Every time I read something about Jobs I'm struck by how similar he is to various assholes I've worked for over the years.<p>This scenario, pretty much every nasty behavior described in the Isaacson biography, the recent salary-fixing emails - I've witnessed them all repeated.<p>It might seem crazy to entertain, but having seen first-hand that these folks can consistently climb and succeed while being what most decent people would consider scumbags - I have to wonder if Steve was just alpha-scum in the right place at the right time.
People are saying that Jobs was being an asshole. I don't know much about the man, but what he's doing here is intelligent negotiation, plain and simple. The bravado of shredding the paper and loudly announcing the desired figure is a dead giveaway that (1) the other details of the contract don't mean much to him, and (2) the 50% figure means an awful lot to whoever else was supposed to hear it.<p>You have to keep in mind what Jobs is trying to accomplish here. It's like a kid loudly putting stuff away when their mom walks by, "yea mom, just cleaning my room!"<p>The ruthless part is that Jobs would have no problem if she didn't pick up on that and came back with the same contract and the 50% rate. I think that the lessons in this post are valuable for negotiating with intelligent people.
<i>At first I did not understand Steve’s needs</i><p>Yes, because he didn't bother to explain them. <i>He</i> could have been the one to explain the need for the magic 50% - just think how that could have made their meeting productive and useful - but he didn't. It was only through her contact that this was discovered. Basically, Steve Jobs was being an asshole.
The last item on the list:<p>>Understand the needs of the other person<p>Is a really important part of negotiation. Nothing to do with Jobs specifically. Don't assume that needs and desires are symmetrical in a negotiation. Sometimes they basically are. But when they aren't, it opens the possibility for win-win scenarios.<p>And oldies but goodie (and short) book, "Getting to Yes" talks about this. Well worth the read. (And, when I say short, I really do mean very short.)
The world is full of assholes and yet there is only one Steve Jobs. If you are thinking of emulating him, I say stick to his better sides: understanding the industry, positioning, marketing, branding, public speaking and of course product design.
"Make it look like fifty percent." That one sentence made all the difference. In one instant, Heidi immediately understood what she had that the other side wanted. In her case, it was an initial app on a new platform. More than the money itself, it was being able to deliver on a previous promise to get a 50-50 split.<p>It can be difficult to understand your negotiating partner's reasons but having an ally sure helped in this case.
so what i learned from this is that the developers did not actually get 50% but something that sounded like 50%.<p>i know a dev at a startup who was employee number 2 and wanted a certain % of the company ( like 2 or 5 or something like that ). anyhoo, he was haggling with the founder about this and the founder didnt want to give him what he wanted but finally relented. later, when signing paperwork, he found that the % the founder relented to was actually a % of a newly created employee pool, and not the whole company.<p>needless to say, the dev was pissed and had little trust in the relationship from that point forward.
Are there any known allegations or just flat-out known instances of Steve Jobs getting physically abusive with any of his employees or in the workplace environment?<p>It's obvious he was verbally and emotionally abusive person and he was generally an all-around asshole, but I've never heard of him getting physical, and that sort of surprises me.
It makes you wonder how good his reality distortion field would have been without the vast dick-mitigation cloud that bubbled around it. Jobs owes a lot of his success to some very nice people.
Pretty much the MO for dealing with anyone with an inflated ego.<p>Make them feel like they're right and make them feel like they always get exactly what they want.
> <i>What I Learned Negotiating With Steve Jobs</i><p>I read the headline and thought, "that he's an asshole?"<p>Then I read the article. I was right!
That wasn't a negotiation, that was a demand. Dan'l did the negotiation. "People are not often as clear as Steve was" - he wasn't clear at all. He put on a performance for the developers, and Dan'l was the person who had to clarify what Steve wanted.
Great lesson here in how to deal with face. If done well this can provide the party unconcerned with saving face a real advantage in the negotiation process.
Some people enjoy throwing their weight around and winning even relatively meaningless concessions, which marks them as high status. This can make it easier to win meaningful concessions at the margin, or to turn "not asking for concessions" into "you owe me one".<p>Robert Ringer has some pretty apt descriptions of this type & how to deal with them in a couple of his more popular books.
This article has another story from Heidi Roizen which may offer some perspective (seventh story „A Friend In Need“):<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/connieguglielmo/2012/10/03/untold-stories-about-steve-jobs-friends-and-colleagues-share-their-memories/" rel="nofollow">http://www.forbes.com/sites/connieguglielmo/2012/10/03/untol...</a>
<i>I had to make the business make sense financially. I just needed to make my 15% look like his 50%.
To do so, I reduced the nut to split by first deducting the cost of packaging, of technical support, the salaries for some developers on my side of the business to implement fixes, and when I still couldn’t get the math to pencil out, I added a $6 per unit</i><p>Out of curiosity, is there an example contract text that demonstrates how to do this? Is it as simple as saying "You get 50% of the gross, but I'll deduct this, this and that from your share"?