Do You Need to Be a Jerk to Win?

In the new movie "Jobs" based on Walter Isaacson's biography, Steve Jobs comes across as an "enlightened being with an evil streak," as a former girlfriend put it. (He had got her pregnant, only to throw her out of his house saying "I have no time for this, I'm building Apple"; it would take him 17 years to recognize their daughter as his.) Jobs's life and supreme success as a technology innovator, and his repeated cheating of colleagues without whom he could not have done it, face us again with the age-old Machiavellian question: Do nice people finish last? Do you have to walk all over people to get ahead?

It is not a rhetorical question. I came away from watching the movie "Jobs" astonished. Having been an avid Mac user for years (I switched from Windows in 2009), I have tremendous respect for Steve Jobs as one of the revolutionaries who made the computer available to the masses, easy to use,and an aesthetic experience.

I am reading Walter Isaacson's brilliant biography "Steve Jobs." (I know, I am late sometimes with these things). To his credit, Jobs, depite being known as a control-freak, gave Isaacson free access to all sources and did not request to see the manuscript before it went to print.

Reading the biography is troubling, to say the least.

Jobs often had a vision and pushed for path-breaking innovations, using for example what colleagues liked to call his "reality distortion field" (his ability to distort reality so that it fit his intentions), which shifted things from being impossible to possible, then to achievable. It was the stuff of breakthrough results.

But that same distortion made him treat people disloyally, rudely and outright callously.


David Kottke was Jobs's longtime friend, roommate and collaborator who had had been on the original team in Jobs's parent's garage where Apple first tarted. But Jobs, worth $250 million at age 23, could not bring himself to give Kottke a single stock option to let him share in the company's success.

Steve Jobs saw himself as a warrior fighting the forces of darkness. But at the same time, from the start he made sure Apple products, from the Apple II to the Mac, from the iPhone to the iPad, were not open source but hermetic. You could not even open the Apple II without a special tool that only Apple had.

His eventual nemesis Bill Gates and his then-small company Microsoft ($32 million turnover to Apple's $1 billiion) started out as a supplier to the Macintosh team. "Jobs had got got Gates to agree," writes Isaacson, "that Microsoft would not create graphical software for anyone other than Apple until a year after the Macintosh shipped in January 1983."

"Unfortunately for Apple, it did not provide for the possibility that the Macintosh launch would be delayed for a year. So Gates was within his rights" when he announced Windows, designed for IBM PCs.

Jobs was furious and ordered Gates to his Cupertino office. "I went down to Cupertino," Gates recalled. He found himself in Jobs's conference room, surrounded by ten Apple employeses. "You're ripping us off!" Jobs shouted.

"Well, Steve," Gates answered coolly, "I think there is more than one way to look at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."

After Jobs plotted--unsuccessfully--a coup to oust John Sculley, the brilliant marketer whom he had courted and recruited a year earlier from PepsiCo, Sculley's wife impulsively confronted him in the parking lot of a restaurant.

"When I look into most people's eyes," she said, "I see a soul. When I look into your eyes, I see a bottomless pit, an empty hole, a dead zone." Then she walked away.

What do you say? Was Steve Jobs's proneness to ruthless behavior a necessary evil that comes with genius and/or leadership? Does the end justify the means? Or does the process have to be good for success to last, as Gandhi and Martin Luther King believed (who were both featured on Apple's famous "Think Different" video)? I look forward to reading you on my blog: http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/.

 
Dr. Thomas D. Zweifel is a Partner & Managing Director at Manres AG in Zurich, Switzerland, and the author of seven books such as The Rabbi and the CEO (SelectBooks, 2008), shortlisted for the National Jewish Book Award and the Foreword Award of the Year.