Steve Jobs

I've been reading a book named iCON which is about Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs is a founder of Apple which started Ipod, Itunes, etc and I find the way he works amazing, irritating and immoral.

According to the book, Steve had an uncanning ability to inspire and he is a master of impossible goals. In one incident, he came into the room, threw down a telephone book and insisted that the technicians came up with one design similar size to the phone book and he set a deadline of a year, when no hardware or software for that computer was already available. Although impossible, they eventually made the timing.

Steve was immoral. He severely overworked his employees. He declared under cheers of his fellow employees this: Working 90 hour weeks and loving it! You'd expect that employees under him would have high pay and benefits to keep them going in this manner. You'd be wrong if you thought that Steve was fair. Apparently some of the supervisors had lower pay than those new-comers who came in later. He denied stock options, which gave ownership to the employees to people who helped to make Apple a success, and alot of totally selfish decisions. How did he then manage to keep them working when they weren't getting paid? He had a definite charisma. He could seduce them into his way of thinking and be so involved in it that they for a period of time wouldn't take so much notice about their paid and other results. Nevertheless, you can imagine the roar they created when they found out the truth.

Steve had a unsatisfiable need to be important. Although the founding people were Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, and an array of smaller people, when Apple became successful, he took almost all the credit even as he created many problems through his stubbornness and solving few. His personal Macintosh team was so disgusted by the way they were not even recognised that in years to come, only a handful stayed under him.

Yet, if you read how Donald Trump depicted his way of dealing, and qualified himself as a master dealer even to write, The Art Of Deal, you'd realised that Steve Jobs unruly methodologies made Donald pale in sheer comparison. When Apple was still new, they couldn't afford their own storage and had to store it on an external company's storage. One day, the data crashed and all was gone. They had to choose between an old backup or starting afresh. They chose the latter. They requested the company to replace with the old backup to which the company refused. The rationale was that they had been late in payments. Steve being the way he was promised to pay on one condition; which was if the head came over and collected the payment himself. The head didn't want to, but it was the only way to recover payment. Steve managed to convince the head to put up the old backup before coming over.

The team hurried to download the file, and when the head came, Steve refused to pay. He was now no longer dependent on the head. The head had no choice but to return empty handed and fuming.

I know more from what I've read from the book, but the methods Steve employed are simply beyond what I can do. Yet, I look at Steve, on the side of his determination, his charisma and even his gut feelings of doing things. You'd need to be an absolute cushion to be able to work with him.