Editor’s note: This article was first published in February 2015. Its description of Apple as “the most valuable company on the planet” reflects the company’s position in February 2015.
What if Steve Jobs wasn’t really losing it? What if he wasn’t as rude as the employees who felt verbally attacked by him claim, this creative genius behind what became the most valuable company on the planet?
In his book Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success, author Ken Segall certainly offers a very different view of Jobs, one that gave me the pieces I was missing to understand some of his behaviour.
Segall admits that the toughest, most difficult and most uncomfortable meetings of his entire career were the ones he had with Steve Jobs, but he is very grateful for them.
In his book he suggests that Jobs wasn’t really a rude man, just an honest one. Could he have used different language or behaviour when telling people things? Of course, but then he would no longer have been honest. He would have been dressing up his words, and that kind of embellishment would probably have made Apple a mediocre company.
Segall describes Steve Jobs as a perfectionist, relentless and very demanding, and says that calling him unbearable is highly debatable.
Although there are stories of Jobs insulting and firing a manager in front of everyone at a meeting, Segall says these were isolated incidents. Jobs had one very good trait: he could insult you in a meeting on a Tuesday because he felt you hadn’t done your “homework”, but by Wednesday he would wipe the slate clean with that person.
Being in Jobs’s sights was not a death sentence for your job. The next day you might be praised as if nothing had happened the day before.
The words his employees, partners and suppliers heard most often were “this is shit”. If something wasn’t what Jobs expected and he felt a lot of things were wrong with it, he didn’t waste time trying to explain every point that failed. According to Segall, it was his simplest way of telling you to change completely what you had shown him, and it didn’t waste Jobs’s valuable time.
But Segall also reminds us that Jobs could make his employees nervous just as easily as he could spread his joy, enthusiasm and passion, and that he helped his employees as much as he could when they had problems, both professional and personal.
(Read: 7 curious stories in which Steve Jobs behaved like a real jerk)
Extremely candid
Segall recounts that when NeXT was getting off the ground, Jobs began interviewing creative directors for its advertising campaign. One of the candidates was the creator of several Nike ad campaigns.
That creative director went to the interview with an ace up his sleeve, because Nike’s campaigns were very successful. In fact, Nike was a very successful company. But Steve Jobs wasn’t especially impressed by the work he had done for Nike. He told him: “Your job at Nike is just not to screw it up, whereas NeXT is a company that needs help.”
And indeed, with or without ad campaigns, Nike would go on existing as a company, while NeXT needed to win over the public. Jobs did end up hiring that creative director, but from the outset he was extremely candid in making sure the person he was hiring fully understood the difference between an account you have to maintain and an account you have to get off the ground.
Clarity as a fundamental business tool
For Segall, if companies used Steve Jobs’s clarity, they wouldn’t waste so much time going back and forth by email, because we sometimes get lost in words just to say we don’t like something. Jobs made it much simpler: “I like it, but I don’t like the design. Change it.” Or simply: “That’s shit. Don’t bring me something like that again.”
Segall says Jobs valued clarity above any mistakes you might make by being clear. If you rambled in a meeting, Jobs would cut you off immediately, because he hated people beating around the bush when asked a clear, direct question.
Jobs knew he wasn’t going to win a prize for the nicest, kindest person, but he knew they would do something great, because only top professionals who could keep up with that pace and that culture of clarity and simplicity would survive and make Apple the company it eventually became.
The secret of Apple’s success?
Steve Jobs hated complexity. Remember that he pioneered the idea of putting into people’s hands something as complex as computers were at the time. In fact, at a time when people were already talking about the importance of innovation, for Jobs innovating didn’t mean creating something more complex than what already existed, but quite the opposite. Innovating meant creating something truly simple: taking something complex and making it so simple that it was real innovation.
The author explains that the world is constantly fighting a battle between complexity and simplicity, and that even Steve Jobs fell into the trap of complexity, though fortunately only for a while.
Want to succeed with a business idea? Keep it simple, because complexity is where most failures are found. In fact, as we have said on several occasions, if you can’t explain your business idea in under 60 seconds in a way that anyone understands regardless of their IQ, the odds increase that you won’t be able to make that idea profitable.
In short, according to Segall, clarity and simplicity should be at the heart of every company that wants to succeed.
Further reading
- Unseen photos of Steve Jobs that capture the moment a few fearless geniuses changed the world
- What Steve Jobs and Bill Gates really thought of each other
- 11 Steve Jobs quotes that will go down in business history
Featured image: marklittlewood1, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
