Steve Jobs in Exile

**Ben Wilson** (0:00)
One of my favorite quotes on the question of weaknesses comes from Steve Jobs. It can be found in the book Make Something Wonderful, and a journalist asks him, what do you think your weaknesses are when it comes to management? And Steve responds, I don't know. People are package deals. You take the good with the confused. In most cases, strengths and weaknesses are two sides of the same coin. A strength in one situation is a weakness in another. Yet often the person can't switch gears. It's a very subtle thing to talk about strengths and weaknesses because almost always they are the same thing. My strength probably is that I've always viewed technology from a liberal arts perspective, from a human culture perspective. As such, I've always pushed for things that pull technology in those directions by bringing insights from other fields.
Okay, did you catch what he did? A journalist asks him his weaknesses and he basically says, well, I don't know, we're package deals. Strengths and weaknesses are the same thing, but here are some of my strengths, okay? He refuses to answer the question.
But I also think at the same time, even though he is dodging the question, I think he's right.
Strengths and weaknesses are flip sides of the same coin. And it is very dangerous to try to work on or fix your weaknesses, because what if at the same time, you're blunting the very thing that makes you special, that makes you a strong leader?
That is why, in my experience, reading about the great leaders of all time, they generally don't change or improve their weaknesses. They are kind of the same package deal throughout their entire careers.
Which is why it is so interesting that Steve Jobs is the one who said that quote, because he is one of those rare exceptions. Early in his career, he was headstrong, unrealistic and hubristic. He had early success at Apple, but then almost everything that he touched was a disaster.
And then, of course, by the end of his life, he was the opposite. He was wise, considered and reasonable, or at least much more so. And everything that he touched turned to gold. And he goes from the iMac to the iPod to the iPhone to the iPad with lots of little innovations in between.
So what happened? How did Steve Jobs change? And what does that tell all of us about growing and improving our weaknesses as leaders? The book that we're talking about this week is called Steve Jobs in Exile by Geoffrey Cain. And it takes a very deep look at the time period when that change took place in his life. And that is basically from 1985 to 1997, when Steve was away from Apple and trying to start his own competing computer company called Next. I loved it. I love this story. And I learned so much about how to change and improve as a leader. I think you'll love it. So let's jump into it. This is Steve Jobs in exile.

**Steve Jobs** (2:51)
I'm going to show you how great I am. I just want to say from the bottom of my heart, I'd like to take this chance to apologize to absolutely nobody.

**Ben Wilson** (3:11)
Perhaps part of the impulse to skip the story is because Next was, spoiler alert, never a huge market success. Next had all the ingredients to succeed. We were at the right place at the right time. We had a world-class team, and we were building technology that was years ahead of the rest of the industry. If history had gone differently, and if Steve had been more willing to take advice, I believe Next and its operating system, Next Step, could have become the industry standard taking the place that Microsoft Windows eventually occupied. Instead, we faced persistent challenges. Our computers were expensive, slow to come to market, and barely worked once they did. Meanwhile, Steve sabotaged important business and distribution relationships. Next existed on the perpetual verge of bankruptcy, on the wheel of Steve's ever-shifting standards. Many of the original team, including me, left as a result of our frustration with him. But despite these problems, Next succeeded in laying the unseen foundation for everything that came after for Apple, and for the technology industry at large. That is from the forward to this book by Dana Lewin is the name of the guy who wrote the forward, and he is a former employee of and friend and co-founder of Steve Jobs at Next.
Okay, so it's an interesting story because Next really did have the opportunity to be a huge market success on the scale of an Apple or a Microsoft, and it's not just that Steve Jobs couldn't make it succeed, it's that he actively sabotaged it into failure.