Steve Jobs on how to hire, manage, and lead people [video]
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The initial success of the Apple computer i'd atttribute more to Wozniak for knowing what the hobby computer should be. The original macintosh wasn't a sales success and sales only took off after Steve was fired and the business strategy was reviewed.
The "version 2.0" Steve Jobs that returned to Apple was an improved person, but I simply wouldn't take any advice from the younger SJ.
Apple was a super-hyped company in the 80s with a very successful IPO, so hiring the best wasn't exactly difficult for them. Instead, it feels like they were filtering out people who may have brought diversity of thought and perhaps helped them avoid some of the critical mistakes that led to the failures of V1 of Apple.
The evidence is to find companies with a lot of people who hate the company but work for the paycheck and see if the company is successful or heading to the dumpster. Then find companies built by HR who puts only the employees with the best fit into positions and see if they are heading to the dumpster (because HR weeds out the passionate people who have weak or poorly written resumes) I would say yes to both.
If you are afraid and think by behavior copy pasting you will solve this problem, instead of going the hard way, of analyzing risks and doing the actual blood, sweat and tears involved with risky moves - you are already set up to fail. Bonus Points on spectacular failure, if you also do the very same moves in a niche that already has a huge company set up in it.
The sentiment among most early employees was that Steve Jobs was like a good coach: you hated him at the time but look back proudly at what he pushed you to accomplish.
There was no Apple Computers at all without Steve Jobs, and definitely no commercial product like the Apple II. Wozniak had no independent ambition to create a company whatsoever. Wozniak played a vital role but primarily as a perfect catalyst for Jobs.
The Macintosh saved Apple and the foolish "young Steve Jobs" is the only reason it was a great enough product to do that. Jobs did not even have control over pricing or sales of the Macintosh, and so blaming his flawed "business strategy" makes no sense. The people that fired him lived off his work for a decade, and did none of their own work at all.
Yes, Jobs had some growing up to do, and firing him probably did help him do that, but the idea that he was a fool that became great is a total myth. He was always great, as can be seen from the work he did.
That's not true. The Macintosh in its early years was severely underpowered and expensive, and the Apple II hardware was driving the revenue of the company.
Jobs wanted to shift all the marketing spend onto the Macintosh as well as drop the price to below cost, and caused a crisis with the board of diretors who ended up firing him.
Jobs had the same problem with overambitious hardware at NeXT. They couldn't even sell enough NexT machines to universities and the enterprise because they were still expensive to produce and underpowered, and had to stop making hardware and lay people off.
Moore's Law didn't catch up with the vision until the mid 90s, and luckily he and NexT's operating system were brought back into the fold at Apple then.
This is exactly what people don't understand. Jobs had a dream computer and he was adamant on making it. First time he got fired because of it. Second time he became immensely successful because of the same dream.
This is case of perfect hindsight. It's easy to think he was great because second time around he became crazy successful. Nobody is willing to admit that he was repeating the same strategy and failing at it until luck worked in his favour. His rehiring at Apple when NextStep was failing. And then at Apple he got John Ive and team. And finally evolution of technologies like powerful and efficient processors, touch screens, high density storage etc allowed that dream to be realized finally.
Gave up control or lost control?
>Founders don't get fired because employees find them unbearable or sabotaging. Those employees get fired or quit...unless the founder gives up control and then loses an internal political fight.
see Kalanick, founders don't get fired because of employees, they get fired because of they can't keep their board loyal to them. This was the case with Steve Jobs as well.
Jobs' return to Apple in 1997, he made sure that 4 new board members were appointed[0], which you can be sure were loyal to him first and foremost.
He lost control of his company the first time around, learned from his mistakes and corrected. There is no need to glorify his early mistakes, they don't diminish his accomplishments.
Of Jobs she said, “He would shout at a meeting, 'You asshole, you never do anything right.' It was like an hourly occurrence. Yet I consider myself the absolute luckiest person in the world to have worked with him."
Either way, at any company in the world just about, taking a stanford mba (even at google) is not a unlikely success story.
However...a dynamic I see happening in my professional world is that the 'how' of doing things is changing so rapidly that managers aren't able to keep up and so might find themselves in a position where when they first started managing they were an expert in their domain but over time the domain has changed so much that their expertise has fallen behind. At that point I think a manager can still have value by performing classically managerial tasks:
- setting/reinforcing/communicating the vision (as Jobs notes in the video)
- recognizing great work by individuals on the team (both within the team and across the org)
- minimizing uncertainty within their span of control/removing 'blockers'
- providing autonomy to their staff
- facilitating collaboration
- striving for fairness and transparency in management decisions
Just like sometimes you're mentoring, coaching or teaching.
At that stage Snow Leopard was already a year behind schedule for what was meant to be a free maintenance + performance release.
So I’d agree that it cuts both ways. A good manager knows to trust his employees.
I feel like sometimes managers create abstractions in their mental model rather than simply relying on their engineers to perform that role at a much greater level of detail. So to this individual, web server == heavy.
The problem however is that no one I have ever worked under embodied all of those traits.
Reminds me of this. The value is in the audio but the animation is entertaining.
He was lucky enough to rope in a genius - Woz - to make a computer he could sell brilliant - thanks to his narcisism, maybe - and make 100 million out of it. From then on he almost destroyed two companies - Pixar and Next - until he learnt how to run one properly at Apple 2.0
Steve’s confidence can come at a cost too though. Steve was part of imposing work anti-poaching agreements so employees couldn’t easily switch jobs to certain tech companies. There’s also plenty of untold stories of Steve yelling at employees and making them cry. While I overall like Apple and would love to work there, it’s worth asking...
What else is behind the video? Are there people who’ve been hurt by Steve? Do you want to be that personality?
As far as handling your own confidence, it comes with time. I’d recommend learning to take some impromptu debate, a dance class, etc. to be around people more. Particularly outside circles of friends that belittle you.
Ego - narcissism - a desire to prove oneself because of feeling less than others while young - these are the dark and necessary motivators to feeling invincible and confident and that you can make your ideas reality. How arrogant must an entrepreneur be to believe that he can defeat and conquer multibillion industries?
Here's the secret though. There is no secret- there is only your fear of being laughed at and ridiculed and failing. People like Steve Jobs aren't confident because they try to be confident - confidence is a side effect of being stubborn and desperate. You are desperate to succeed because of the dark motivators I described above. You are stubborn because you desire success desperately, and will keep knocking your head against the wall until you achieve it. If you push your stubborn-ness and desperation to the extremes, eventually one day people will look at you speak, and think you were always confident and always powerfully-centered and in control. But they are just seeing the symptoms of a lifetime of failure and desperation and stubbornness that has finally begun to turn around.
What I am saying is - to be confident - be honest with yourself. If you want to be great, expose yourself, look ugly and feel insecure, but be stubborn in pursuing your honest desire to be great and do great things. Confidence will be gained by trying to do exceptional and weird things long enough until you realize you can achieve them.
Very few people will ever put in the kind of effort and time that Steve Jobs put into his work, and so they shouldn't ever expect anything like his level of expertise or confidence.
You can see this in school culture: is the goal of school to get the stamp at the end, and you might get some knowledge in the process; or is it to get knowledge and you might get a stamp at the end.
You can see it in interviews: do you hire someone with ten years experience, or do you hire someone who can solve your whiteboard problems.
This culture of results mattering more than experience may come from the US history of being very spread out with a lot of people moving around. If some out of town person comes in looking for work and says they've been doing something for 10 years, it may or may not be true -- you ask them to show you how they can do whatever it is, and decide based on that; the truth of the background doesn't really matter.
This doesn't hold true completely. It's harder to get a programming job without a degree, but it's not impossible. It is impossible (or darn near) to get a job as a medical surgeon without an appropriate degree and supervised training, though.
"While Mr. Jobs's stated positions on management techniques are all quite noble and worthy, in practice he is a dreadful manager ... He is a prime example of a manager who takes the credit for his optimistic schedules and then blames the workers when deadlines are not met," he wrote, adding that Steve "misses appointments ... does not give credit ... has favorites ... and doesn't keep promises."
I think Jobs was incredibly lucky that he was always surrounded by smart, humble people, such as Woz. Raskin was less tolerant. You say confidence; some say arrogance. Some admired him for that; others just didn't care; it seems.
don't confuse the tech world in the USA today with the one at jobs time.
When I was younger, I watched an interview with Richard Feynman where he described how exceptionally difficult it is to truly know something. I wish more people took that approach when it comes to their own workplaces.
As I've grown older, I've come to believe that holding strong opinions and being decisive is extremely important and impactful. It comes with the caveat though that as soon as you find you're wrong, you need to be able to change direction and not cling to your disproved beliefs.
it is, and yes you can be wrong. but it's being strongly opinionated that matters, not being right (assuming you don't confuse that with just being stubborn). Many "meh" projects are just due to not being able to make strong, bold choices.
However, the idea of employees as fanatical followers always struck me as too cult-like. I’d bet with superb vision and organization (managements job), and deep skill and insight (workers job), you can get the results without the fanaticism.
Maybe that aspect is just played up for thr media.
The only piece of good advice for someone in the position of a young Steve Jobs is to find a friend like Woz who actually knows how to do something.
You could give the transcript of these interviews to a Mr-nobody-Joe-Schmoe and have them say it. And no one would care, if not laugh to their face.
It's 90% about who says it, and maybe 10% about what is being said.
Pick up most management books and you'ok see the same.
Jack Welch's version was "get the right people on the bus and then decide where to go"
Lou Gestners is "culture is not part of the game, it's the only game"
However, he was a very nice people manager. He listens well, and he treats his team well. He would protect me even when I disrespected and frustrated the whole chain of commands (well they all respected my history of great contributions but they just weren't happy with the way I was acting - probably due to my mental illness).
But my manager kept me under his arms, and would rely on the engineers to run the technical show as he sat in the backseat listening during meetings (he would step in if needed to keep "politics" out).
Often you don't get both "very technical + very good people manager" type of manager, so if it were up to me I'd pick a people manager who is great at communication and have respects for his/her engineers to do their jobs without tight oversight. If the team isn't able to resolve a technical decision, then it is the manager's time to become an arbitrator: let people cool down, break down the problem and then discuss options.
SJ's advice on not micromanaging is probably the only thing I can agree on. Don't micromanage, but make sure everyone knows you are the manager, and everyone on the team deserves to be kept informed by one another. There shouldn't be a "I am working on a ticket but I will update you when I am done in a week."
That was me. Don't be the old me. It was toxic, no matter how successful I was technically.
I'm far from a "fanboy" on Apple; I am curious.
It was much easier to just make calls on a 3310, in fact Siri is not a patch on the 1930's concept of asking a lady at the exchange to patch you through.
To ask 'are any of their products even new anymore' is a bit odd though.