‘Inside the mind of a tyrant’ by John Arlidge, Sunday Times, 9th October

In the next blog, we will be reviewing Walter Isaacson’s new book about Steve Jobs but this time I have chosen what I thought was the best of the many immediate articles written after his death. Those writing since he passed away seem to have gone one of two ways, either to idolise him as the new Messiah, or to question whether the adulation is going over the top. This article seemed to get it just right by admitting that he was a bullying tyrant but also a man who changed the world for the better in quite fundamental ways. ‘Good Steve, Bad Steve’ is how the author expresses it.

I have previously read a number of books about this remarkable man but this article provided me with a number of extra insights. I did not know for instance how much his greatest rival - Bill Gates - admired Jobs, even though it was not reciprocated. And Gates summed up his genius pretty well - ‘he could figure out where the next big bet was coming from’.

The author makes it clear that Jobs was disdainful about all ideas of conventional marketing, in particular of market research. This was evident in his early Apple days; the joke was that his method of market research was to look in the mirror each morning. The arrogance behind his statements - ‘it is not the consumer’s job to know what they want’ and ‘the customer is not always right, I am’ - is unbelievable yet it worked for him, because he was a genius. He could see instantly what would sell; the moment he saw Rank Xerox’s first ideas of the Mouse, he rushed back to Apple to exploit its potential.

That was the Good Steve. The Bad Steve came about because he was also arrogant and dismissive of his own employees, calling anyone who opposed him a ‘bozo’ and either sacking or causing to leave a whole series of despairing employees. This is what caused the Board of Apple to throw him out in 1985, only to plead for his triumphant return in 1997.

Yet he was very different when it came to people he really valued and on whose commitment he depended; for example Jonathan Ive, the Englishman on whom his latest successes at Apple have depended and John Lasseter at Pixar. One criticism of this article it is that it rather plays down Jobs’ achievement at Pixar between his Apple stints, encouraging and selling the technology that enabled Toy Story to happen and paving the way for a new generation of children’s films. Maybe this development would have happened anyway but it was on his watch that the breakthrough came.

The article also makes it very clear what was behind Jobs’ genius. He was not a green-fields innovator; he took other people’s ideas and converted them into marketing successes because he did, as he claimed, know what would sell to the masses. And that was simplicity of design and operation, combined with a special kind of elegant and minimalist beauty. This made Apple products seem to be cool and fun, creating an army of addicts and devotees.

The danger for management learning of such unique success stories is that others begin to think that such genius can be bottled and copied, when clearly it can’t. But the message is clear; there is always more than one route to success, more than one strategy that works. We will explore this issue further when we review the new book.