TERRY W. NOEL
Steve Jobs was an obnoxious, condescending, and vindictive man who berated and belittled his employees. He was also one of the greatest technological visionaries of all time. Jobs radically transformed the personal computer industry, the music industry, the movie industry, and the telecommunications industry. Chances are that the reader of this book has used at least one Apple device or watched a movie made by Pixar. Jobs’s efforts resulted in the technological betterment of millions.
But was he a virtuous man?
The Four Cardinal Virtues
Philosophers have been talking about virtues for thousands of years, and in all their discussions they keep coming back to a short list of character traits, known as the four cardinal virtues:
• Prudence
• Justice
• Courage
• Temperance
Judging by these four classic virtues, Jobs was hardly a virtuous man. While at times he displayed traits from this list, his rabid need to achieve led him to violate them regularly. Yet his products changed the world forever—for the good. Isn’t this what we mean by being virtuous—doing good things?
So here’s the puzzle. How can a man do so much good while being deficient in the classic virtues? And does this mean we have to rethink these virtues and come up with a different list?
Jobs and the Four Cardinal Virtues
Prudence
Many people have considered prudence foremost among the virtues. Though today we think of prudence more in terms of caution, the original sense of the word was the ability to make right decisions. However, according to Alan Deutschman’s account, Jobs was notorious for making bad decisions. After being thrown out of Apple (in part due to a bad decision about the Lisa, a computer that flopped) he built a new computer company (NeXT) whose products had no clear market, were too expensive, and sold abysmally few units.
On the other hand, Jobs shows us some compelling reasons not to be prudent. Despite his numerous mistakes, he emerged a hero as he came back to Apple and took Apple from near-bankruptcy to its ranking as the most valuable company in the world. Mistakes are the bread and butter of the entrepreneurial process, without which no progress can be made. For entrepreneurs, prudence can mean death by timidity.
Even if prudence were accepted as a desirable character trait, it is not clear it would do an entrepreneur any good. One reason is the sheer uncertainty of entrepreneurial markets. The prudent person needs something to go on, some evidence that a decision will lead to the desired outcome. For new products, especially radical innovations, there simply is no history of similar decisions. One cannot “strike a balance” between two extremes because those extremes are not well-defined.
Justice
Justice is the balance between self-aggrandizement and self-sacrifice—assuring that each receives what they are due. Jobs was routinely in violation of this virtue. He was maniacal about secrecy at Apple. He shut down bloggers, even those favorable to his products, by threatening lawsuits to force them to reveal their sources. (See Bryan Gardiner’s account.) Jobs always had to be the center of attention, the person who was seen as the smartest guy in the room. He had to be the one on the stage for a new product release and the one to whom accolades flowed. He was a prima donna.
You may be forgiven for taking risks and failing, but to claim credit or allocate rewards unfairly seems both wrong and deeply offensive. Aside from its intuitive appeal, justice has a practical advantage. Being just endears you to others and sets up social relations that make future interactions go more smoothly. In the case of someone setting out to change the world, however, such niceties may get in the way.
One example is Jobs’s appropriation of the Graphical User Interface (GUI). Even after they became practical for military and industrial use, computers remained highly specialized equipment that could only be operated after extensive training. The computer-human interface was lightly considered, there being no particular reason to make them broadly human-friendly. Only a few people would ever even see a computer, much less have occasion to use it. That is, until Apple.
Our present ability to interact with computers in an intuitive and user-friendly way are due largely to Steve Jobs. However, he was not the originator of the ideas that enabled it. As Walter Isaacson tells it, Jobs’s vision of a “friendly” computer was inspired at least in part by a visit to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center in 1979. He saw a remarkable thing—the icons-and-mouse system that is near-universal today. By 1984 he had improved upon what he saw and built the Apple Macintosh, changing the personal computer market forever.
Jobs had not created GUI; he had essentially stolen it. Though later court cases would establish that Apple had not legally infringed on Xerox’s patents, it was clear that Jobs had taken liberally from the idea he had seen at PARC. Eventually, even he admitted as much, saying, “It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy.”
Jobs could easily have been humble. He could have credited Xerox. He could have paid no mind to bloggers whose speculation on new products stole his thunder. He could have directed attention away from himself and acted the part of the humble servant-leader. Doing so might have made him appear to be more just, but also would have diminished the leverage he had with the marketplace. Truly new ideas are rare. For people to embrace them immediately is even rarer. Radical ideas require radical marketing and precise market positioning. Humble, self-effacing people don’t have the audacity to make this kind of thing happen. Jobs did—and his being in the spotlight was part of what made it happen.
Temperance
Temperance was not one of Jobs’s strong suits either. He was not given to restraint in his personal life, constantly going on bizarre diets and following short-term obsessions with a vengeance. As a virtue, temperance keeps us in check lest our passions be our undoing, at least when our passions are about to lead us to do something dumb. Jobs was not governed by temperance in any significant way.
However, passion also has the capacity to transform a human being into a creative powerhouse. Jobs described himself once as a “hopeless romantic” who “wanted to make a difference.” (See the article in Entrepreneur.) In his case, this passion often turned him into a cruel, condescending heel. Deutschman reports that Jobs once looked at an employee’s work and said, “You’ve baked a lovely cake and used dogshit for icing.” Such outbursts were routine at Apple, making you wonder how he kept employees at all. But the end result over the years was a core of deeply committed people who could withstand his barrages and use them to fuel even greater efforts toward perfection.
Courage
Last, courage. Of the four classic virtues, Steve Jobs probably exemplified this one the most. His willingness to try new things even after abject failures is inspiring. In the case of Pixar, Jobs’s fortitude paid off as the company released the wildly successful movie Toy Story. NeXT paid off as well when it was sold to Apple and its software used to develop the OSX operating system.
Yet this kind of behavior is a different type of courage. For entrepreneurs to be successful, they must be brash. Not courageous, brash. Mere courage dictates that an individual act so as to stand up for the good, but not do so foolishly. Being an entrepreneur often requires a kind of foolish confidence that you’ll win no matter what the odds.
This is not to say that fools invariably win. Jobs had another type of courage that enabled him to turn a flaming failure into a glowing success—the ability to change his mind: Apple CEO Tim Cook noted that Jobs:
had the ability to change his mind, much more so than anyone I’ve ever met. . . . Maybe the most underappreciated thing about Steve was that he had the courage to change his mind. (Quoted in Steve Jobs)
So while it can be argued that Jobs had courage, his particular brand of it was a unique twist on an old virtue.
The Virtues of an Entrepreneur
In the light of the four cardinal virtues, then, Jobs was not so virtuous. Part of the reason may be that the creator, the visionary, and the entrepreneur do not fit neatly into this plain vanilla view of virtue. In some ways, they are a breed apart. Jobs never considered himself to be bound by the rules others followed.
Though this trait was no doubt irritating and obnoxious, it is probably good for the rest of us that Jobs did not consider himself a member of the pack. While some might consider such an attitude narcissistic and a reflection of poor character, it also enabled him to do what few could—radically transform the world for the better. Jobs was simply too big in his own mind to be bound by petty social mores—and it worked.
Entrepreneurs by definition change reality. They create new worlds, sometimes drastically altering our perceptions of what is possible. In order to shake others out of their complacency, they sometimes resort to unorthodox methods. Jobs was devastatingly effective at using a combination of charm and condescension, delivered with surgical precision. An employee once coined the phrase “reality distortion field” to describe the effect Jobs had on his listeners:
If you trust him, you can do things. . . . If he’s decided to make something happen, then he’s just going to make it happen. (Quoted in Steve Jobs)
Everything about Steve Jobs raises questions about what we mean by virtue in visionary leaders. When we say that a person on the street is virtuous, we’re often speaking of a kind of blasé goodness. We expect someone who does the “right” thing. We do not envision this individual to be a maverick or a person of exceptional creative accomplishment. The four cardinal virtues leave little room for the exceptional individual.
Does that mean we need to add to our common conception of virtue to include those traits that successful entrepreneurs possess? It seems odd to assert that the entrepreneur should have a different set of virtues than the rest of us. It smacks of a “means justifying the ends” mentality. It is also reminiscent of Nietzsche’s master-slave morality—one set of rules for the lions, another for the lambs.
On the other hand, Nietzsche also states in The Will to Power that “the highest man is he who determines values and directs the will of millennia by giving direction to the highest natures.” Was Jobs one of these men? Did he direct the will of others by showing them what they wanted instead of asking them? I suggest that he was. “You can’t just ask customers what they want,” Isaacson reports him as saying, quoting Henry Ford, who first organized the mass production of the family car: “If I had asked them what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”
Entrepreneurs are not ordinary. They disrupt routines. They shake up people’s sensibilities. They kill off old ideas and introduce new ones. They are the wellspring from which progress flows. The four cardinal virtues are a good guide for the ordinary citizen choosing to fit in and be good. For the entrepreneur, they are deadly. In their stead, I suggest that the following three traits are foundational to the virtuous entrepreneur: independence of mind, vision, and audacity.
Independence of Mind
The virtuous entrepreneur is a person of intellectual integrity. They rely on the judgment of their own mind over the thoughts and feelings of others. Concerned less with fitting in than with standing out, the entrepreneur values individuality above all.
Vision
The ability to see what the future can be is vision. Successful entrepreneurs are able not only to convey the limits of the status quo, but to communicate a vivid image of what the future can be. Truly great entrepreneurs see things that most people cannot fathom until they see the new product or idea in action.
Audacity
Audacious people are not only bold, they are often impudent. Steve Jobs make no secret of the fact that he thought of himself as the smartest guy in the room. For entrepreneurs, modesty and restraint are not always helpful in achieving their goals. Entrepreneurs must press forward with a boldness that defies common social norms.
Not Fitting In
The ancient Egyptians recognized that certain broad characteristics of the universe were better for humans than others. Their goddess Maat was the Egyptian personification of these characteristics—balance, order, and justice. Isfet, her counterpart, symbolized chaos and injustice. One led to good for humanity; the other to destruction and deprivation.
As Maria Isabel Pita explains, Maat served the Egyptians as the spirit of justice that informed individual behavior in the context of society. Virtue was living in accordance with Maat, and failing to live in accordance with Maat was thought to bring punishment on King and commoner alike.
The ancient Greeks further refined the concept of virtue. In the Republic, Plato wrote of the same four traits that today we call cardinal virtues. A bit later, Aristotle’s contribution in his Nicomachean Ethics was to define virtue as a mean between two extremes, sometimes called the Golden Mean.
The fact that virtue was defined as a “mean” for Aristotle, however, didn’t make it a formulaic rule. He emphasized that particular decisions about where the mean lies hinge on the situation, your expertise, and your level of moral development. However, Aristotle did establish balance and moderation as key components of virtue. This sense of virtue as moderation informs religious and philosophical traditions all over the world. Confucianism, Buddhism, Stoicism, and Christianity all contain some version of these four building blocks of character. How does Steve Jobs stack up against them?
Since the first codification of virtue by the Ancient Egyptians, virtue has been conceived of as both a personal and a societal affair. You should be good, but you should also “fit in” for the benefit of the society. Virtuous people, by the standards of the four cardinal virtues, may have influence in a community, but will rarely be disruptive.
The problem with such a state of affairs is precisely that it is staid and predictable. Were it not for the disruption caused by creative thinkers, we would still be lighting oil lamps by which to peruse scrolls. Instead we have iPads and iPods to light up our lives with knowledge and music. These things come to exist precisely because people like Steve Jobs don’t think the four cardinal virtues apply to them.
Being virtuous in the sense of cultivating the four cardinal virtues no doubt benefits the individual possessing them, but not in every sense. If your goal is to lead a quiet life, contribute to mankind positively but unobtrusively, and be thought of well by others, this is the ticket. Fitting in, however, only benefits those individuals whose inclinations run toward conformity. For rebels like Jobs, the four virtues are prison walls.
In myths and legends we can find the theme of the antisocial creator, the individual who contributes something just because he won’t fit in. Described by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the path a true benefactor of mankind takes is one of rejecting society’s norms and going out on their own. In the language of mythology, the hero (in our case, the entrepreneur) gets the “call” and sets off to places others dare not go. Along the way, he finds both great opportunity and great danger. Success or even survival are far from certain.
Failure to answer the call results in a life lived falsely. We all know someone who has sacrificed their dreams to the unfulfilling comfort of a cubicle. For true creators, inventors, artists, and entrepreneurs, this is not an option, nor would they find solace in knowing that they had been prudent, just, temperate, and brave rather than independent, audacious visionaries.
Jobs was not cubicle-farm material, and while his entrepreneurial virtues cost him dearly in personal relationships and physical health, they also made him more than he could have been otherwise. He set out to change the world and did. Few people can look in the mirror and say that honestly.
While this answers the question of how the three entrepreneurial virtues benefit the individual, what is their relation to society? The renegade’s personal virtues bring value to society, but in a paradoxical way. Upon his or her return from the journey precipitated by the call, the hero brings a boon back to society, but sometimes the people do not want it or can’t understand it at first.
Moses brought down the Ten Commandments to a people that had forsaken Yahweh. In the end, Buddha despaired of transmitting his teaching to others and upon his deathbed admonished his followers to “Be a lamp unto yourself.” Jobs’s thinking about the role of technology in the lives of everyday people was so far ahead of the norm that he often launched market failures. Society may crave compliance, but it benefits from audacity.
Just as the hero of myth turns the notion of social propriety on its head, so does the entrepreneur require a different set of virtues to guide him. The person living by these virtues has a flourishing life, as Aristotle would say, but it is probably more colorful than Aristotle had in mind. They are virtues, nonetheless. The result is not only an assent to life for the individual, but a gift to the society in which he lives.