STEVE JOBS: Universal Characteristics in His Leadership - Orientation Toward Performance and Excellence

 

Orientation Toward Performance and Excellence: A Focus on Self-Development

Throughout his life, Steve Jobs experimented with several modes of self-development.  For example, Steve Jobs underwent primal scream therapy, which Arthur Janov, a Los Angeles psychiatrist, developed and popularized.  Scream therapy is based on the Freudian theory that repressed pains of childhood cause psychological problems.  Arthur Janov argued that re-suffering these primal moments while fully expressing the pain—sometimes in screams—could resolve these psychological problems.  To Steve Jobs, this seemed preferable to talk therapy, because it involved intuitive feeling and emotion, rather than analyzing.  He felt that reliving childhood pains would lead to insight.

In late 1974, Steve Jobs became involved in 12 weeks of therapy at the Oregon Feeling Center, located in an old hotel in Eugene.  Robert Friedland, Steve Jobs’s guru from Reed College, ran this center.  While undergoing scream therapy, Steve Jobs confided to friends about the intensity of his pain regarding being put up for adoption and having no knowledge about his birth parents.  Steve Jobs felt that he could better understand himself if he knew more about his physical parents.  To avoid hurting his adoptive parents, he refrained from hiring a private investigator.  Rather, he spoke with his adoptive parents, Paul and Clara Jobs, and learned that his birth parents had been graduate students at a university and that his father was Syrian.  He was deeply angry about being put up for adoption.  While experiencing scream therapy and for a while afterwards, Steve Jobs seemed to have found peace, improved confidence, and reduced feelings of inadequacy.

There are other examples of Steve Jobs’s focus on self-development.  When he dropped out of college, he took up Buddhism.  At Apple, he was an active learner, dropping in for learning sessions with staff.  He distanced himself from his tendency to shut people down, taking on new behaviors to allow others to open up and contribute more comfortably.  He accepted input and applied it to making needed changes in himself.

Even his rivalry with Bill Gates provides evidence of self-development.  In May of 2007, then Wall Street Journal columnists Walt Mossberg and Karen Swisher got Steve Jobs and Bill Gates together for a joint interview during an All Things Digital conference.  At first, Steve Jobs spoke warily of Bill Gates.  However, when Bill Gates recalled how, while Steve Jobs was reviewing the software Microsoft was making for the Macintosh, he would see Steve Jobs make decisions based on people and product, doing things differently in a way that was magical, Steve Jobs pointed out that Microsoft’s decoupled approach to technology was faring better in the personal computer market than Apple’s theology of building end-to-end products.  Also in that interview, Steve Jobs indicated that this difference in design philosophy led Apple and him to less collaboration with others.

In his 2005 commencement address at Stanford University, Steve Jobs provided further confirmation of self-development.  He mentioned that he dropped out of college, believing that everything would turn out all right, signalling that had made a decision and committed to it.  Stating that following his curiosity and intuition led him into much of what he stumbled into showed how he trusted himself and his intuition.  Talking about how the “lightness of being a beginner” replaced the “heaviness of being successful” was synonymous with keeping an open mind.  Finally, his referencing keeping faith even though life hit him “in the head with a brick” suggested trusting and having faith in his decisions and himself.

Source Notes

Throughout his life, Steve Jobs experimented with several modes of self-development:  Isaacson, W. (2011) Steve Jobs. New York, New York:  Simon & Schuster

In his 2005 commencement address at Stanford University:  Stanford 2005  Commencement address.  Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vja4GJv40xE

Excerpt from:  Universal Characteristics in The Leadership of Steve Jobs

Available at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B081J113NT