Steve Jobs's Real Genius

It has some truth to it, but ignores a lot of salient facts in favor of a cute argument (insert Gladwell dig here).<p>Steve Jobs' had many parts to his genius. Tweaking products until they were really finished was one.<p>But I would say the most important (and impressive) part of his genius was <i>holistic thinking</i>. He wasn't a programmer, a hardware engineer, an industrial designer, an advertising copywriter, or an architect, etc. But he deeply understood the essentials of those fields and was able to harness them to create a hugely successful business and set of products.<p>Another part of his genius was to pick the best talent and get the most out of them.<p>This is all obvious, but after reading Isaacson's book, which was quite good, this article is basically fluff. Gladwell basically just adds this marginally related story about tweakers so the entire article isn't regurgitating all the interesting anecdotes from the bio.<p>EDIT: Also, the use of the word "tweaker" is a stupid rhetorical trick -- the article is basically a troll.<p>"In contrast, Jobs’s vision, brilliant and perfect as it was, was narrow. He was a tweaker to the last, endlessly refining the same territory he had claimed as a young man."<p>Really? Does anyone honestly believe a person that was CEO of 2 different companies that changed industries has a narrow vision? This is willfully ignoring reality to make a cute little article.

I have to give Bill Gates the credit for nailing the real genius of Steven Jobs...<p>.<p>Lise Buyer (to Bill Gates and Steven Jobs): "Question, I guess it’s historical curiosity. You approached the same opportunity so very differently. What did you learn about running your own business that you wished you had thought of sooner or thought of first by watching the other guy?"<p>.<p>Bill Gates: "Well, I’d give a lot to have Steve’s taste. [laughter] He has natural–it’s not a joke at all. I think in terms of intuitive taste, both for people and products. You know, we sat in Mac product reviews where there were questions about software choices, how things would be done that I viewed as an engineering question; that’s just how my mind works. And I’d see Steve make the decision based on a sense of people and product that is even hard for me to explain. The way he does things is just different, I think it’s magical. And in that case, wow."<p>.<p>-- <a href="http://allthingsd.com/20070531/d5-gates-jobs-transcript/" rel="nofollow">http://allthingsd.com/20070531/d5-gates-jobs-transcript/</a>

I keep thinking of this quote by George Bernard Shaw:<p><i>"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."</i><p>Steve Jobs was the consummate unreasonable man.

I'm ready for the Jobs dissertations to be finished. I've made up my mind -- he was professionally successful but a personal failure.<p>It's my interpretation, so I'm not trying to change anyone else's opinion. But to me, if you have to scream at subordinates and mock colleagues and generally treat everyone else as inferior, you have failed -- in spite of one's accomplishments.<p>Some call that perfection or simply dealing with the attributes of genius. I call it a cop-out to let petulence and immaturity be an acceptable excuse for success.<p>An open request of all existing geniuses: try impressing us with accomplishments that don't require you to stomp on the dignity of others.

The more I read, the more I think that any attempt to seperate Jobs' "shortcomings" from his "genius" are wrong from the start. I look at Gladwell's anecdotes and I see that Jobs' greatest talent was making relatively modest (often borrowed) visions into well-executed reality via his unique combination of aesthetic sensitivity and barely controlled personality power (which, as Isaacson gets at, also seems a function of his deep sensitivity).<p>Gladwell's theory falls apart if you really consider the competitors. If you look at the history of Microsoft's tablets and the Xerox Star, their biggest barrier wasn't a lack of "tweaking", it was the ability to get the products out of labs without getting killed or tweaked into mediocrity by a hundred conniving VPs.<p>Here I think we need to acknowledge that Jobs' personality was part of his genius. Perhaps typical 20th century corporate culture/governance has been so inherently larded with politics, so easily driven into misaligned incentives, that it's been almost inimical to creating excellent products of high technical sophistication (<i>especially</i> involving both hardware and software). Perhaps recognizing and rapidly correcting these inherent sicknesses (from removing "B players" to forcing dramatic but necessary strategy shifts)and actually shipping great products requires a certain craziness, a <i>rudeness</i>.

Insightful and highly accurate characterization of Issacson's Biography. I often wondered whether people like Jobs have any ability to see themselves (and others) objectively, and whether that lack of ability, that narcissism, is essential to their ability to ensure their vision comes out with the purity that we saw in the iPhone, iPad, Macbook Air, etc...<p>I also appreciate this characterization's of Jobs' rant on Gates' supposed lack of imagination:<p>"Philanthropy on the scale that Gates practices it represents imagination at its grandest. In contrast, Jobs’s vision, brilliant and perfect as it was, was narrow. He was a tweaker to the last, endlessly refining the same territory he had claimed as a young man."

I'm annoyed that Gladwell classifies Jobs as a tweaker. He's not. He's a tastemaker. From TFA:<p>&#62; When Vincent shouted, “You’ve got to tell me what you want,” Jobs shot back, <i></i>“You’ve got to show me some stuff, and I’ll know it when I see it.”<i></i><p>Can you imagine one of the British hacker/tweakers in the article (or a hacker/tweaker you know) EVER saying something like that? The respect I have for role comes from them having both the vision AND the skill to take something someone else invented and make it fly. Jobs sees a thing, decides "that sucks" and has the people he hired bring him iterations with varying degrees of feedback until he's happy. That stretches the definition of tweaking so far it basically makes the word meaningless, lacking both the engineering and the raw ideas. Jobs is probably the best tastemaker of all time, a great presenter, and a great CEO, but comparing him to the great hackers of the Industrial Revolution is offensive to me.

Gladwell creates a dichotomy of the tweaker and inventor. I believe this dichotomy is false[1] and think he concludes Jobs a tweaker because all inventors are tweakers.<p>Gladwell's tweakers are "skilled engineers and artisans than its competitors: resourceful and creative men [people?] who took the signature inventions of the industrial age and tweaked them—refined and perfected them, and made them work". Inventors, by contrast, are large-scale visionaries.<p>Who, among people who created things, exemplifies a large-scale visionary?<p>[1] A conclusion largely based on Weisberg's excellent "Creativity: Beyond the Myth of Genius" and Goldenberg's "Systematic Creativity in Business" as profiled here -- <a href="http://joshuaspodek.com/creativity" rel="nofollow">http://joshuaspodek.com/creativity</a>

Who is this Gladwell guy and what did he invent or made that is worth noting?<p>Or did he simply take someone else's opinions using someone else's language and tweaked them a little bit to make them appear as his own?

I like the tweaker v innovator perspective. I agree that Jobs, and Apple in general perfect rather than innovate. E.g. they didn't invent mp3 players, they just made a really good one. They didn't invent phones with browsing capabilities, they just made them really easy to use and nifty.

I moderately disagree with Gladwell's conclusions, and fear he is trying to 'tweak' his own theories about 'tweakers' to fit Jobs.<p>Jobs had faults and long-term insights. He liked what was beautiful. And he was really good at tweaking (and insisted on it until a kind of perfection).<p>But the other thing he had was imagination, insight into what was important in the long run, and really good engineers who were attracted by his insistence on excellence. It's not just about insistence on tweaking.<p>It's about NeXT and Pixar and excellence. Insistence on tweaking a design perfectly is correlated with excellence in imagination. They are not so different. You don't insist on tweaking something past all points of normal behavior -- unless you have that vision.

"Tweakers" (God what a horrible name, and I thought "hacker" was kind of bad for makers.) might have contributed to the industrial revolution in England.<p>Then again, the relative prices of labor vs energy at the time probably played a greater role: <a href="http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3570" rel="nofollow">http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3570</a><p>It made sense to invest in labor saving machinery because you actually saved money. In other places, labor was cheaper and energy more expensive, so it just wasn't <i>economical</i> to spend on industrial machinery.

&#62;When Vincent shouted, “You’ve got to tell me what you want,” Jobs shot back, <i>“You’ve got to show me some stuff, and I’ll know it when I see it.”</i><p>I too am like this. I know what I want when I see it. I also know good stuff. I am sure most people are the same way too.<p>The main difference between us and Jobs is; we do not have the patience to wait until it it is right. The heart to tell 64 (!!!) nurses that they do not fit. The authority to tell geniuses their work suck and they should come back with more designs.<p>He was willing to be rude, difficult and a bully to get it right.<p>Are you?

----------------------------------------<p>Jobs, we learn, was a bully. <i>"He had the uncanny capacity to know exactly what your weak point is, know what will make you feel small, to make you cringe"</i>. Jobs gets his girlfriend pregnant, and then denies that the child is his. He parks in handicapped spaces. He screams at subordinates. <i>He cries like a small child when he does not get his way.</i> He sits in a restaurant and sends his food back three times. He arrives at his hotel suite in New York for press interviews and decides, at 10 pm ... the flowers are all wrong: he wanted calla lilies. <i>When his public-relations assistant returns, at midnight, with the right flowers, he tells her that her suit is "disgusting".</i> Machines and robots were painted and repainted as he compulsively revised his color scheme, Isaacson writes, of the factory Jobs built, after founding NeXT, in the late nineteen-eighties. He insisted that the machinery on the 165-foot assembly line be configured to move the circuit boards from right to left as they got built, so that the process would look better to visitors who watched from the viewing gallery. ...<i>when Jobs returns, in the late nineteen-nineties, and our natural expectation is that Jobs will emerge wiser and gentler from his tumultuous journey. He never does.</i> In the hospital at the end of his life, he runs through sixty-seven nurses before he finds three he likes...<p>...Even within Apple, Jobs was known for taking credit for other's ideas. Jonathan Ive, the designer behind the iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone, tells Isaacson, <i>"He will go through a process of looking at my ideas and say, 'That's no good. That's not very good. I like that one.' And later I will be sitting in the audience and he will be talking about it as if it was his idea."</i><p>----------------------------------------<p>Was Jobs really such an <i>asshole</i>? If so, I think he was really lucky to have Steve Woz as his co-founder. I know a lot about Woz and hardly anything about Jobs, and I do know that Woz in addition to being a first rate engineer is also a very good guy. Maybe if Woz was even half the asshole that Jobs seems to be, he might have kicked him out before Apple went public and Jobs would have been just another tantrum throwing hippie hanging around some starbucks in Berkeley or wherever angry hippies like to hang around.

Almost done with the book. Having read it, this strikes me as a 7th grade book report. How does the same mag print Atul Gawande and this? And why does that irritate me?

Steve Jobs was a great director; perhaps the greatest of our generation.<p>That's the simplest I can say it. It wasn't about his singular abilities or his design sense. He was the right director who had the decline and ownership to do the great things he did.<p>I only read this piece because it was a Gladwell, but frankly i'm getting tired of every other person and their mom trying to define Steve Jobs.

I found a simple method that works really well: ask the student to invent their own language syntax on paper. We start with a simple language that can draw on screen, and proceed from there. I'm noticing that Students naturally discover many of the issues and tricks that they would otherwise have to "study" (such as flow of execution, nesting, variables)<p>I occasionally teach at schools in NY, and this semester my students "invented" the smalltalk syntax. It was heartwarming to witness.

<i>Jobs’s sensibility was more editorial than inventive. “I’ll know it when I see it,” he said.</i><p>This caption strikes me because my friend/professor in architecture just read <i>Steve Jobs</i> and said "Steve Jobs was an architect more than anything". We often collapse these things onto a domain more familiar to us, and the model of editor as Master Tweaker (and architect as Master Builder) seems to fit Gladwell's world of thinking.

This reminds me a lot of my business partner, who will not rest until our projects are perfect. She's driven me nuts the entire time I've worked with her, but this has brought our output to a much higher level than I would have achieved without such an influence.<p>You have to love and hate someone who has such obsessive attention to detail. The key to making this mindset positive is knowing when it matters and when it doesn't.

It always struck me that Jobs would have made a really, really good A&#38;R executive and label president.

Was it, that he made things closed because he didn't want the user to screw them up or was it because he thought they were already perfect and couldn't be made better?<p>I would like to believe the former.

There are no words that can sum up Steve Jobs genius and his contributions to modern society.<p>On the other hand, I can't help but notice how much press/literature there has been on his genius and I think it's starting to be excessive. Maybe it's just me, but I'm not a fan of literature that praises success and goes in-depth into the lives/processes of talented people(that's why I'm not a fan of Gladwell's Outliers book). Where can you draw the line between admiring someone's achievements and idolising their every trait?

I guess Steve Jobs' real genius is that people here are still talking about him so long after he's dead.<p>A bunch of self proscribed hackers find him more interesting than either John McCarthy or Dennis Ritchie. When in fact he was just more successful monetarily. And better at getting you lot to talk about him.

Why is it dated November 14, 2011?

Dated November 14..are we seeing the future?

I never met Jobs and I know nothing about him personally. But if the stuff in this article is true, he was an obnoxious prick, genius or not.