Case Study:
Understanding People-Steve Jobs’s Personality
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 built it into the world’s
most valuable company. Along the way he helped to transform seven industries: personal
computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, retail stores, and digital
publishing….
When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, it was producing an array of computers and
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 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.” Their job, he told his team
members, was to focus on four great products, one for each 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. “Deciding what not to do is as important as
deciding what to do,” he told me. “That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.”
After he righted the company, Jobs began taking his “top 100″ people on a retreat 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 engendered focus) and
asked, “What are the 10 things we should be doing next?” 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 come up with a list of 10. Then Jobs would
slash the bottom seven and announce, “We can only do three.”
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
members would at times be exasperated as they tried to get him to deal with issues they
considered important. But he would give a cold stare and refuse to shift his laser-like
focus until he was
ready….
Part of Jobs’s compulsion to take responsibility for what he called “the whole widget”
stemmed from his personality, which was very controlling. But he was also 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 or content might pollute the
perfection of an Apple device. It was an approach that 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 marked by delightful user experiences. Being in the
Apple ecosystem could be as sublime as walking in one of the Zen gardens of Kyoto 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….
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 makers
would start adding music players to their handsets. So he cannibalized iPod sales by creating
Understanding People-Steve Jobs’s Persona
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the iPhone. “If we don’t cannibalize ourselves, someone else will,” he
said….
John Sculley, who ran Apple from 1983 to 1993, was a marketing and sales 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
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.
Understanding People-Steve Jobs’s Persona
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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. …
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,
“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 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 by an
ability to be inspirational. He infused Apple employees with an abiding passion to create
groundbreaking products and a belief that they could accomplish what seemed impossible.
And we have to judge him by the outcome. Jobs had a close-knit family, and so it was at
Apple: His top players tended to stick around longer and be 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 to do great
things. Ask any member of that Mac team. They will tell you it was worth the pain.” Most of
them do. “He would shout at a meeting, ‘You [expletive], you never do anything right,”‘ Debi
Coleman recalls. “Yet I consider myself the absolute luckiest person in the world to have
worked with him.”
Understanding People-Steve Jobs’s Personality
Objective:
Determine the role personality plays in understanding leadership success as exemplified by
examining the traits exhibited by Steve Jobs as he created and then resurrected Apple.
Summary:
Steve Jobs and Steve Wosniak created Apple in his parents’ garage in 1971. Apple became one the
world’s most successful companies. Jobs leadership was brash and aggressive as he displayed his
passion for quality products over the company’s profitability. He changed the classic corporate
environment from three-piece suits to a more casual attire and open-area physical culture. His
personality traits caused him to be bold, passionate, and controlling; yet empowering his teams as
he pushed them to expand new technical boundaries in the quest for giving customers the products
they wanted. He demanded clarity of purpose in product development as he controlled and pushed
his technical teams to strive for product perfection. He was a complex personality who influenced
his team to follow his leadership as Apple became one of the most successful companies in the
world.
Discussion Questions:
1.
How would you evaluate Steve Jobs in terms of cardinal disposition, central
tendencies, and secondary traits?
2.
How would you evaluate Jobs in terms of interpersonal style-traditional,
participative, and individualistic?
3.
How would you evaluate Jobs in terms of the Big Five personality traits-openness to
experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism?
4.
Do you think Jobs’s personality influenced Apple employees in a positive or
negative way?
Teaching Points:
✓ It might appear that Jobs’s leadership style was a dichotomy since he could be for
example; aggressive, bullying, controlling, impatient, petulant, profane, and
insulting. However, he was also caring, intuitive, passionate, value oriented, a
visionary, rewarding, inspirational, focused, and loyal.
✓ Most leaders do not have just one style, but they often allow the situation, the
people involved, and the circumstances to dictate their style.
✓ Jobs was a leader who influenced his teams by empowering them to be an integral
part of the product development process which contributed to a culture of high
morale and employee commitment to Apple’s vision.
✓ Jobs had a high level of self-confidence and was a risk-taker extordinaire, pp. 341 –
342.
✓ Jobs influenced his employees through his beliefs and values which he lived daily.
Thus, he was a “living” example of his beliefs about the potential for Apple’s
success.
✓ A major leadership focus is “How to Solve Personality Differences,” pp. 355 –
356; i.e.,
1. Talk out the issue, concern, or problem,
2. Be flexible,
3. Be tolerant.
Understanding People-Steve Jobs’s Personality
Related AOL 6 Text Information to Support Your Class Discussion:
o Explore Jobs’ leadership style, which included the empowerment of his
employees in Apple’s product development process even though some
considered it contrary to his occasional abrupt behavior, pp. 160 – 184.
o In many ways, Jobs was a charismatic leader. Detail the traits of charismatic
leadership by exploring pp. 3, 25 – 28.
o It will be interesting for your students to learn how Jobs leadership style relates
to the trait style of leadership. Studies on leadership trait theory usually include
the following; 1) basic intelligence, 2) clear and strong values, and 3) a high level
of personal energy. Ask you students if Jobs possessed these three traits and
those discovered by Ghiselli’s trait research. pp. 14 – 15.
NOTE: We routinely research the subject of our specific case assignment to determine
changes in vision, mission, leadership team, new product development, financials, current
national/global news events, etc., prior to the class discussion. An example of this is
found in the Introduction section preceding our suggestions for using Case Analyses in
your class. We have used Hewlett-Packard as a sample for all the cases since this form of
organizational information is fluid and possibly time sensitive.