Many executives think of Steve Jobs as a role model. But we rarely acknowledge that he wasn’t always the singular person that we remember. He had his share of trials and tribulations, and he had his own growth curve to navigate. He was not the same person in 1979 as he was in 2009.
Transcript
John Lamy: I thought your comments the other day, Steve Rice, about a CEO that we are well aware of was very, very helpful.
Steve Rice: Just to give some context, John and I were talking about this and he said, “Steve Jobs had a long , longrun.” And we has certainly a particular type of person. And my point was that we all probably remember him as the last person that he was, so to speak. Probably only Wozniak and a few other people know who he was in 1975 and 1981 and 1986. And there is no way that he could have been the same person throughout that whole experience.
So even though you look at him and he is this quintessential famous executive, he was a bunch of different people. And he had to change in order to get to where he was and needed to be who he was. Like I pointed out, he was very humbled and maybe even humiliated in the late 80s and early 90s. But he re-worked himself, became somebody new or became more of who he already was. But he wasn’t the same person in 1979 as he was in 2009. So we all have to make changes as we grow, and hopefully we are all growing.
Stephen Sendar: And the other piece of that story to me is the fact that Apple found its way to name Tim Cook the successor-CEO when the word on the street for many people was what a mistake it was. And he made them the most valuable company on earth. Without Jobs evolving he would never come back to Apple and fixed it in the way that he did. But also, the culture would not have existed to have Tim Cook become the successor had Jobs not been kicked to the curb, learned a few things, come back, focused on what he could do for it, and allowing somebody else like that to rise to the top. It wouldn’t have been possible.