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ultiplying Effectiveness
“but if something sucks, I tell people to their face, It’s my job to be honest.” When I
pressed him on whether he could have gotten the same results while being nicer, he
said perhaps so. “But it’s not who I am,” he said. “Maybe there’s a better way-a
bono
gentlemen’s club where we all wear ties and speak in the Brahmin language and velvet
code words—but I don’t know that way, because I am middle-class from California.
It’s important to appreciate that Jobs’s rudeness and roughness were accompanied
Ubon by an ability to be inspirational. He infused Apple employees with an abiding passion
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to create groundbreaking products and a belief that they could accomplish what
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seemed impossible. And we have to judge him by the outcome. Jobs had a close-knit
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family, and so it was at Apple: His top players tended to stick around longer and be
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more loyal than those at other companies, including ones led by bosses who were
kinder and gentler. CEOs who study Jobs and decide to emulate his roughness
without understanding his ability to generate loyalty make a dangerous mistake.
“I’ve learned over the years that when you have really good people, you don’t have
to baby them,” Jobs told me. “By expecting them to do great things, you can get them
holno
to do great things. Ask any member of that Mac team. They will tell you it was worth
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the pain.” Most of them do. “He would shout at a meeting, ‘You (expletive], you never
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do anything right,'” Debi Coleman recalls. “Yet I consider myself the absolute luckiest
person in the world to have worked with him.”
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Questions
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1. How would you evaluate Steve Jobs in terms of cardinal disposition, central
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tendencies, and secondary traits?
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al stbro 2. How would you evaluate Jobs in terms of interpersonal style–traditional,
il sige participative, and individualistic?
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3. How would you evaluate Jobs in terms of the Big Five personality traits-openness
mo to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism?
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4. Do you think Jobs’s personality influenced Apple employees in a positive or
negative way?
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15 / The Role of Personality 365
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matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off. It happened at Apple when Sculley
came in, which was my fault, and it happened when Ballmer took over at Microsoft.”
When Jobs returned, he shifted Apple’s focus back to making innovative products:
The sprightly iMac, the PowerBook, and then the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. As
he explained, “My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were
motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to
make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products. But the
products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to
where the goal was to make money. It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning
everything-the people you hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings.
Caring deeply about what customers want is much different from continually
asking them what they want; it requires intuition and instinct about desires that have
not yet been formed.
“Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page,” Jobs explained. Instead of
relying on market research, he honed his version of empathy-an intimate intuition
about the desires of his customers. He developed his appreciation for intuition-
feelings that are based on accumulated experiential wisdom-while he was studying
Buddhism in India as a college dropout. “The people in the Indian countryside don’t
use their intellect like we do; they use their intuition instead,” he recalled. “Intuition is
a very powerful thing–more powerful than intellect, in my opinion.
Jobs’s (in)famous ability to push people to do the impossible was dubbed by
colleagues his Reality Distortion Field, after an episode of Star Trek in which aliens
create a convincing alternative reality through sheer mental force. An early example was
when Jobs was on the night shift at Atari and pushed Steve Wosniak to create a game
called Breakout. Woz said it would take months, but Jobs stared at him and insisted he
could do it in four days. Woz knew that was impossible, but he ended up doing it.
Those who did not know Jobs interpreted the Reality Distortion Field as a
euphemism for bullying and lying. But those who worked with him admitted that the
trait, infuriating as it might be, led them to perform extraordinary feats. Because Jobs
felt that life’s ordinary rules didn’t apply to him, he could inspire his team to change
the course of computer history with a small fraction of the resources that Xerox or
IBM had. “It was a self-fulfilling distortion,” recalls Debi Coleman, a member of the
original Mac team who won an award one year for being the employee who best stood
up to Jobs. “You did the impossible because you didn’t realize it was impossible.
One day Jobs marched into the cubicle of Larry Kenyon, the engineer who was
working on the Macintosh operating system, and complained that it was taking too
long to boot up. Kenyon started to explain why reducing the boot-up time wasn’t
possible, but Jobs cut him off. “If it would save a person’s life, could you find a way to
shave 10 seconds off the boot time?” He asked. Kenyon allowed that he probably
could. Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if five million people were using the
Mac and it took 10 seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to 300 million
or so hours a year-the equivalent of at least 100 lifetimes a year. After a few weeks
Kenyon had the machine booting up 28 seconds faster.
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During the development of almost every product he ever created, Jobs at a certain
point “hit the pause button” and went back to the drawing board because he felt it
wasn’t perfect. That happened even with the movie Toy Story. After Jeff Katzenberg
and the team at Disney, which had bought the rights to the movie, pushed the Pixar
team to make it edgier and darker, Jobs and the director, John Lasseter, finally
stopped production and rewrote the story to make it friendlier. When he was about to
launch Apple Stores, he and his store guru, Ron Johnson, suddenly decided to delay
everything a few months so that the stores’ layouts could be reorganized around
activities and not just product categories..
Jobs was famously impatient, petulant, and tough with the people around him.
But his treatment of people, though not laudable, emanated from his passion for
perfection and his desire to work with only the best. It was his way of preventing what
he called “the bozo explosion,” in which managers are so polite that mediocre people
feel comfortable sticking around. “I don’t think I run roughshod over people,” he said,
. .
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. . .
7/ Multiplying Effectiveness
Case Study:
To
Shalom
Understanding People—Steve Jobs’s Personality83
onals
This case is based on an interview of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, the author of
Jobs’s biography. His saga is the entrepreneurial creation myth writ large. Steve Jobs
co-founded Apple in his parents’ garage in 1976, was ousted in 1985, returned to
rescue it from near bankruptcy in 1997, and by the time he died, in October 2011, had
TO
built it into the world’s most valuable company. Along the way he helped to transform
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seven industries: personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet
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computing, retail stores, and digital publishing.
When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, it was producing an array of computers and
maana
peripherals, including a dozen different versions of the Macintosh. After a few weeks
of product review sessions, he’d finally had enough. “Stop!” he shouted. “This is
crazy. “He grabbed a Magic Marker, padded in his bare feet to a whiteboard, and drew
101
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a two-by-two grid. “Here’s what we need,” he declared. Atop the two columns, he
wrote “Consumer” and “Pro.” He labeled the two rows “Desktop” and “Portable.
bonolito top
Their job, he told his team members, was to focus on four great products, one for each
of animad
one
quadrant. All other products should be canceled. There was a stunned silence. But by
getting Apple to focus on making just four computers, he saved the company.
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“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,” he told me. “That’s
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true for companies, and it’s true for products.”
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After he righted the company, Jobs began taking his “top 100” people on a retreat
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each year. On the last day, he would stand in front of a whiteboard (he loved
whiteboards because they gave him complete control of a situation and they
svobo
engendered focus) and asked, “What are the 10 things we should be doing next?”
DOC
People would fight to get their suggestions on the list. Jobs would write them down-
and then cross off the ones he decreed dumb. After much jockeying, the group would
bo led
come up with a list of 10. Then Jobs would slash the bottom seven and announce,
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“We can only do three.”
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Focus was ingrained in Jobs’s personality and had been honed by his Zen training.
He relentlessly filtered out what he considered distractions. Colleagues and family
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members would at times be exasperated as they tried to get him to deal with issues
dom world
they considered important. But he would give a cold stare and refuse to shift his
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laser-like focus until he was ready. .
2011
Part of Jobs’s compulsion to take responsibility for what he called “the whole
moldong quong widget” stemmed from his personality, which was very controlling. But he was also
loge of giaob von driven by his passion for perfection and making elegant products. He got hives, or
worse, when contemplating the use of great Apple software on another company’s
uninspired hardware, and he was equally allergic to the thought that unapproved apps
todas
dwubivibn T250 or content might pollute the perfection of an Apple device. It was an approach that
od tog did not always maximize short-term profits, but in a world filled with junky devices,
inscrutable error messages, and annoying interfaces, it led to astonishing products
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boobri bns botol marked by delightful user experiences. Being in the Apple ecosystem could be as
on lootup or on
sublime as walking in one of the Zen gardens of Kyota that Jobs loved, and neither
experience was created by worshipping at the altar of openness or by letting a
thousand flowers bloom. Sometimes it’s nice to be in the hands of a control freak.
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After the iPod became a huge success, Jobs spent little time relishing it. Instead he
began to worry about what might endanger it. One possibility was that mobile phone
dotato makers would start adding music players to their handsets. So he cannibalized iPod
SOOS VON
sales by creating the iPhone. “If we don’t cannibalize ourselves, someone else will,”
Vilnonis I he said.
pat bnshots lo John Sculley, who ran Apple from 1983 to 1993, was a marketing and sales
a executive from Pepsi. He focused more on profit maximization than on product design
after Jobs left, and Apple gradually declined. “I have my own theory about why decline
happens at companies,” Jobs told me: “They make some great products, but then the
sales and marketing people take over the company, because they are the ones who can
juice up the profits. When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t
. .

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