Steve
Jobs died in October of 2011. Since
then, there have been two major movies made about him and the publication of
Walter Issacson’s authorized biography.
It is hard to dispute that in the entire history of humans, there has
never been an entrepreneur so worthy of examination and praise. As Walter Isaacson and others have pointed
out, the companies he created revolutionized personal computers, digital
publishing, music, telephones, tablets and animated movies. To those astonishing achievements, we could
add that he revolutionized digital space itself, making it delightful and
responsive to the average consumer and then went on to do the same with retail
space and even the physical packaging in which our newest technology arrives in
our hands. Now we have the Apple Watch
which, while developed immediately after his death, has the fingerprints of his
creativity all over it, extending his legacy even further. The influence of his
product designs on cultural taste in general is immeasurable. In doing all this, he built two great
companies—Pixar and Apple, the latter becoming the most valuable company on
earth in dollar terms alone. Clearly,
there is much to be admired in the man, his vision and his accomplishments.
Because Steve Jobs’ legacy looms so
large, there is also a danger that new entrepreneurs will find it convenient to
refer to him to justify a bullying, badgering, bombastic, brutal, cold,
calculating and manipulative leadership style. Steve Jobs was a screaming
genius—figuratively and, unfortunately, literally. Precisely for that reason, it is important
for wiser people with deep leadership experience to weigh in and state emphatically
that this side of his brand of leadership was not even close to optimal. We may seek to understand and even empathize
with one possessed of so much talent and intelligence and yet so deficient in
psychological balance that he was driven to treat others as he did. But it is
critical that we identify it as unacceptable, inexcusable, unjustifiable, not
to be laughed off or dismissed and certainly not to be emulated. Abuse always has a cause and a result. That doesn’t mitigate it. It is an “ends justifies the means” approach,
a self-justifying pathology It is certainly not to be confused with any
form of well-considered strategic leadership.
The corollary argument that the end products could not have been created
any other way stands on a foundation
of toothpicks. We do not here similar tales of temperament coming out of Google or Facebook or any number of other
companies that are mountains in the new digital landscape. Personally, I have worked for a few people
who had styles similar to that of Jobs, and coached numerous people who worked
under such confusing blends of affection and aggression. I know them all too well. A psychologist would have a field day
diagnosing them and I have no doubt that in the not too distant future, someone
will write a thesis or a book doing just that with Jobs as their subject, going
way beyond the general idea that he carried a deep wound from being adopted. As
Alice Miller pointed out in her book, The
Untouched Key, in most biographies (and I would apply this to Isaacson’s of
Jobs), “individual childhood events usually are not given any prominence.” With the explosive expansion of knowledge in
the field of epigenetics, those “events” will now have to include an inquiry
into the state of a mother during her pregnancy, the nature of the birth itself
and the critical first few months of life—all of which increasingly look, in
combination, like the true foundation of personality, as opposed to the
traditional view that it is the first three to seven years in which this
foundation is established. To shine light into these earliest moments of life
will be daunting but not impossible to the determined investigative biographer.
It’s
important to state that I am a fan and owner of Apple products, as are many of
you reading this, in all likelihood. But
delighting in the results doesn’t mean we can’t imagine getting there
differently. How can we know, beyond our
own intuitive sense and life experience and a few good current contrasting
examples that there was and is a better way?
We can’t conduct a classic double-blind study in which we have Steve
Jobs as he was leading Apple and a transformed Steve Jobs leading the exact
same Apple in parallel universes. But we
don’t have to. Jim Collins and his merry
band of researchers at Stanford have done the work for us. They closely examined some of the greatest
companies of the last hundred or more years in comparison to other companies in
the same business slots to see what distinguished the best. They have published their results in three of
the most important books for anyone interested in leadership, particularly
entrepreneurial leadership: Built to Last, Good to Great and Great by
Choice. What they found was that
generally, the most successful leaders are possessed of a paradoxical blend of
fierce determination to succeed with, of all things, humility. Yes, humility. These are generally people who
are driven, but not unrelentingly. They
are possessed of strong egos but are not egomaniacs. They are demanding but not
histrionic and brutal. They make a lot
of tough decisions, but they also share responsibility for a lot of decisions
with their people. They include and
empower. Perhaps most significantly,
they are not arrogant. That directly
contradicts the popular image promulgated not only by Jobs but by someone as
different from him as Donald Trump. In
fact, when asked about their success, over and over again these leaders avoid
taking credit, instead giving it to their people, recognizing that it truly
takes not just one team but many teams working in a coordinated dance to attain
and sustain success on a large scale.
That is the norm. Jobs’ charisma
was incredibly appealing to many, including, some who were willing to suffer at
his hand. But stylistically, the abusive
side of his brand of leadership is an outlier when considered in the context of
a large population of Fortune 500 company leaders as well as leaders in smaller
entrepreneurships. We should discourage
anyone from emulating it and, instead, show a better way.
In my
own experience of more than forty years in business, the best leaders I have
personally experienced did indeed possess the paradoxical combination of
intense ambition and humility. They were
also cool in the face of enormous challenges, holding to their basic business
principles and practices to pull their people into a creative problem solving
process that would get them through and position them to take advantage of the
opportunities that inevitably arise as markets contract and expand. I have had the privilege of witnessing and
working with men and women who have the flexibility, self-confidence and wisdom
to lead from the front, the middle and the back, depending on what was called
for…sometimes all three within a given day.
By
leading from the front I mean defining the vision, setting the overall
strategic direction, setting the agenda in a particular moment, making the
command decisions that cannot be optimally made by consensus or majority vote
and, in one of their most important roles, being the Educator in Chief to
continuously advance his teams’ knowledge and understanding of both the
short-term and long-term context. In
these activities, he or she occupies the king’s or queen’s throne and embodies
the kind of parental energy that can set boundaries, embrace specific values, create
positive, respectful conditions, identify necessary daily practices that create
consistency and a common language of achievement concepts. These
leaders inspire people to stretch themselves into their very best work to serve
a greater cause. This leader avoids
creating false urgency and instead lays out timetables for achievement that his
teams can make sense of, even if they are demanding. The language from this position can be direct
or poetic but above all, it is clear and without psychological games.
By
leading from the middle I mean stepping away from the king or queen energy into
the brother and sister energy. In these
situations, the leader conducts him/herself as equal in power to the rest of
the team, engaging in inquiry collaboratively and assuming that he/she doesn’t
necessarily have all the best ideas and cannot understand what people
downstream from him/her are dealing with without deep inquiry and deeper
listening and meditation on the input.
This communicates respect to the individual teammates that goes down
like honey. In such highly collaborative
settings, a vision and the strategy and tactics necessary to achieve it can
become the authentic property of everyone, not just the leader. Smart “leaders from the middle” will often
enlist outsider professionals to facilitate meetings so that they can step into
an egalitarian position with their team members. Doing so humanizes them and fosters their
emotional and mental availability to ideas other than their own or their top
advisors.
By
leading from the back I mean fully empowering people to do the jobs they are
qualified to do, cheering them as they go forward and resisting the temptation to
tweak or fine-tune every decision they make.
Leaders who do the latter often do not realize that they are betraying a
deep insecurity of their own that manifests in being unable to trust others and
release them to do a job that is more than good enough, even excellent, but
simply different from how the leader might have gotten there. The ability to lead from the back is, along
with leading from the middle, critical in developing the increasing interdependence
of strong players based on ever-growing competencies and trust, and ultimately
engendering an organization that is truly self-sustaining as it feeds on its
own joy in co-creating vitality, innovation and success in all measures. Leading from the back embodies the kind of
parental energy that sees accurately what others are ready to try and
encourages them to be adventurous and self-correct when things fall short of
expectations. There is no “I told ya so”
in this leader. His or her energy is
strong in compassion, encouragement, understanding and patience.
The
best leaders genuinely are the kind of people about whom staff will say, “I
love him/her. I would do anything for
him/her within my power.” The beauty is,
such leaders do not ask people to go to extremes, the way Steve Jobs did. They are more interested in nurturing
talented people who are devoted to the best available practices for their respective
positions on a consistent basis across days, weeks, months and years.
Steve
Jobs has proven that a company can
succeed with tyrannical and bullying leadership. That doesn’t mean it should.
Jobs was right when he said of
himself, as reported by Walter Isaacson, “I am not well made.” He knew, for all his brilliance and all his
rationalizations about making the future, there were things within him dark,
chaotic and incomplete. He was a seeker
from a fairly young age—living on a commune, experimenting with recreational
drugs, including LSD, traveling to India to study with a Buddhist guru, and developing
a series of relationships with mentor/father figures. On some level he sensed that there was a deep
pain living in him that had something to do with being adopted. In my experience, that kind of early hurt
calls for psychotherapy, but not any psychotherapy from any average therapist. It requires brilliance and a profound process
that can ultimately reach the earliest hurts, hurts that the mind cannot
identify but the body remembers. The
ferocity of his reactivity points toward insults to the system in the first moments
of life, including during gestation in the womb, the birth experience and the
period immediately following when he and all children are utterly defenseless. Unfortunately,
he never found his way to such a person and process.
Interestingly, he did have a brief
dalliance with mock Primal Therapy
when he was 19. Primal Therapy had grabbed
headlines and become highly controversial after the publication of the The Primal Scream, by Arthur Janov, in
1970. A number of celebrities were open
about attending Janov’s institute in Los Angeles, including John Lennon and
Yoko Ono, actor, James Earl Jones and popular pianist, Roger Williams. It may seem curious, then, that Jobs chose to
go to Oregon in late 1974 for his therapy at a center that was not run or
endorsed by Janov. According to
Isaccson, he paid $1000 for a twelve week experience—a commitment far less than
what Janov required at The Primal Institute, knowing that the process through
which he and his therapists led people was painful and challenging and
necessitated an “all in” mentality to see it through to its full benefits. Since I did receive therapy from Janov and his
staff in my late twenties for a total of two years in the early Seventies, I
can say from personal knowledge that if Jobs had applied at The Primal
Institute, he would not have been accepted.
It was the policy of the Institute at that time to only take people who
were twenty-five or older, and for very good reason. Younger people were not sufficiently
developed to handle the peeling away of defenses and processing of tumultuous
early childhood hurt while still getting up and going to work to take care of
themselves every day. It took a certain
level of experience, emotional resources and some maturity to be able to do
that. Though it was not known at the time that the left side of the brain
doesn’t fully boot up until around twenty-five, clinical experience had made
the point to Janov and his team.
I offer these details because
Isaacson was apparently unaware of them when writing his biography of Jobs and
offers no explanation as to why Jobs went to Oregon to have an experience with
“adherents” of the therapy (which might mean anything), when it was well-known
that Janov himself was practicing on Almont Street in West Hollywood. Janov was insistent that a person could not
practice Primal Therapy until they had completed rigorous training that took a
number of years at his Institute. It
included their having a sustained and thorough experience of their own with the
primal process, as well as a requirement that they get their PhD in psychology
if they didn’t already have it. If they
completed this regimen of therapy, training and academic achievement, they were
then Certified Primal Therapists and free to practice as such. There were a couple of so called “Feeling
Centers” that appeared, in Los Angeles and Oregon, run by people many of whom
might have been in therapy with Janov for a period of time but did not complete
the training and were not endorsed by him.
The mere fact that the Oregon center accepted a nineteen year old Jobs
is alarming to anyone, such as myself, with first-hand experience at Janov’s
Institute.
As Isaacson reports, Jobs was
quickly disillusioned with his experience in Oregon. Since my own experience at the institute was
stunning and deeply healing, as was that of the overwhelming majority of the
people I knew there at the time, I can only wonder how he might have changed
had he applied directly to The Primal Institute in his mid to late twenties…or
had he stumbled upon some other equally potent transformational process, fully
committed to it and made it part of his daily practice for the rest of his life. I have been privileged to know and work with a few such rare leaders. Jobs would likely still have been a visionary
and ambitious but a more consistently humanistic and respectful leader who knew
clearly where the line was between being demanding and being abusive. Unfortunately, whatever he did try was either
insufficient in itself to address the power of his pain, or his practice of
that modality was insufficient. Instead,
he continued to visit rage and tears upon those around him.
In all likelihood, the overwhelming
majority of the leaders detailed in Jim Collins’ books were neither devotees of
Buddhism or Western psychotherapy. They
were gifted by childhood experience with more balanced temperaments to lead
through a kind of humble ambition. Still,
we do see pathological behavior emerge in many of these people in terms of how
they manipulate the public, promulgate misinformation, spin or withhold
information, and spend absurdly large sums of money lobbying state and federal
lawmakers to influence policy in their direction, often specifically to lower
or remove regulation and oversight of their behavior to the detriment of the
public.
A serious discussion of leadership
has to address such behavior. It should
not be walled up by economic or business concepts, or glibly dismissed with
platitudes about different personalities.
Leaders are people and as such, just as likely to suffer “the slings and
arrows” as the rest of us. A
psychological perspective is necessary to come to a full understanding of who
they are, why they do what they do, and what, if anything they might be able to
personally do about it themselves if and when they at least have sufficient
pre-cognition to realize they are not “well-made.”
Plain and simple, bullying is the
action of a deeply afflicted soul blasting its pain outward. It may be done “hot” the way Jobs did it or
“cold” the way others do it, manipulating markets and bringing the largest
economy in the world to its knees. We
should never accept it as a valid leadership style. It should be dissected in MBA programs
designed to catch the tendencies early and direct people towards therapeutic practices. We should also be aware that people suffering
from such internal strife, be it hot or cold, are worthy of empathy, hard as it
may be to give at times. The bully is
not a happy camper. He or she is an abused
person who has taken on the behavior of the powerful aggressor. Being on either the giving or receiving end
is a devastatingly limited and tortured place to live.
The last thing we need is for such
leaders to be made icons by the press and for people to be willing to follow
them unflinchingly, leaving a trail of their own blood in the street in the
name of fortune or “creating the future.” In fact, the opposite is called for. Such leaders need people who realize they are
suffering from serious psychic pain, people who are courageous and strong
enough to stand up to them and say, “No, we will not follow you as long as you
treat us like this, no matter how smart and talented you are. Get help!”
