Steve Jobs
Paul RichardsonOctober 2011
The death of Steve Jobs is on everyone’s mind this week. The
accolades for his leadership and creative genius at Apple areeverywhere in the media. The accolades are appropriate becauseof the results he turned in over his career. I think it is very wor
thwhile to look at the “whole person” who was so successful
and learn from it.
Steve’s reputation was that he was a very smart and driven
person. That was characterized by his extremely highexpectations for himself and the organization he led coupled witha passion for excellence. From what you can piece together fromcomments now but especially over the years when people werediscussing a living and not a dead man paint a picture of a difficultperson to have as a boss. More than one person who worked withhim has said he did not suffer fools at all. He also did not suffer insilence when confronted with what he saw as work that did notmeet his standard. His feedback in such circumstances was swiftand biting. He created a work environment where politicalcorrectness had no place. Perhaps above all he understood the
technology and what it could and couldn’t do at the current time
or the short term future. This objective and realistic butstretching view of what was possible led Apple to success aftersuccess.
So let’s compare the Jobs approach to management with thatemployed by our education “leaders.”
Results - our education system is turning in results as
abysmal as Job’s results were positive.
Expectations
–
educators do not have high expectations of themselves or of their students.
Objectivity
–
educators continue to use educationapproaches which are technically wrong in spite of the
results they aren’t able to achieve. This is compared to
competitor nations who use technically sound approachesand teach their kids much more effectively as is shown by theinternational testing. The approach in our education systemis to try to do the wrong thing better when they should stopdoing the wrong things and start doing the right things.
Work environment
–
in education political correctness andgroup think run amok. This creates a workplace whereconstructive feedback (that is, you are not getting the rightresults, shape up or ship out) simply does not occur. Kidsand our increasingly uncompetitive society globally continueto pay the price.
Mental Toughness
–
Job’s created an environment of mental
toughness where robust dialog was encouraged as a way toperfect the quality of the work teams. The educationenvironment is one of people walking on eggshells becauseconflict is not allowed and thus creates a bunch of wimps.
Passion
–
in education passion is not allowed because itmight lead to conflicts. Conflict is required if you want toreally perform well. It results in much better decisions. Oh,
people “say” they are passionate about things but it is all a
charade. If passion for doing the education mission in anexcellent way were ever allowed to break through the
educations fiefdom’s fortress walls it would have a
remarkably positive impact.Therefore, we must conclude that there are good reasons why Steve Jobs and Apple were successful and equally valid reasons
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Steve Jobs
What can we learn about management from Steve Job's life?
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