I was intending this week to continue the series of posts about value and reality, but that can wait. For this week, there’s been another of the memorable lives that ended in 2011.
I speak, of course, of Steve Jobs, the co-founder and former CEO of Apple Computer. Jobs’s figure loomed large over my life a decade ago. My first wife had convinced me to switch to a Mac in 2000, and I embraced everything Mac and Apple with all the zeal of the newly converted. She and I regularly went together to the Apple retail store in Cambridge for Jobs’s keynotes, just to watch him announce new products with his famous showmanship. I have been far less enthused about Apple recently, especially the arbitrary restrictions the company places on iPhone apps – the exact kind of controlling monopolistic behaviour that Apple was once best known for fighting against. I still happily use Macs and iPods, though. And more importantly for today, I learned important lessons from following Apple and Jobs so devotedly in the 2000s – above all about leadership.
I’ve never been much of a leader. I’d much rather let people do their own thing, and stay out of their way. But there are plenty of circumstances when such an attitude is not appropriate. Sometimes, we need to make decisions for other people, and it’s not easy to figure out how to do that well. “Leadership” does not figure prominently in premodern lists of virtues (like Aristotle’s), but I wonder if that’s because of different social circumstances. The idea of leadership as a virtue seems to me to come to the fore in organizations that are supposed (in theory) to be meritocratic, and where the input of subordinates is supposed (again in theory) to be valuable. This is the regular situation of a modern business, but seems to me to have been less common in earlier days. Confucius’s “rectification of names” tells us that “a king kings” (that is, a king should act in the manner proper to a king and “a father fathers”; it doesn’t tell us that “a leader leads,” and I wonder if this wasn’t because most hierarchies were specific enough that the more general idea of leadership was unnecessary.
I’m not enough of a social historian to say any of that with confidence. The point is: however that history may be, today we – at least we in the white-collar middle classes – are frequently thrown into situations where we are expected to lead people who are in other respects considered our equals. And this is a situation that requires decisiveness, requires that those decisions be made even when there are others who actively disagree. And Steve Jobs was the best model of this kind of leadership that I knew.
I remember how back in 2001, not long after I’d first obtained my beautiful Ruby iMac, Apple announced one of its famously secretive press conferences for a mysterious new product. Online Apple forums lit up with underwhelmed disappointment after the conference, saying “you mean it’s just an MP3 player?” But that disappointing MP3 player, of course, turned out to be the iPod – a product that wound up being more successful for Apple than any of the computers it had previously sold, and one which probably eventually wound up in the hands of nearly all the people who had previously posted their disappointment. Similarly, the new computer designs that Apple released under Jobs were often notable for what they lacked. It was unthinkable in 1998 for a computer to be sold without a floppy disk drive – but that’s exactly what the iMac was, and it was the computer that saved Apple. If Jobs had listened too attentively to those around him, he could not have made the bold decisions that he did.
In this respect, leadership is in many respects the inverse of humility, a virtue I’ve spoken of quite frequently on this blog. One must listen to others enough to be aware when one might be wrong – but one must nevertheless still make the decision even though it might be wrong.
Indeed, while Jobs’s decisiveness made him a good leader, it may well be the occasional dose of humility that helped make him a great leader. Just before the iPod, Jobs had gushed about a computer called the G4 Cube, saying in interviews “Isn’t it beautiful?” The G4 Cube, as it turned out, was a very expensive computer that was only as powerful as a laptop but had none of the portability. Few people wanted one; I can’t recall meeting anybody who owned one. It was a flop. But soon enough, Jobs admitted “we goofed.” The humility to admit a mistake is essential to a good leader – one must have the courage to make mistakes, but then be willing to accept their consequences. Jobs did, and he didn’t look back – he continued to make the bizarre but prescient decisions that would build his company from a struggling niche player to the most valuable company on earth.
Now as part of an integrated human life, leadership extends beyond just your own organization; it’s one thing to be a good leader for your company’s bottom line, and another to be a leader who benefits humanity as a whole. On this score, Jobs’s later monopolistic tendencies leave me unable to give him the unequivocal praise I would have liked to give; excluding competitors arbitrarily from the iPhone’s store has probably been great leadership for the bottom line, but it diminishes the broader human good in a way that Jobs’s earlier innovations never did. But then power corrupts, and Jobs is no exception to that. I doubt I could have been as effusive about Jack Layton had he actually become prime minister for a significant length of time. For many years, at least, Jobs gave us a model of what it’s like to be a great leader. That model is worth celebrating – and emulating.
“. . . leadership is in many respects the inverse of humility . . .”
Amod, you make this statement, but then you qualify it by recognizing that Jobs’ humility is a key element of his leadership style.
I wonder why you would state as the base case that strong leadership is the inverse of humility? That seems clearly wrong to me.
Obviously, there are different leadership styles. One of them is the egomaniacal, arrogant Donald Trump style — completely lacking in humility. There is no question that this style can be effective to a limited extent. In the same way, a political leader can dominate citizens for a time through fear or through bribery and appeals to selfish interests.
But it seems to me that the best leaders are always humble. In other words, the best leaders are never driven by ego gratification. Perhaps the problem is that you equate humility with indecisiveness. Why? It seems to me that humility is in no way inconsistent with the conviction, decisiveness and tenacity that are also qualities of a strong leader.
Jim, I tried to say “inverse” rather than “opposite” to indicate that they are, in a sense, flip sides of each other. I suspect it wasn’t the best language to express what I was trying to say, but I’m not sure what is. I probably should have said decisiveness rather than humility, for one thing, since leadership as such is likely to involve both. I do stand by the point that they are contrasting – they pull one in opposite directions. The situations where leadership is most required are those where the choice one would think best on one’s own conflicts with the advice of one’s confidants. And then one must ask oneself which to follow; in trying to be decisive one is likely to choose the former, and in trying to be humble, the latter.
I definitely agree with your point that the best leaders are likely to be humble – but I think it’s also worth taking some caution with that claim. In trying to be humble, it can be all too easy to go too far, toward meekness and submissiveness – listening so much to others that one is afraid to make a judgement independent of them, a lack of decisiveness. I’ve often tended to err in that direction myself when placed in leadership positions; I admire Jobs because he did not do that.
This sort of thing is the reason I’ve regularly talked about virtue as a mean: it is always a hard thing to get right, and too easy to err in one direction or another. In a sense that is true of all three of the virtues in question (leadership, humility and decisiveness).
This is interesting. We have a fundamental disagreement.
One of the great insights that I came across recently in reading Buddhist teachings on the emotion of pride (arrogance) is that pride is not at all inconsistent with a poverty mentality and self-denegration. Pride manifests as arrogance (inflation) if external conditions allow favorable comparisons of self with external reference points (I am a winner of a Nobel Prize — I am really something!). However, if external conditions are unfavorable, the habit of pride manifests as loss (deflation) — depression and a sense of poverty. Neither of these states of mind has anything to do with humility.
Humility (in my view) is the recognition that any view focused on self (whether it is “I am a king” or “I am a shit”) is a mistake. Humility is not a mean between pride, on the one hand, and poverty and submissiveness, on the other. Humility is seeing accurately that one’s own role in a situation is very precise and very small. And from there, it is possible to see how others can be cultivated, inspired, pacified or crushed depending on what is necessary and helpful in the situation. That is why I say that the best leaders are always humble. But I don’t define humility as being meek or submissive or in any sense lacking in confidence.
Decisiveness and Humility are not opposing traits, though there are a surprisingly large number of people who tend to believe that they are.
Decisiveness is simply a trust in one’s own judgment or the judgment of one’s advisers (rightly or wrongly), combined with the understanding that it is often better to act on incomplete information, than to fail to act and allow important opportunities to pass.
Humility is the ability to recognize (and admit) mistakes – it is also a recognition that your judgment is not absolute, to allow yourself to hedge your most dangerous bets, so as to avoid the most severe and fatal errors.
Humility is necessary to learn from mistakes properly, so as to assure those who trust and follow you that you will not repeat them.
Decisiveness combined with poor judgment leads to failure. A lack of humility ensures that you will repeat the same mistakes over and over.
Since you say that Apple became more of a monopoly rather than “fighting against” other companies, you’re implying that haveing this monopoly is bad which i agree with. But do you believe that the government will make Apple pay another company to “even out the odds”? As i believe Microsoft had to give money to i think actually Apple, do you believe that that same case would have to occure?
I completely agree with your statement of “A leader leads” because if you claim to be a leader or appointed as leader, you must show the potential, mindset, and agreement to properly lead a group of people in the right path. the leader must clearly state his/her’s intentions as a leader to be rightly respected. I never really knew anything about Steve Jobs, but from reading your article, I can really see his great leadership skills. If only he could have taught some of our leaders today some of those great leadership qualities.
Welcome, Ariadne! It remains to be seen whether the government will intervene against Apple. (If there is intervention I suspect it will come from Europe rather than the US, because the US government is so paralyzed right now.) Certainly Apple’s refusal to stock competing apps in the App Store because they “duplicate existing functionality” does smack very much of Microsoft’s “tying” Internet Explorer to Windows. On the other hand, Android is a much stronger competitor to Apple than, well, Apple was to Microsoft at the time. So while Apple is acting like a monopolist, they have less of the resources to back it up.
On the bigger issue in your second paragraph, I agree. Though I’m not sure how much these leadership skills can really be taught – this is a question management schools always seem to have a hard time with.
Steve Jobs has been a great leader and a very good role model for younger people. He has changed the ENTIRE world with his founding of apple. Where would we be with out his innovations and his leadership. He led from the front of Apple and always let other people from his COMPANY bring there thoughts and ideas to him to take up these matters from those that were involved with him. He had major upsets and downfalls but finally finding himself back on top again, of course, he did this with his head up high and with humility.