Comment by wpietri
8 years ago
Definitely. And my real issue with Jobs is more the ripple effect. So many people read stories of Jobs being an asshole and think, "Oh, this is how you success." Ignoring the many assholes who weren't as brilliant or as thoroughly lucky.
Look at Theranos, for example. The CEO was practically a Jobs impersonator. From the turtlenecks and the air of brilliance to the controlling, abusive, and secrecy-oriented behaviors. How many people fell for the fraud? And I can't count the wantrepreneurs I've come across that had similar theories.
> thoroughly lucky.
Jobs made a huge success 3 times:
1. the Apple II
2. Pixar
3. return to Apple and transforming it from 90 days to bankruptcy to the biggest corporation in the world
You can ascribe one of the above to luck, but faced with all three, Jobs was just that good, and made his own luck.
You have to be able to separate the things that were good about Jobs (e.g. design sense, marketing instincts, etc.) from what was bad (i.e. being an asshole).
It's the difference between being effective and being Cargo Cult Steve Jobs. Far too many baby entrepreneurs try to mimic Jobs' behaviors, but fail to couple it with any sort of skill or good taste.
This is a false dichotomy. I already said he's brilliant. But that doesn't mean that he wasn't also very lucky.
No success is without a good degree of luck. Repeated successes show it's less likely that the "luck" is the main factor.
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1. Wozniak 2. Lasseter (and others) 3. Ive
His success was being involved with people with genius and vision that were willing to put up with his shit.
I love Woz, but he's demonstrated no ability to create an impression in the marketplace since his time working with Jobs (arguably an unfair assessment as he largely retired). Jobs turned Pixar into an animation studio and gave Lasseter a place to practice his talents. Ive was working at Apple for years before Jobs came back and put his talents to use (not to mention that Ive's design efforts are only one of a huge swath of things Apple started knocking out of the park after Jobs was back in the chair). That's not just success-through-association.
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This claim is delusional. The stories about Jobs' vision, product/engineering judgement, and ability to get others to share it are very convincing. They stretch for decades. He basically worked his entire career to put creative computing tools into people's hands (Apple II, Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad). He did not just happen to get lucky to "be involved with people with genius and vision."
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You're saying like it's easy to just find a talented person and associate yourself to them and everything else will just work.
BTW things that Ive wasn't involved in when SJ returned to Apple:
- Bring Next software to Apple and create OSX from it
- Software UI/UX design (Ive is mainly a product designer. And it's much more than "let's make colorful plastic" but how to do it so that it looks right, in which colors or how do you actually build this so that it is thin but resistant)
- Simplify product lines and improve focus
- Be involved in the "Think Different" campaign (the bozos at the top level wanted to go with a "We're back" campaign that was proposed to them)
"His success was being involved with people with genius and vision that were willing to put up with his shit."
Which was in no way an accident.
Jobs talent was identifying these people, and building environments around them that maximized their talents, while also identifying how to translate those ideas into products people wanted to pay money to buy.
All three of those guys were/are clueless about business until Jobs made their ideas work.
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How the heck did you come up with Ive as being #3?
Did Ive make the brilliant decision for the 4-square powerMac/iMac product strategy abandoning the dozens of previous models?
I'm guessing no.
That's in no way a counter-argument.
Look I see your point and I agree. However, having worked in a number of big companies I am really at a loss as to what is the right way to coerce a number of humans into the "right" direction. I have sat in meetings where ignorant executives have blabbered on and on about nothing because the company and CEO felt it was important to hear everyone out. This works if everyone at the table is knowledgeable and able to swallow their ego. You get people making ridiculous statements like we need to replace our database that runs the whole organisation. I have also worked in a company where the CEO cut people who were blabbering short, mostly rightly but rudely so. I think the two approaches have a time and place. There is probably no need to be rude but I don't know how one cuts someone off without being rude.
What if there were right ways that don't involve coercion?
What if we can't find them because we let coercive assholes run amok, seizing advantages and damaging people in ways that make it hard to create non-coercive structures that are also highly creative and productive?
I wish I had an answer. It seems to be getting worse or I am just getting old. From where I am standing, management .i.e. "coercion" is considered a stand alone skill. I understand management but I don't buy that it is a standalone skill. Most IT people will not be able to manage a hospital well. I use the word most because I don't want to use the word all and derail this argument. There are off course exceptions, but these are very rare. The number of people who can effectively manage in an industry/business unit they do not understand is less than the number of people currently managing an industry/unit they do not understand. Money, ego, selfishness ... you name it, humna traits get in the way. We all have these one of these traits and we are all affected by these traits.
One of the issues with modern world is that big talkers are rewarded over reserved more knowledgeable people. The more you appear online, the more you talk in meetings and the higher profile you appear the more likely you are to be promoted. It is the way of the world.
There's a line beyond which Jobsian behaviors will ruin the productivity and happiness of the Woz. Holmes/Kissenger and friends flew over it and landed in "scientists are being forced (and encouraged) to lie to keep their jobs," territory.
I googled her images after reading your comment and it is so funny to notice the impersonation.
Also, every C level guy(also middle management wannabes) impersonates Jobs.
> I googled her images after reading your comment and it is so funny to notice the impersonation.
Well, it's not like she made any effort to conceal it. In fact, she was very public about her desire to appear like Jobs.
A Jobs impersonator...but without the talent, taste for design, passion for products, or virtually any other positive quality that he had. IMO Holmes has more in common with Jordan Belfort than Steve Jobs.
I think Elizabeth Holmes belongs in prison. However, I read her bio and she was a genius on par with Jobs.
> However, I read her bio and she was a genius on par with Jobs.
In short, why do you believe that Steve Jobs was remotely close to being a genius, and what made Elizabeth Holmes do to lead you to believe she also met you definition of a genius?
https://www.wsj.com/video/reporting-on-theranos-and-elizabet...
At 4:00 in this video they talk about Holmes fake "deep voice". I think its pretty clearly her fraud tendencies run really really deep. I don't think you could trust anything you think makes her a genius. The only things we actually know about her is that she could get into Standford, where she dropped out. She could also raise money really well.
I don't think she is by any means dumb. But there is absolutely no evidence of genius.
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Honest question:
Is raw intelligence or wisdom more important for success in biotech? It seems to me that raw intelligence is useful when studying systems that are either designed rationally or can be understood easily from a mathematics perspective. On the flip side, I think experience is important when dealing with biology which is often messy and not easily understood because so much is still unknown and everything is the result of an accumulation of random variations.
Most biologists I know are very high in raw intelligence. However there's a distinction between biology as a science and biotech as an industry. The key insight that starts development of a new drug often comes from pure molecular biology, but after that, a different type of biology, as well as chemistry and pharmacology quickly become very important.
The industrial drug development process is one of the most technically complex, risky and highly regulated processes in industry. You basically need PhD level experience in almost a dozen distinct technical domains to get a drug approved. Most biotech VCs prefer CEOs with decades of drug dev experience because they know where the pitfalls are and how to execute better
That said, Ive heard a very experienced biotech VC / former big pharma drug developer describe the process of developing a drug as "hanging on by your fingernails", and the traditional dyed in the wool drug industry strategy has pretty much put the industry on a long term declining trend, so maybe experience isnt as powerful as the industry tells itself
Genius isn't enough. In fact, it can be a detriment in the right (wrong?) environment resulting in stunted emotional and social development. The problem with geniuses is that they tend to think their aptitude is enough to grant them magical ability to be correct. It takes experience and humility to learn that it's not the same, but a life of being pampered and put on a pedestal limits the genius' opportunity to learn this life lesson.
The self-serving genius is roughly equivalent to the pychopath. Once you begin to look for these antisocial behaviors among so-called geniuses you'll see a frightening pattern.
People thinking they are smarter than they are, and that this entitles them to run other peoples' lives, is hardly limited to geniuses.
>I read her bio and she was a genius on par with Jobs.
What were either of them geniuses at exactly? Psychology?
Sure. People with certain personality disorders are extremely good at reading others, and convincing them to do what they want. Two common (and apt) terms I see thrown about are "social chameleon" and "reality distortion field".
You can also learn how to do it if you don't have one by studying those who do.
Regardless of how someone ends up with the ability, I don't think it's unfair to refer to it as genius, even if it's specifically based on emotional intelligence. They're just on a completely different level in comparison to the general population when it comes to bending others to their will and getting their way.
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For breaking what law(s)?
Fraud? The kind of fraud that can get someone hurt or killed like the bogus diagnostic tests which could mean a patient ends up taking the wrong drug and/or dose which hurts them.
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Fraud, theft.