Throughout Jobs’ Journey
Veröffentlicht am 4. Juni 2015
Is being a true leader a state or a tale? Looking closer to Steve Jobs’ life, the second option may be more accurate. And in this regard, his “wilderness years” deserve better attention than given to date in most of his biographies.
An initiation journey
According to the two journalists, the most decisive period for Jobs was his “wilderness” years from 1985 to 1997, in-between his two tenures at Apple. “That’s when he learned most everything that made his later success possible, and that’s when he started to temper and channel his behavior. To overlook those years is to fall into the trap of only celebrating success.” (p. 13)
This period started with one of his most difficult and bitter failures: getting rejected from Apple, his very own company. However, it happened to trigger something inside him. As he admitted twenty years later: “[It] was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything.” Jobs put Apple out of his heart and started to think about what mattered in his life. “Apple had been formed when he was twenty-one, so he never really had time off to think about what he really wanted to do with his life,” (p. 90) Susan Barnes, NeXT’s CFO, told the biographers. During the few months that followed his leave, he rebuilt his relationship with his daughter Lisa, of whom he first had denied paternity, began gardening and travelled throughout Europe. This precious-though-painful retreat helped him figuring out that being a tech entrepreneur was what he really loved, and that he had to “to turn back his focus where it had always been : discovering the Next Big Thing.” (p. 91)
That did not turn him into an effective businessman immediately. In NeXT, the company he founded after quitting Apple, his management style was still spurred by relentless ambition. A $100,000 logo, an office featuring custom-designed furniture and lush leather couches, a state-of-the-art factory to assemble not-yet-sold computers… were only the first extravagant decisions interfering with his Fortune 500 view given the limited capability of a start-up. Effectively, Jobs' management style truly transformed after his venture with Pixar.
“Great things are done by a team of persons”
Bought from George Lucas for five million dollars in 1986, the studio wasn’t really the kind of toy the tech wunderkind expected. Though he saw from the beginning how 3D imagery would be game-changing and therefore should be at the heart of NeXT Work Station, he faced some challenges getting his team working toward this goal. “He wasn’t the founder, even as owner, he could not change the company to reflect his image and sensibilities. It already had a culture. It already had a leader. Its cohesive and collaborative team knew exactly what it wanted to do. And [Ed] Catmull (Pixar's President, Ed.) was not about to let his young new owner mess things up.”
Steve really had to deal with constraint by that time, and that is precisely how he learned from Lasseter and Catmull, Pixar’s real leaders. He thus learned patience and how to negotiate with greater subtlety. What’s more, according to his biographers, “he started understanding the meaning of teamwork as something that’s far more complicated than simply rallying small groups – without losing his capacity to lead and inspire.” (p. 167)
Upon recalling that period, Steve Jobs would analyze it as follow: “My model of business is the Beatles. They were four very talented guys who kept each other’s negative tendencies in check, they balanced each other, and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. Great things in business are never done by one person. They are done by a team of persons and we’ve got that in Pixar.” (60 Minutes, 2003) The tale of Pixar is since well-known: a deal with Disney to produce its first animated movie, Toy Story, and an epic IPO just ten days after its release which made Steve Jobs a multi-millionaire again.
“To infinity… and beyond”
Putting aside his professional life, the resurrection started a few years earlier. First, getting away from Apple had freed up some space for a real private life. That is when he met his wife Laurene as she was pursuing her MBA at the Stanford Business School in 1989. A direct match which eventually led to marriage and their first kid, Reed, less than two years later. “Getting married and beginning a family changed Steve profoundly, in ways that had an enormous positive impact on his work.” (p. 13)
In the early nineties, the tech scene was taken over by Microsoft; Apple was slowly but certainly sinking; NeXT was still far from the anticipated success… Despite all these headwinds, Steve Jobs was starting to balance his personal life. “He was starting to settle personally, in a way that gave him great satisfaction.” (p. 162) About the time of Reed’s birth, his daughter moved into the couple’s home. In 1995, Laurene delivered their second child, Erin, almost at the same time as Pixar released Toy Story. Retrospectively, this huge success – and foolish bet – appears quite meaningful to Steve’s journey. Like him, Woody, the likeable main character, “is the cause of his own downfall, as a result of hubris; but he overcomes weakness through kindness, bravery, quick wits, invention, or some combination thereof, and thereby earns a redemption that makes him an even better and more complete toy. […] the parallels to Steve’s own exile from Apple are obvious.” (p. 181)
Toy Story and Pixar’s success and the flourishing of Jobs’ personal could appear as a mere concomitance if he had not been so passionate and dedicated about both “ventures”. As his biographers underscore, Jobs clearly saw how Toy Story had to be a family entertainment: “He always wanted to make products that he both loved and found useful. [There] he had a hand in the creation of a product that a young family like his own could enjoy.” (p. 181)
In 1997, when Steve Jobs came back to Apple’s board, things were different. Being rejected by his very own creation, having to let others handle what was the “real” next big things in Pixar, founding a family… all these lows and highs that happened during his twelve-years crossing of the desert were the true causes of his transformation from “reckless upstart into a visionary leader.” As he told his Apple’s teams in 1982: “The journey is the reward.”
J.H.F.
Reference:
Brent Schlender & Rick Tetzeli, Becoming Steve Jobs, the evolution of a reckless upstart into a visionary leader, Crown Business, New York, 2015, pp. 447.
Photo: segagman
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Other articles of the same issue:
A dialogue with Seth Dei: about choices of study, work and life (Part I)
A dialogue with Seth Dei: about investment, art and leadership (Part II)
10 disruptive leaders of civil society (Part I)
Emotional intelligence: key to excellent leadership
Wisdom on inspiration
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