HOW NOT TO MANAGE RELATIONSHIPS

For a man who so understood the value of people to a business, Jobs nonetheless developed quite a reputation for being prickly, difficult and frequently unreasonable. In looking at how he dealt with people – both on a professional and a personal basis – his behaviour is sometimes best considered in terms of a ‘how not to’ guide.

A man of undoubted passion and sometimes short temper, Jobs would no doubt have conceded himself that his ‘people management’ skills fell short of what they should be at certain times and with particular individuals. All that said, he commanded enormous respect and trust among the vast majority who worked alongside and underneath him. He was able to instil in people the sense that they were on a collective mission, a joint quest for perfection, and thus many of his excesses were overlooked. Jobs spoke of how his role was not to be easy on people but to make them better. It is against this aim that his management style is best judged.

Don’t lose your cool

One of the dark sides of Steve Jobs was that he could be volatile and unkind. He was not above humiliating people in front of their colleagues and was repeatedly accused of usurping others’ ideas for his own glorification. He hugely upset Jef Raskin, the man originally in charge of the Macintosh project, who sent a memo to Apple president Mike Scott stating that Jobs’ performance as a manager was ‘dreadful’ and accusing him of attacking those whose ideas he didn’t understand while claiming credit for the ideas of others. (As we have also seen, Jobs proved to have more muscle in the resulting arm wrestle and Raskin quickly moved on. This in itself no doubt represents a valuable lesson of sorts: if you’re going to upset people, make sure your position is strong enough to withstand any retaliation. On this occasion Jobs won; on other occasions he didn’t.)

Don’t lose perspective

Jobs could also be coldly ruthless. When he oversaw a restructuring of Pixar in the early 1990s, he notoriously sacked over 40 per cent of the company without notice or severance pay. Redundancy is never much fun, but he did little to make it any easier for all those people who had to go home and tell their families that they didn’t have a job anymore. He could also be monstrously petty, as when he threw his toys out of the pram after Mike Scott introduced a payroll system to tighten up payment processes in the early days of Apple. It happened that Woz was designated employee no. 1, while Jobs was no. 2. This really was small stuff that should not have been sweated but an enraged Jobs took the issue up with Scott, who, to his credit, refused to back down.

Don’t lose your audience

Those who worked with Jobs on the Macintosh project were exposed to a good many of his character frailties. Many complained of his changeability: what was a terrible idea one day could become a stroke of genius the next – and quite possibly Jobs’ stroke of genius rather than anyone else’s. But the Mac project also exemplifies many of his skills as a manager. The end product was so great that it could be said to have justified the means. Indeed Bud Tribble, part of the team behind the Mac, spoke of how brilliant Jobs was at persuading the gang that they were on the brink of creating something great. ‘He can convince anyone of practically anything,’ Tribble recalled, before wryly noting: ‘It wears off when he’s not around.’ It was this ability to inspire people to new heights that was perhaps Jobs’ greatest strength.

It is clear Steve Jobs was not a man who went into business to make friends. But he was someone who valued people, which makes his sporadic people-management failings all the harder to understand. As Richard Branson commented to ShortList in 2012: ‘Too many business leaders are too quick to jump down people’s throats, or rule by fear, which is foolish.’ He added: ‘Steve Jobs was quite ruthless, and did very well despite that, but that isn’t the way it should be done.’

But did Steve Jobs achieve his goal of creating the climate in which people do better things than they thought they were capable of? Undoubtedly so.