"I don’t know why I feel this way, but between working closely with Bill Campbell, working closely with Steve Jobs and watching a lot of my mentors pass on, unfortunately, I feel like I bear this responsibility now. There’s a few of us who are keepers of that knowledge. It’s almost our responsibility to be able to continue that way of thinking, that way of working. Expect excellence, respect excellence, drive hard, change things, don’t accept the status quo, push yourself, push the people on your team harder than they could ever imagine, and they will do more than they could have ever imagined."
You gotta love these incompetent execs, who have taken nothing away from Steve Jobs' legacy except "be an asshole". Tony, listen: Steve Jobs succeeded in spite of being a massive douche, because he was a genius who essentially invented new product categories, and made them work really really well. You, on the other hand, stuck networking interfaces in common household appliances, usually making them worse. Your psychopathic treatment of your employees gains you nothing in that case.
Abusive? Maybe, sending fired up execs home. Or an exec who had stepped over the line. But abusive, as in, a continuous process currently in motion? Sending them home and letting them come back the next day is not great, and sometimes a terrible business decision on par with letting aggressive sexual harassers come back the next day.
Signed,
Someone who has had a boss throw chairs at people
+1 to this. I only met him once, but even in that he greatly impressed me with his humanity and humility. I can completely imagine Bill holding people to high expectations, but in a generous and affirmative way.
Working under a jerk for a very long time can also teach you to be a jerk. Being a jerk for a very long time is what makes you feel normal.
There is this multiplier vs. diminisher comparison. A lot of people originally start out as multipliers but having worked under diminishers makes them forget or never realize what gifts their original talents could bring about.
Sometimes you don't have to work under them, just with them. And they can be people in an influential team. For me that was many years ago where I was abused one too many times by someone I considered a friend. There's no excuse, but I turned into a jerk - and years later I recognised this failure in my personality.
I have to work very hard not to be that person nowadays. I think I largely succeed, and my current job isn't that well paid or require deep skills, but I'm happier with myself.
It's not easy realising you are a part of the reason the system is rotten. Often, even if you do acknowledge it, you aren't part of that system so you have to bring that hard earned and lived experience to the next organisation. It's worth it, but it's a pity it often takes being outside the system to realise it, and an even bigger pity when you realise it whilst in the system but then find it impossible to change...
I've been in a similar situation where the boss man is a jerk - and it was destroying the whole team
me and other managers under him hated this but we still ended up doing the same as him. his requirements for reporting made us pass the same onto the team etc..
in the end me and another manager decided it was enough and started protecting our teams from the boss and treating them like humans.
it was a big learning for me that culture has to be fought for and its slides into a shit place pretty quickly if you dont defend it.
lots of other managers left and good staff, and ultimately the boss moved on. I left a few year ago, but everyone remarks on how much better it all became once we started defending our team.
so maybe we should acknowledge that some bosses are bad people and that we need to stand up to them just like any other kind of bully
To a degree I think I did stand up for my colleagues. I brought in the Helpdesk guy, who was my old colleague from Epson days and in a strange twist of fate was actually my boss early in my career. I never needed to manage him, just protect him from some of the crap that fell his way because he was new. And the other guy was fully self managing and whilst I was technically his manager for about a week till the new boss came in, he got in with what was needed and showed such astute vision and planning that frankly I found all I would have done was get in his way if I'd "supervised" him. So I just asked him periodically how things were going, listened to his ideas over lunch, encouraged him and asked only a few questions; he just got everything done and even had a vision for where IT should be that I was pleased largely synced up with where I wanted things to go.
The new boss they brought in didn't listen to anyone, insisted on us doing useless things, broke all the critical Qlikview dashboards, prevented us from automating anything, took copious notes about things that I already knew about and that were largely unimportant, undermined the three of us to the CEO and caused me to burn out so badly that it took me over 6 months to get a new job.
So I defended my team partially by allowing them to come to me for advise, which was largely to ride it out and let the guy make his mistakes. All three of us tried to advise the fool that the things he was doing was literally destroying the business, but when I did 21 days straight with no break, leading to the start of a solution I could have implemented in 3 days max that would have not only fixed the massive breakages he caused in reporting but also automated them and reduced total manual handling, but was then told that a technical change I had done (add a synthetic foreign key to a table!) was completely out of order and something he and the project manager were going to discuss with the CEO about, I took a deep breath, excused myself from their meeting and then wrote my letter of resignation.
The CEO accepted my resignation and told me to leave immediately on full pay, then 6 weeks later my old manager stuffed the entire system so badly there was no way of fixing the mess (he deleted all my reports, I assume because they made him look bad...) and he resigned.
Last week that same CEO was fired for gross incompetence. They are apparently looking at the books very closely, but it rather looks like the accounts sent to ASIC are quite possible wrong. That's a big no-no and if bad enough ASIC may decide to prosecute.
Sometimes bad bosses screw over good people and even worse bosses back them. Eventually though, if you screw over every good person them as a manager they fail, and fail hard. And they normally have the hide yo look surprised when nobody is upset for them when they have left!
"There’s a few of us who are keepers of that knowledge. It’s almost our responsibility to be able to continue that way of thinking, that way of working."
Uhmmm ... the line of thinking that has your smoke detector talking to remote servers and dealing with a social layer (logins, smart apps, etc.) ?
That line of thinking is a cancer. It's a scourge on all of us that needs to be stamped out wherever we see it.
You really put that in the right perspective for me. I've always thought of Jobs as a sociopath, but I also thought it was because of his demeanor that his employees created such amazing things.
No. You are right - he succeeded despite being a douche.
>[Steve Jobs] was a genius who essentially invented new product categories
What product categories did Steve/Apple invent? All of their major breakthroughs (iPod, iPhone, iPad) were already existing product categories but Apple just made them right / what customers wanted. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Yes, Blackberry had a smart(ish) phone. But it was really just a mobile email phone. Apple was the first phone manufacturer to provide a full featured, no compromises mobile internet browsing experience.
I would then add the whole mobile app store concept. Blackberry's version was really nothing much.
"I don’t know why I feel this way, but between working closely with Bill Campbell, working closely with Steve Jobs and watching a lot of my mentors pass on, unfortunately, I feel like I bear this responsibility now. There’s a few of us who are keepers of that knowledge. It’s almost our responsibility to be able to continue that way of thinking, that way of working. Expect excellence, respect excellence, drive hard, change things, don’t accept the status quo, push yourself, push the people on your team harder than they could ever imagine, and they will do more than they could have ever imagined."
You gotta love these incompetent execs, who have taken nothing away from Steve Jobs' legacy except "be an asshole". Tony, listen: Steve Jobs succeeded in spite of being a massive douche, because he was a genius who essentially invented new product categories, and made them work really really well. You, on the other hand, stuck networking interfaces in common household appliances, usually making them worse. Your psychopathic treatment of your employees gains you nothing in that case.