Unlearnable

“A book is a mirror; if an ass peers into it, you cannot expect an apostle to peer out.”
-         Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Steve Jobs. Great innovator? Definitely. Ran a huge company as if it was a small, nimble one? Absolutely. Role model? That’s a tough one. By all accounts, he was a terrible person to work for. And yet he drove/led those very same employees to insane levels of perfection and greatness.

That makes Jobs a very complicated figure to learn from: should other bosses and companies learn from him? Did Jobs succeed because of those horrible attributes? Or despite them?

To realize how badly managers want to learn from Jobs, consider the following instance that Bob Sutton ran into:
“(this) caring, calm, and wickedly smart CEO -- asked Huggy Rao and me if we thought he had to be an asshole like Jobs in order for his company to achieve the next level of success.... he seemed genuinely worried that his inability to be nasty to people was career limiting.”
Wow!

In his book, “Good Boss, Bad Boss”, Sutton encountered many other instances like the one above. That led him to come up this very interesting hypothesis:
“So I raised my hypothesis: that people couldn’t learn much from Jobs. That he was so hyped, so complex, and apparently inconsistent that the “lessons” they derived from him were really more about who they were and hoped to be than about Jobs himself.”

Ben Austen came to a similar conclusion:
“Jobs has become a Rorschach test, a screen onto which entrepreneurs and executives can project a justification of their own lives: choices they would have made anyway, difficult traits they already possess.”

Does that mean nobody can learn anything from Jobs? Perhaps. But strangely, that may not even matter because as Bob Sutton said:
“Steve had such a weird and rare brain that it simply isn’t possible for another human being to copy him anyway!”

Comments

  1. KumarMay 27, 2013 at 12:32 PM

    It seems true that Steve's character defies correlation with what his organization achieved.

    When you quote “Steve had such a weird and rare brain that it simply isn’t possible for another human being to copy him anyway!”, isn't it true that nobody really achieves anything worthwhile, by copying or 'trying to be' someone else? It is quite another thing to learn and apply implied principles behind someone else's approach which can be sensible cause-effect correlations.

    There are implied questions whenever some leader's achievement is focused at the leader's personal level. Would the Germans ave responded to Hitler the way they actually did, had the conditions prevailing in that region during Hitler's rise to power been different? One other example: Are we to believe that England's rise to supremacy would be solely due to their queen, Elizabeth the first, during whose regime, England's grooming to become the greatest colonial power occurred?

    Since even the Western world has started using the term "karma" with clearer insight into what it may mean, I am wondering if karma is relevant with leadership and organizational growth too. (Note that I do not endorse the general Hindu tendency of giving karma a fatalistic interpretation, which is silly.) We may never know the answer.

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