***** 5 of 5 Stars
You’ve got to read this book. Issacson (and Kearnes Goodwin) are my all-time favorite biographers. How like Steve Jobs to identify and rope in the best biographer before his death.
I didn’t realize what a selfish, immature jerk Steve Jobs was until I read this book. He was 100% task focused and 0% relationship focused. This resulted in a world-class company. It also resulted in two classes of family members, friends, and co-workers: (1) those who put up with the crap with saintly patience and (2) those who distanced themselves from him.
Back to the world-class company part. It looks like Job’s willingness to run ramshod over people made Apple great. And he was well aware of this. He had a singular goal: to create a world-class company that built world-class products after he was gone. In order to do this, he had to say to someone’s face “that store looks like crap.” Or that guy is a “bozo”, fire him. He could take it too. If you weren’t willing to push back and disagree, you were also fired. As a result, he created a company crammed full of engineering geniuses. He attracted people as brilliant as himself with an intense desire to innovate user-friendly, simple products. His instinct for product design and his bull-headed management style worked in tandem to literally benefit the entire world. And he knew it. His story left me in awe.
This book raises a bunch of interesting questions:
1. Can you accomplish something really great without sacrificing family?
2. How can I consciously build a church whose values and structure live past me and please Jesus?
3. What primary value drives our church? (in the case of Jobs, it was great, fully-integrated products; he said other companies failed because they were run by the marketing or the money people)
4. Who do we put into leadership or take out of leadership? Why?
5. Can a volunteer-based, non-profit achieve the same kind of excellence as a for-profit business with a dictatorial, brilliant CEO?
6. Do we have a culture of honesty and high standards? Can you say “that’s crap”?
7. How would you compare Jesus’ and Job’s leadership styles? How can you be effective and loving at the same time?
8. Could a woman get away with a bull-headed leadership style?
I am interested to know if you have come to any conclusions regarding your last question, “Could a woman get away with a bull-headed leadership style?” A corollary question might be, “Is a bull-headed leadership style even appropriate for use in a church?” Clearly there were prophets, judges and kings in the Old Testament that used it with varying degrees of success. The apostle Paul strikes me as at least heard-headed, if not bull-headed, and while it was not his usual M.O., Jesus showed some bullheadedness on more than one occasion. Still, in all these examples the bullheadedness appears to be closely tied to their masculinity.Whether fair or not, women are expected to use gentler, though no less effective, means. To quote Charlotte Whitton, “Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.”
If the woman already has significant authority from some other source, I think she could. Job’s authority came from being a founder and from saving Apple from a near-death experience under Sculley. The board and his officers put up with his arrogance and abuse, especially second time around, because the markets proved his instincts correct time and time again. If he were female, I think they’d put up with the cursing and the tantrums because “where else can we go to get your proven product instincts?”
In the church, bull-headed honesty and driving towards a heavenly goal is OK. Bull-headed cursing people out and throwing tantrums and neglecting your kids, not so much.