Cult leaders get their followers to do all sorts of extraordinary things through systematic abuse. I've read a number of bios of cult survivors and a consistent theme is their incredible dedication and accomplishment.
The interesting question to me is whether there are other ways to do great work. People focus on Jobs and then generalize from their n=1 sample. They also take the visible correlations and turn them into causation. It's ridiculous.
Even if Jobs's behavior towards subordinates is related to his success, it may not be in the way people think. Perhaps his abuse of engineers was valueless, and that the win for Apple was in him abusing management rivals so they were all afraid of playing the normal turf games. Or maybe his prickishness was only needed to get him back in charge of Apple as chief tastemaker, a CEO who was willing to spend on design until a product was fucking right.
If we expand the sample size to n=2 and just add another Jobs company, Pixar, we can see that it's possible to produce an extraordinary amount of great work without anybody running around being a giant asshole all the time.
Perhaps his abuse of engineers was valueless, and that the win for Apple was in him abusing management rivals so they were all afraid of playing the normal turf games. Or maybe his prickishness was only needed to get him back in charge of Apple as chief tastemaker, a CEO who was willing to spend on design until a product was fucking right.
I think you nailed it.
Most executives in most companies get to bike-shed and do little else. Jobs actually made bike-shedding the worst job in the company.
Steve Jobs lived in the spotlight more than almost anyone else in this business, so every assholish thing he did got magnified. What I've heard is that he was very polarized: sometimes very nice, sometimes very mean. (I'm that way, so I can relate.) Apparently he was nice to engineers for the most part; it was the VPs and Directors that he tore to shreds.
Jobs had this whole theory about the VP level being the threshold of responsibility that is a direct affront on the Effort Thermocline (in that VPs get more direct scrutiny, rather than, as is more typical, more power that gives them the ability to hide losses and make themselves invincible).
The interesting question to me is whether there are other ways to do great work. People focus on Jobs and then generalize from their n=1 sample. They also take the visible correlations and turn them into causation. It's ridiculous.
Even if Jobs's behavior towards subordinates is related to his success, it may not be in the way people think. Perhaps his abuse of engineers was valueless, and that the win for Apple was in him abusing management rivals so they were all afraid of playing the normal turf games. Or maybe his prickishness was only needed to get him back in charge of Apple as chief tastemaker, a CEO who was willing to spend on design until a product was fucking right.
If we expand the sample size to n=2 and just add another Jobs company, Pixar, we can see that it's possible to produce an extraordinary amount of great work without anybody running around being a giant asshole all the time.