Steve Jobs: Thank you for disobeying me | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs: Thank you for disobeying me

folklore.org

156 pointstwidlit30 comments

Skunkworks, underground, and off-the-radar initiatives are a lot more common in large technology organizations than people might imagine. While you may have "Product Action Committee's" and "Executive Commits" and "Roadmaps" that theoretically set the mandate/budget and resourcing for the company, many of the best projects occur because a few (sometimes only one) smart engineer or manager gets it in their mind to do their own thing.

I will admit, it takes a little gall to hide an entire T&E budget to Japan on a skunkworks project though. Great Story.

It kind of reminds me of the story of the development of the Graphic Calculator application. http://www.pacifict.com/Story/

I work at a huge tech company and in the new SVN repo I've created last week there's a folder named skunkworks. It's just easier to acknowledge these projects will happen.

The repo hasn't hit it's 50th commit yet and there are already two projects there.

If you're a CEO and you discover your engineers are running projects under the radar, then it's time to take your axe to the org chart and get swinging on those middle managers.

Hee. We used to find Twiggy drives in various places (typically in the back of labs when we moved, or when some older cow-orker quit and left boxes of crap behind). We'd send the drives via inter-office mail to one of the original hardware guys responsible for the Twiggy.

We were still finding the damned things and shipping them off to him in 1993. The H/W guy had a pretty good sense of humor about it.

What future albatrosses are /you/ working on? :-)

This is a great story. Not only were the engineers brave enough to defy Jobs, but also Jobs being able to admit his own mistake and not fire the entire team upon finding out. Signs of true leadership all round.

You know what would have been better leadership? Not making the wrong decision in the first place. Yeah, obviously, backing down gracefully when proved wrong is quite important, but so is not betting the product on being able to make a new component...

Guess what, people are wrong all the time. Only in the hindsights, it is easy enough to tell which decisions/risks worked out, and which did not.

Generally, yes. There are a lot of hard decisions out there, where even if there is a right choice, it is only obvious in retrospect. This isn't one of those cases. The engineers involved knew it was a bad idea. They were so convinced it was a bad idea that they defied their boss to ensure there was a backup plan. And they were right to do so.

Jobs had to admit he was wrong. Good for him. But this story is silent on the question of whether he took the next step: figuring out how he was blinded, and why he made this mistake so that he would not make the same mistake in the future. Some mistakes are inevitable. Many are not.

Unfortunately, you've just missed the hundred other cases where Jobs was correct and persevered. People will always be wrong, this doesn't show anything about good decision making or bad decision making because you can find examples of both in everyone. It does show a little bit of humility on Jobs part though, which I think was the point. Arguing about the merits or demerits of the decision itself is irrelevant IMHO.

I wasn't trying to slag Jobs. I was responding to someone saying that this specific instance was an example of "true leadership". I disagreed. The hundreds of other instances where Jobs did indeed make the right decision are irrelevant as to whether this particular incident was one.

"Never make mistakes" isn't exactly a workable business plan.

Agreed. The people that never make mistakes are generally the people that never make anything.

I never claimed it was. But all other things being equal, it's better to be wrong less often, to make fewer mistakes. And when you do make mistakes, it's better to gracefully correct. But in any given case, it really is better to not make the mistake at all.

Of course it's better to be perfect than not. You've stated a tautology.

A tautology means it's always true. That a curious criterion to use as a criticism. All statements are either tautologies, or sometimes false (or are not meant to have truth values, of course).

It is what should be an obvious tautology. Criticizing it for its obviousness makes sense -- if it were that obvious it would add nothing to the discussion. Yet for some reason I did feel the need to remind people of this.

Acknowledging that one was wrong when at last forced to by circumstances is not a particular trait of great leaders. It is a bare minimum. Acknowledging and correcting as circumstances suggest better options, but before circumstances thus force one is a sign of great leadership. Having backup plans ready in case your first choice doesn't work out is another. (It's true that many leaders do none of these. Leaders that do only the first are better than leaders that do none. But it's still not a sign of great leadership.)

> Criticizing it for its obviousness makes sense

That was my intention. I was perhaps unclear.

That depends entirely on the cost of a mistake. If the cost of mistake is low, it's better to make a lots of decisions quickly than it is to try to get each decision correct.

Haha, have you realized the prepotency you display?

Have you made something new in your life?

I'm certain you have not, because it is impossible to do anything new without making mistakes.

This is getting heavily downvoted, but I agree with it. I'm as big of a Steve Jobs fanboy as there ever was (seriously!), but he is much smarter/wiser today in some significant aspects than he was 30 years ago.

Apple today is really, really good about not ending up hamstrung because they didn't have a Plan B; part of why they control everything so tightly and don't make themselves dependent on other organizations is because they want to avoid ever being in a position where they're "stuck". If these guys hadn't surreptitiously worked with Sony, the Mac would have been wounded, perhaps critically.

It's good that Steve admitted he was wrong, and he'll go down as one of the absolute greate leaders in business history, but this story doesn't generally strike me as an example of great leadership.

Anyone who wants to read a fascinating insight into the early days of personal computer development should read this entire site - it evokes wonderful memories for me of how exciting it all was in those days, and how a few guys can develop a historical product all on their own.

Alternatively, it exists in a nice, convenient and well-illustrated dead tree version, "Revolution in the Valley".

Do you mean "Fire in the Valley", or is it a different book?

No the title is "Revolution in the valley", subtitled "the insanely great story of how the Mac was made": http://www.amazon.com/Revolution-Valley-Insanely-Great-Story...

They are different books, but both are great.

The poor guy's name couldn't really be Hide Kamoto?

Why not? Although Hide was asked to hide in a closet, those words are not pronounced the same way and Hide is a common Japanese given name.

It's pronounced (something like) Hee-Day, assuming my Japanese isn't completely worthless.

Brave enough to defy Steve Jobs! And y'all said it was suicide. Refreshing!

So, Steve Jobs wasn't always above secretly copying another company's product the way he claims to be now.

"Cupertino, start your photocopiers." (http://www.macnews.com/content/wwdc-apple-blasts-microsofts-...)

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