Jobs made a huge success 3 times:
1. the Apple II
2. Pixar
3. return to Apple and transforming it from 90 days to bankruptcy to the biggest corporation in the world
You can ascribe one of the above to luck, but faced with all three, Jobs was just that good, and made his own luck.
It's the difference between being effective and being Cargo Cult Steve Jobs. Far too many baby entrepreneurs try to mimic Jobs' behaviors, but fail to couple it with any sort of skill or good taste.
His success was being involved with people with genius and vision that were willing to put up with his shit.
Pixar wanted to be a studio, Jobs wanted it to be a hardware/software company. The people of Pixar forced Jobs into letting it be what it is today.
Jobs recognized Ive for what he is and then Apple became what it is today.
Like I said, Jobs was good at latching on to people with vision and genius to make what him what he is.
Jobs had a controlling interest in Pixar. Nobody forced him. Pixar would have gone bankrupt without Jobs. Apple would have gone bankrupt without Jobs. Apple would never have existed and we'd have never heard of Woz without Jobs.
Nobody is that lucky. It's like winning the lottery 3 times. Once is luck. 3 times means there's a guiding finger on the roulette wheel.
I think Woz is down on Jobs, but Lasseter, Catmull, Ive, Cook, Fred Anderson and others all spoke highly of him.
Really expressing creativity in computing requires a richer interface, at least a keyboard and a mouse.
BTW things that Ive wasn't involved in when SJ returned to Apple:
- Bring Next software to Apple and create OSX from it
- Software UI/UX design (Ive is mainly a product designer. And it's much more than "let's make colorful plastic" but how to do it so that it looks right, in which colors or how do you actually build this so that it is thin but resistant)
- Simplify product lines and improve focus
- Be involved in the "Think Different" campaign (the bozos at the top level wanted to go with a "We're back" campaign that was proposed to them)
Which was in no way an accident.
Jobs talent was identifying these people, and building environments around them that maximized their talents, while also identifying how to translate those ideas into products people wanted to pay money to buy.
He could sell, but as a side effect.
I see this too often from fellow developers - anyone pushing business objectives and strategy instead of engineering choices is a "salesman". It's not true at all.
Calling Jobs a salesman is like calling Einstein a Civil Rights campaigner. Certainly they both did that, and did it well, but it sort of misses the major thing they were good at.
Did Ive make the brilliant decision for the 4-square powerMac/iMac product strategy abandoning the dozens of previous models?
I'm guessing no.
What if we can't find them because we let coercive assholes run amok, seizing advantages and damaging people in ways that make it hard to create non-coercive structures that are also highly creative and productive?
One of the issues with modern world is that big talkers are rewarded over reserved more knowledgeable people. The more you appear online, the more you talk in meetings and the higher profile you appear the more likely you are to be promoted. It is the way of the world.
Also, every C level guy(also middle management wannabes) impersonates Jobs.
Well, it's not like she made any effort to conceal it. In fact, she was very public about her desire to appear like Jobs.
In short, why do you believe that Steve Jobs was remotely close to being a genius, and what made Elizabeth Holmes do to lead you to believe she also met you definition of a genius?
At 4:00 in this video they talk about Holmes fake "deep voice". I think its pretty clearly her fraud tendencies run really really deep. I don't think you could trust anything you think makes her a genius. The only things we actually know about her is that she could get into Standford, where she dropped out. She could also raise money really well.
I don't think she is by any means dumb. But there is absolutely no evidence of genius.
Didn't you just criticize it by the category? When I was raising capital I definitely heard VC's making fun of men who spoke in a false voice, practiced their handshake, or artificially held eye contact way too long.
I'm fine if you want to say my criticism of Holmes is influenced by sexism.
But to make the statement that men speaking in a stupid fake voice get zero criticism... is hyperbole to point ridiculousness.
This was literally made fun of in a meeting two days ago for a vendor I work with.
Is raw intelligence or wisdom more important for success in biotech? It seems to me that raw intelligence is useful when studying systems that are either designed rationally or can be understood easily from a mathematics perspective. On the flip side, I think experience is important when dealing with biology which is often messy and not easily understood because so much is still unknown and everything is the result of an accumulation of random variations.
The industrial drug development process is one of the most technically complex, risky and highly regulated processes in industry. You basically need PhD level experience in almost a dozen distinct technical domains to get a drug approved. Most biotech VCs prefer CEOs with decades of drug dev experience because they know where the pitfalls are and how to execute better
That said, Ive heard a very experienced biotech VC / former big pharma drug developer describe the process of developing a drug as "hanging on by your fingernails", and the traditional dyed in the wool drug industry strategy has pretty much put the industry on a long term declining trend, so maybe experience isnt as powerful as the industry tells itself
The self-serving genius is roughly equivalent to the pychopath. Once you begin to look for these antisocial behaviors among so-called geniuses you'll see a frightening pattern.
What were either of them geniuses at exactly? Psychology?
You can also learn how to do it if you don't have one by studying those who do.
Regardless of how someone ends up with the ability, I don't think it's unfair to refer to it as genius, even if it's specifically based on emotional intelligence. They're just on a completely different level in comparison to the general population when it comes to bending others to their will and getting their way.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic...
Look at Theranos, for example. The CEO was practically a Jobs impersonator. From the turtlenecks and the air of brilliance to the controlling, abusive, and secrecy-oriented behaviors. How many people fell for the fraud? And I can't count the wantrepreneurs I've come across that had similar theories.