I admire Late Steve Jobs for reasons other than the rest of the world does. For something he didn’t have to do. Steve was very, very rich before iPod and iPhone. He could have easily led his life being nice to people, just living famously in silicon valley, making safe bets along the way, and he still would have made out like a bandit.
But, Steve chose the difficult path of reinventing the music industry and the smartphone. That is very hard to do. Why? Being an engineer, I will tell you one thing. Most engineers will push back on everything that is not possible with the current technology. And, that is what has resulted historically in ordinary phones like Motorola Razrs, Palm Pilots and Blackberry Storms. They let you do what you need to do, but there is nothing seductive about them. To reinvent the smartphone, the envelope has to be pushed way past what is possible.
I really don’t want to say that Steve liked being mad. He had just gone through a lot of mediocrity and suffered the results that come at the end of a team where everyone likes each other, but delivers products which they don’t even feel like using.
With passing time, Anger came naturally to Steve though. When asked about the success of Microsoft and his views on Gates, Jobs once said:
“I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.”
LOL!
Actually, as hustle once reported:
Steve was the same to people outside the company as he was to people inside. He was mean even to people who were considering to come on the inside from the outside. Apparently, the Xerox Star was supposed to be the hot new computer that came out in 1981 (it was ultimately a flop). Jobs and his team went to check it out, but were unimpressed. A few weeks later he called Bob Belleville, one of the hardware designers on the Xerox Star team.
“Everything you’ve ever done in your life is shit,” Jobs said, “so why don’t you come work for me?”
Belleville joined the team. LOL again!
Back to Steve’s anger inside the company, Steve had to say fuck you to a lot of engineers who said, “No, that is not possible” and ask them to go back to their drawing boards to come up with a way to do what he wanted done. That might have been the reason he got progressively angrier and angrier with the passing years and got labelled the “mega asshole”. Try working in a company where 90% of the employees despise you for pushing them so hard and causing years and years of time away from kids, missed piano recitals, working over weekends, and passively angry spouses.
Prior to the iPhone, plastic screens were standard on smartphones. About six months before the iPhone was released in 2007, Jobs became worried after using the prototype iPhone that the device’s display would get scratched when the phone jumbled around in pant or purse pockets with keys and coins. Jobs called Corning’s CEO, Wendell Weeks, and asked him if Corning could create a glass cover that would resist scratches and breakage. Corning usually requires two years of R&D before rolling a new product out, but, Steve persuaded Corning to get it done in six months — an almost impossible feat. The result was Gorilla Glass, which defined the feel of the user’s finger moving around on the touchscreen. It is the superior tactile experience, combined with the responsive graphic software, that was iPhone’s seductive magic. Most major smartphone manufacturers followed suit and started using some version of Gorilla glass to replicate the similar feel of touch.
My point is: Leaders should be agents of change and improvement. This takes a lot of daring and initiative. And, it takes saying ‘Fuck you’ to what you are being told is possible. It takes saying saying ‘Fuck you’ to the limits people are putting around your vision.
As owner of Pixar, Steve once said: Pain is temporary, movie is forever. True Leadership means takes saying ‘Fuck you’ to the temporary pain, so that the world can see the movie you are meant to make. What will you say ‘Fuck you’ to today?
One of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it. And I’ve made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room. And, I got the scar tissue to prove it.
– Steve Jobs on leading transformational change