouts, having fonts on computers), was largely ushered in by his insistence while no one else was paying attention to it. That he seems to have been a world-class dickhead at the same time is unfortunate, but I don't subscribe to the belief that being a terrible human being is inexorably tied to being a professional success. It just happened to be in this case.
ReplyDeleteI tend to agree with Mark that the ends don't justify the means and that one shouldn't ruin people's lives for the sake of achievement (whether personal or societal). And I think that makes the counterfactual so interesting -- "could Jobs have accomplished everything he did WITHOUT being such a colossal dick?"
ReplyDeleteThat's obviously an unanswerable question but a fascinating one to think about.
Eric