Chaotic, manipulative, arrogant: would you have hired Steve Jobs?
Posted: Mon Jan 06, 2025 6:14 am
Steve Jobs is often regarded as one of the most inspiring leaders in history, not only because he pioneered the iPhone, the iPad and other Apple devices; Jobs is read as a visionary because he anticipated a new way of doing business that was inspiring to what is now concentrated in Silicon Valley. Without unjustified hierarchies, without conventionalism, the new company is fluid and disruptive.
But if you were a recruiter for a major company, would you have accepted a scruffy college kid with an interest in technology? A hippie who, it is said, smelled so bad that Atari had to reassign him to the night shift? Not only that. In his biography of Jobs, Walter-Isaacson describes the Californian as manipulative, arrogant, “a terrible manager,” a mediocre engineer and an irrelevant technologist.
We insist: would you have kept him in your company? It is usually difficult to overlook such weaknesses and instead focus on the latent virtues of the person in question. In the case of Jobs, he demonstrated a genuine ability to understand the demands of users and combined this with great perseverance in achieving greece number data his objectives. Thanks to his nose, he had fixations that redounded to the benefit of the company.
Avoiding weakness, explains Peter Ducker in his classic The Effective Executive, will, at best, produce plain mediocrity.
Jobs' biographer portrayed him as a man of enormous weaknesses but also of great strengths. He was a charismatic leader who inspired people to do what they believed possible, and he was also one of the great entrepreneurs without great credentials behind him. In fact, Steve Jobs never finished his university studies.
Advertising man David Ogilvy is another example of a self-made man who went against the conventions of the labour market; another genius who defied the titulitis and came out on top. In 1949, Ogilvy was 38 years old and had no advertising experience – apart from a brief stint at his brother's agency in London. He had previously left Oxford to work as a chef in Paris, sell ovens in Scotland, do research in Hollywood, spy for the British Security Coordination and farm with the Amish in Pennsylvania.
Years later, on March 5, 1971, when he was already well established in the advertising world, Ogilvy sent this autobiographical note to one of his partners: “Is there any agency that would hire this man? He is 38 years old and unemployed. He did not finish his college education. He has been a cook, a salesman, a diplomat and a farmer. He knows nothing about advertising and has never written an advertisement. He claims to be interested in advertising as a career and is willing to work for $5,000 a year. I doubt that any American agency would hire him. However, there was one London agency that did hire him. Three years later he had become the most famous advertising copywriter in the world. Moral: Sometimes an agency that is imaginative and unorthodox in hiring its staff pays off.”
But if you were a recruiter for a major company, would you have accepted a scruffy college kid with an interest in technology? A hippie who, it is said, smelled so bad that Atari had to reassign him to the night shift? Not only that. In his biography of Jobs, Walter-Isaacson describes the Californian as manipulative, arrogant, “a terrible manager,” a mediocre engineer and an irrelevant technologist.
We insist: would you have kept him in your company? It is usually difficult to overlook such weaknesses and instead focus on the latent virtues of the person in question. In the case of Jobs, he demonstrated a genuine ability to understand the demands of users and combined this with great perseverance in achieving greece number data his objectives. Thanks to his nose, he had fixations that redounded to the benefit of the company.
Avoiding weakness, explains Peter Ducker in his classic The Effective Executive, will, at best, produce plain mediocrity.
Jobs' biographer portrayed him as a man of enormous weaknesses but also of great strengths. He was a charismatic leader who inspired people to do what they believed possible, and he was also one of the great entrepreneurs without great credentials behind him. In fact, Steve Jobs never finished his university studies.
Advertising man David Ogilvy is another example of a self-made man who went against the conventions of the labour market; another genius who defied the titulitis and came out on top. In 1949, Ogilvy was 38 years old and had no advertising experience – apart from a brief stint at his brother's agency in London. He had previously left Oxford to work as a chef in Paris, sell ovens in Scotland, do research in Hollywood, spy for the British Security Coordination and farm with the Amish in Pennsylvania.
Years later, on March 5, 1971, when he was already well established in the advertising world, Ogilvy sent this autobiographical note to one of his partners: “Is there any agency that would hire this man? He is 38 years old and unemployed. He did not finish his college education. He has been a cook, a salesman, a diplomat and a farmer. He knows nothing about advertising and has never written an advertisement. He claims to be interested in advertising as a career and is willing to work for $5,000 a year. I doubt that any American agency would hire him. However, there was one London agency that did hire him. Three years later he had become the most famous advertising copywriter in the world. Moral: Sometimes an agency that is imaginative and unorthodox in hiring its staff pays off.”