Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.
Marcus Aurelius
We often find role models that we want to emulate. We look at their success, decisions, and life choices and we think if we can learn something from them we can replicate their success in our own lives.
This strategy can be effective, but it is also wise to look at negative role models and think about what not to do.
Sometimes people succeed despite themselves. The challenge is to disentangle what is effective and what is luck.
Bad Jobs
Steve Jobs might be the best marketer ever. He was an outstanding ideas guy, a terrible leader and a worse father.
Jobs helped start Apple along with Steve Wozniak. Wozniak was the tech guy, but Jobs could see how tech could create the future. There is no denying his talent, but also he helped create the story of his own technical brilliance.
You can learn many lessons from Jobs from an innovation, marketing, and creativity point of view, but there are also other lessons you can learn from him about what you shouldn’t do that get lost in the success.
Tyrant
Many thought pieces have been written about Jobs and his challenging work style, often the word tyrant comes up, you can read some here, here, here, and here.
This is where the challenge comes in. Because he was so successful the obvious takeaway is that you should be a tyrant and then you get these outlandish results.
This is a classic oversimplification of the challenge of leadership. Another way to view is that his marketing and ideas were so amazing they offset the damage he did to his teams by how he behaved.
Defenders of Job’s style will say that people could just leave if they didn’t like it, which is untrue. If your remuneration is tied into shares, your health insurance is connected with your job, and you don’t have other companies doing what you are specialised in, there are many reasons why you can’t just leave your job.
The other thing is that you shouldn’t feel like you can be horrible to someone just because they can’t leave.
Nuance
How you engage with your team isn’t a one size fits all response. Some people can handle more pressure, and some people can not. Some people you need to be gentler with, while others can handle hard direct truths.
Jobs had many talents, some of them world-class, and he had many deficiencies, so basically he was human like the rest of us.
But he is a useful example of how can look at the negative experience he created as something that we as leaders want to avoid.
Luke McMeeken-Ruscoe 