Leadership
The Leadership of Steve Jobs
A few days prior to the passing of Steve Jobs, I did a presentation on leadership incompetence – focusing on Steve Jobs.
Did I just say that Steve Jobs was an incompetent leader? Yes, but not the Steve Jobs that brought us the iPhone, iPad, iMac, iTunes, etc.
The leadership incompetence that I am referring to goes back to Apple’s early days, when they were still called Apple Computer Inc. One of the best portrayals of the early days of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates was in the docudrama The Pirates of Silicon Valley released in 1999. This movie showed us a Steve Jobs who was not the CEO of Apple, but rather the head of the Macintosh Division.
Before
Take a look at this following clip from the movie which shows what kind of manager/leader Steve Jobs was at the time:
The Steve Jobs portrayed in the video was a results-only manager. His management style was temperamental and erratic. He did not care about his employees. He just wanted results and wanted to see the success of the Macintosh line.
Aftermath
What happened to the company afterwards?
The Apple Macintosh was released and was well received.
What happened to Steve Jobs?
Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer, Inc., was forced to resign from the company. So what happened, after he resigned? Steve Jobs went on to found NeXT, a rival computer company that would later be bought by Apple and whose operating system would be the basis for Mac OS X. Steve Jobs would later return to Apple almost 10 years later and serve as CEO (until August 2011).
After
I don’t have a video of Steve Jobs leading in action, so I will have to take his word for it. In this interview at All Things Digital D8 Conference, Steve Jobs describes what he does all day at Apple.
Analysis
This video portrays Steve Jobs as a competent leader.
Compare this to the earlier video – note that what Steve Jobs talks about is: leading teams and communicating ideas. While the final products are still important to Steve Jobs, the process of getting there is also important.
Why in the early days of Apple was Steve Jobs an incompetent leader?
- Lack of business knowledge?
- Single focus – Macintosh line of computers?
- Lack of interpersonal skills?
If you watch the entire movie – Pirates of Silicon Valley, you will see that although Steve Jobs was a visionary, he was not a people-person.
Conclusion
Although you can lead a project to success, it does not mean that you are a successful leader. To be a competent leader, you must be able to accomplish goals, provide support to your team, and receive empowerment from your team.
0Write Your Own Programmers Credo
There’s an old joke that’s been floating around the web for over 10 years called: Computer Programmer’s Credo #73, which says:
Documentation is like sex:
When it is good, it is VERY good;
and when it’s bad, it’s still
better than nothing at all.
Putting humor aside, if you examine Computer Programmer’s Credo #73 – it describes something that all computer programmers face at one time or another.
Think about the last time that you worked on or inherited code that didn’t belong to you. How many times did you ask yourself:
Why did this person write this in this particular way?”
or
Is there a reason why they chose to implement this so inefficiently?
If the original author of the code is still around, you could ask them – but what are the odds that they would remember why they did it? Without having documentation in code, all you can do is read the code at face value.
What exactly is a credo?
A credo is more than a cute little saying about a particular subject matter. It is best described as a philosophy or words by which you live or work.
I assume the author of the Computer Programmer’s Credo #73, was somebody who had to constantly modify or rewrite code that wasn’t his or hers. If the author appreciated good code documentation, does this mean that he or she implemented the same practices in his or her own code?
A credo should be something that you strongly believe and actually implement in your habits. It is not a complaint about how someone else does something, but you also do that same something at one point or another.
Get Started with Your Programmers Credo
Think about what you appreciate about programming:
Do you:
- Appreciate good code documentation?
- Implement best practices?
- Design your code for reusability?
- Learn new programming languages and frameworks
- Encourage Jr. programmers to grow and learn from Sr. programmers
These are just a few questions that you can ask yourself about your programming habits.
Take a few minutes to write down several things that you as a programmer believe as your philosophy. Just keep in mind that whatever you write down, should be something that you practice.