A friend recently lent me the book, Steve Jobs. I was excited to go through it because I had done a lot of consulting at Apple in the 80’s and 90’s, and wanted to see the author’s view of those times. I never worked with Jobs because I focused mainly on enterprise and education sales. But lots of the names in the book were familiar, and I had worked directly with some and had been at a number of the big meetings mentioned.
The book provided the back story for Jobs’ hits and misses, along with his personal life. He had an uncanny knack of getting people to perform at ridiculously high levels even while they endured his scathing criticism. It’s as if all those management rules about “treating people right” didn’t apply to Jobs. He also had the ability to evoke super-human efforts from people to get things done.
The book talked in detail about the personal price Jobs paid for this single-minded devotion to his career. But what I remembered were so many of the people working there. Some came to the point of having had enough, and they left. Apple lost a lot of talent that way. Then there were those who stayed. What the book skipped over was the price they paid in terms of time and relationships with their spouses, partners, kids, family, community, and so on. The price of Jobs’ singular focus on work rippled throughout the community.
The lesson I got from the book is that, if you’re super-smart, you can be an SOB and still be successful. But it’s hard to maintain that singular focus and retain any sort of work-life balance. Also, if you’re a carrier for work-life imbalance, you can end up hurting thousands of people. That’s what I remember from those decades.
I recently heard about a C-level exec from a big company who was interviewing to be the CEO of a small business. He said that he just couldn’t handle the total personal commitment his old job required. It was either change or lose his family. He made his choice. How about you?
What kind of leader are you? What kind do you want to be?