To others, Jobs serves as a cautionary tale, a man who changed the world but at the price of alienating almost everyone around him. To some, Jobs’ life has revealed the importance of sticking firmly to one’s vision and goals, no matter the psychic toll on employees or business associates. Indeed, his life story has emerged as an odd sort of holy scripture for entrepreneurs-a gospel and an antigospel at the same time. Jobs has been dead for nearly a year, but the biography about him is still a best seller. Jobs’ flouting of those rules extended outside the office, to a family that rarely got to spend much time with him as well as to strangers (police officers, retail workers), who experienced the CEO’s verbal wrath whenever they displeased him.
“The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don’t apply to him,” Ive explained to the biographer. Once, after checking into a five-star London hotel handpicked for him by Ive, Jobs called it “a piece of shit” and stormed out. According to Isaacson, even Jonathan Ive, Apple’s incomparable design chief, came in for rough treatment on occasion. Jobs routinely told subordinates that they were assholes, that they never did anything right. But the lesson here might make us uncomfortable: Violate any norm of social or business interaction that stands between you and what you want. What lesson should we draw from this anecdote? After all, we turn to the lives of successful people for inspiration and instruction. But meanwhile, Apple hired a new shipper that met the expectations of the company’s uncompromising CEO. (Jobs “would have fired me anyway,” he later told Isaacson.) The legal imbroglio took a year and presumably a significant amount of money to resolve. Will Wright Wants to Make a Game Out of Life Itself.Undead: The Rabies Virus Remains a Medical Mystery.Former McDonald’s Honchos Take On Sustainable Cuisine.