- According to leadership personality guru Robert Hogan, Jobs’ key weakness as a leader was his tendency toward erratic emotional outbursts (http://www.ipacweb.org/conf/09/hogan.pdf).
- I had a client some years ago who lived in the same neighborhood as who told me that Jobs refused to put a license plate on his car as a deliberate mark of his uniqueness and unconventionality. I never fully believed the story, but Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs confirms it. (“Opting Out of Overoptimism” by Michael Shermer, Scientific American, March 2012, p. 78).
- Also according to Isaacson, Jobs believed that the “rules didn’t apply to him… He had a sense that he was special, a chosen one, an enlightened one.” (ibid)
- “Think Different” was Apple’s advertising slogan from 1997 through 2007. Apple traditionally positioned itself as the outsider, the anti-Microsoft, a scrappy rebel far hipper and more creative than the competition. Perhaps more than any other major corporation, Apple’s culture was a direct reflection of its CEO’s temperament. That culture emphasizes elegance of design, rebellion, creativity, and an unwillingness to follow convention in management, strategy, or product development. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Different)
- Profiles of Jobs have always portrayed him as someone volatile, demanding, and perfectionistic in his expectations of others and the products they developed but, as we have seen, not believing the rules applied to him. He was widely viewed as shy and reclusive, but also as a very aggressive businessman with a clear, distinct vision of what the product should be. He famously said that he didn’t do customer research because people didn’t know what they wanted until he told them what they wanted. In other words, he saw it as his responsibility to have a vision of what a given product should be, and he assumed that others would find that vision compelling.
- For Jobs, the aesthetics of the customer experience was almost as important as the functionality of the product. One of the reasons that Apple’s products are so expensive–beyond their ability to command a premium because of their reputation–is that the aesthetics of the products require internal components that are more expensive to produce, thus raising production costs per unit. Even the package of Apples products are elegant in their zen-like simplicity and expensive materials.
- Jobs had profound resentment of Microsoft and demonized the company for years (which was so much more successful for so many years). In particular, he derided Bill Gates as lacking creativity and as someone who “never invented anything.” (Gates countered that Jobs was “‘fundamentally odd’ and ‘weirdly flawed as a human being.'”) (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2055347/Bill-Gates-brushes-Steve-Jobs-criticism-praising-late-competitor.html#ixzz1oHu4Opdp)
- Jobs’ much-publicized 2005 Stanford commencement address (easily available on youtube.com) could not be more Four-ish if it had been written by the author of an Enneagram book. Yes, it is ultimately inspiring and uplifting (sort of), but the themes are:
- Finally, and this is very superficial, I grant you–the guy wore a black shirt EVERY DAY! Do only Fours wear black? Of course not. But still…