21 Great Leaders: Learn Their Lessons, Improve Your Influence (8 page)
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Authors: Pat Williams
Jobs’s senior advisers tried to get him to pay attention to big-picture issues of corporate vision and strategy, but he refused to listen. He became like Captain Queeg in Herman Wouk’s
The Caine Mutiny
, a sea captain who obsessed over a quart of strawberries while his ship was on a deadly collision course.
New York Times
business writer Randall Stross wrote of Jobs’s strangely unvisionary performance during the NeXT era:
Mr. Jobs’s lieutenants tried to warn him away from certain disaster, but he was not receptive. In 1992–93, seven of nine NeXT vice presidents were shown the door or left on their own.
In this period, Mr. Jobs did not do much delegating. Almost every aspect of the machine—including the finish on interior screws—was his domain. The interior furnishings of NeXT’s offices, a stunning design showplace, were Mr. Jobs’s concern, too. While the company’s strategy begged to be re-examined, Mr. Jobs attended to other matters.
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The failure of NeXT forced Steve Jobs to reexamine his leadership priorities. He learned that his top priority was to be the steward of the corporate vision, not the steward of the sprinkler heads. Kevin Compton, a senior executive at Businessland, contrasted the Steve Jobs who returned to Apple with the vision-impaired Steve Jobs who ran NeXT into the ground. “He’s the same Steve in his passion for excellence,” Compton said, “but a new Steve in his understanding of how to empower a large company to realize his vision.”
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2.
To be a leader of vision, avoid the character flaws of Steve Jobs
. Emulate his visionary strengths without adopting his failings and flaws. Make every effort to become a complete seven-sided leader.
Steve Jobs was
not
a complete leader by any means. We can give him high marks as a leader of vision, communication skills, competence, and boldness, but he was almost completely lacking in people skills and a serving heart, and a bit sketchy in the character department (remember how he deceived his partner, Steve Wozniak). Why do I say that Steve Jobs lacked people skills and a serving heart? Let me introduce you to the dark side of Steve Jobs:
Ryan Tate observed in Gawker: “Jobs regularly belittled people, swore at them, and pressured them until they reached their breaking point. In the pursuit of greatness he cast aside politeness and empathy. His verbal abuse never stopped.”
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And Malcolm Gladwell, writing in the
New Yorker
, called Steve Jobs “a bully,” and based that assessment on these facts:
Jobs gets his girlfriend pregnant, and then denies that the child is his. He parks in handicapped spaces. He screams at subordinates. He cries like a small child when he does not get his way. He gets stopped for driving a hundred miles an hour, honks angrily at the officer for taking too long to write up the ticket, and then resumes his journey at a hundred miles an hour. He sits in a restaurant and sends his food back three times. He arrives at his hotel suite in New York for press interviews and decides, at 10 p.m., that the piano needs to be repositioned, the strawberries are inadequate, and the flowers are all wrong: he wanted calla lilies. (When his public-relations assistant returns, at midnight, with the right flowers, he tells her that her suit is “disgusting.”)
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Adam Lashinsky of
Fortune
tells another revealing story. In 2008, Apple debuted MobileMe, an e-mail system for its iPhone. But MobileMe performed poorly, resulting in user complaints and poor reviews. Steve Jobs called a meeting with the MobileMe team. He opened the meeting with a question: “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?”
One member of the team explained MobileMe’s function.
“So,” Jobs continued, “why the [expletive] doesn’t it do that?” Then, in an obscenity-laced tirade, he blistered his team for the next half hour. “You’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation,” he said. “You should hate each other for having let each other down.” Then, in front of the whole group, he demoted the team leader and named a new executive to head the team.
This incident, Lashinsky concluded, was no aberration. It’s a glimpse into “Apple’s ruthless corporate culture” under Steve Jobs—a culture that could often be “brutal and unforgiving.”
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Steve Jobs had only himself to blame for the disastrous rollout of MobileMe. He had created a culture of fear in which no one dared to bring him bad news. The MobileMe team worked feverishly, day and night, hoping to perfect the software in time for the rollout. When they failed to meet their goal, no one dared give Steve Jobs the bad news. Leaders need to hear bad news long before it becomes a public humiliation. Jobs’s dysfunctional leadership style guaranteed that bad news would not reach his ears until it was too late.
Great leaders don’t have to be bullies. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Ronald Reagan transformed nations while maintaining gracious, even courtly manners. They demonstrated respect for the people they led. The late UCLA head basketball coach John Wooden won ten NCAA national championships (seven in a row) and never once yelled or swore at his players. Tony Dungy coached the Indianapolis Colts to an NFL championship in Super Bowl XLI—and he never screamed or cussed.
Steve Jobs’s abusive leadership style earned him many enemies and cost his company a lot of top talent. Yet Apple continues to thrive. How do we explain the contradiction? How did a leader who displayed only four of the Seven Sides of Leadership become one of the most successful business leaders in history? Relly Nadler, author of
Leading with Emotional Intelligence
, offers an explanation: The power of Steve Jobs’s vision was so strong and compelling that it compensated for Jobs’s leadership deficits. Nadler explains:
Jobs’ vision…overpowered what can be considered his coercive leadership style…. Did his employees just tolerate his style for the sake of being a part of changing the world? Did they accept his “emotional towel snapping” and humiliation in front of peers for the exhilaration and pride of being…[part of the] coolest company on the planet? I think so. The power of his vision…seemed to mute the negativity of his management.
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Dr. Nadler asks, could Steve Jobs have achieved the same heights without being a tyrant? His answer: absolutely. “His prickly, demanding personality was not the critical factor for his success,” Nadler concludes. “Jobs often stated, ‘This is just me,’ without the awareness that he could or would benefit from changing.”
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My advice: Study the visionary brilliance of Steve Jobs, harness the power of leadership vision. Then make sure you build
all the other sides of leadership
into your leadership life for good measure.
3.
To be a visionary leader, learn to focus
. In an interview with
Fortune
, Steve Jobs talked about a leadership lesson he learned while pruning trees in the apple orchards of Robert Friedland’s hippie commune. Just as pruning branches makes apple trees more productive, pruning away extraneous ideas makes a company more productive. He explained:
People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done.
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Great visionary leaders don’t confuse their followers with an array of visions. They focus their followers’ attention and energies on one compelling vision. Great visionary leaders have mastered the art of “pruning” ideas. They say yes to the best and no to the rest.
4.
To become a leader of vision, don’t look around you—look within
. Once Steve Jobs got his priorities straight, it wasn’t hard for him to be a visionary. He didn’t need to study historical trends or read books by futurists in order to determine his vision of the future. He simply had to look within. He asked himself, “What should computers do that they don’t already do? If I could build the perfect phone, what features would it have?” Then he gathered a team of engineers to design it and build it.
True visionaries don’t study trends—they set trends. True visionaries don’t try to anticipate change—they drive change. True visionaries don’t need focus groups to tell them what the public wants—their instinct, intuition, and experience tell them what people will want the moment they see it.
The mature, visionary Steve Jobs peered into the future by looking within himself. He
imagined
the future; then he
committed
himself to building the future he saw within. Anyone can imagine possible futures. That’s called daydreaming. But Steve Jobs committed time, energy, personnel, and resources to his dreams, and that’s called visionary leadership.
Whatever his flaws—and they were huge—Steve Jobs envisioned and invented the future. Yes, he treated people badly. Some people walked away—but many stayed. Why did they stay? Because Steve Jobs showed them such an exciting vision of a future that, in spite of Steve Jobs’s toxic personality and wretched people skills, they wanted to help build it.
Steve Jobs talked about changing the world, about making a dent in the universe. When you give people a vision of making a difference in the world, you give them a sense of
meaning
. For most people, being employed at Apple was more than a career. At his best, Steve Jobs made people believe their work had meaning.
That’s our mission as visionary leaders: look within, discover our vision, then communicate that vision to our followers with power and a sense of meaning. When you and your followers truly believe that together you are making a dent in the universe, there’s no limit to what you can achieve.
I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next
.
S
TEVE
J
OBS
COMMUNICATION
W
INSTON
C
HURCHILL
Sending Language into Battle
If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever
.
Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again
.
Then hit it a third time—a tremendous whack
.
W
INSTON
C
HURCHILL
I
n 2013, the British national morning newspaper
The Independent on Sunday
conducted a poll of readers to find the most inspiring public speaker of the past fifty years. John F. Kennedy placed third in the poll. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. placed second. And in first place, with 39 percent of the vote, was Sir Winston Churchill.
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The speeches of Winston Churchill during World War II did more than merely inspire the British people. His speeches may well have saved Western civilization from destruction by Nazi Germany. For a seventeen-month period, from the beginning of the Battle of Britain, July 1940, until the entrance of the United States into World War II, December 1941, the British Isles were on the ropes. Hitler’s Luftwaffe pounded Britain’s shipping and military installations then turned to terror-bombing civilians.
Hitler was eager to launch Operation Sea Lion, a massive air and sea invasion across the English Channel. Only the stubborn resolve of the British people stood between Hitler and his goal of conquering Great Britain. Germany had already conquered France with astonishing speed, and Britain was next in line to fall. But the British people would not falter, would not fail. They were sustained by the thundering words of Winston Churchill.
On April 9, 1963, President John F. Kennedy officiated a White House ceremony proclaiming Sir Winston Churchill an honorary citizen of the United States. Though Churchill was in poor health and could not attend the ceremony, he and his wife watched a live transatlantic television broadcast and heard President Kennedy say, “In the dark days and darker nights when Britain stood alone—and most men save Englishmen despaired of England’s life—he mobilized the English language and sent it into battle. The incandescent quality of his words illuminated the courage of his countrymen.”
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