“It turned out that being fired from Apple was the best thing that could have happened to me.”
You would not expect to hear this from Steve Jobs, a man famous for his short temperament and his strong opinions. However, it turns out that being withdrawn from his own business has transformed jobs, helping him to become the creative force which, years later, would generate products that changed the world like the iPhone, iPod and the best macs and macbooks.
His evidence dropped 40 years ago in 1985, and it is worth going back to what happened at that time and how it changed work – and Apple, and perhaps even the wider computer world – for the best.
Far from being the end of the road for jobs, it was just the start. After leaving Apple, he founded another computer company, then, then took the bar in Pixar. Under his watch, he became the first animation studio on the planet. In its absence, Apple has lost its way, producing products without inspiration and entering the width of the bankruptcy of a bankruptcy.
Twelve years later, Jobs returned to Apple and led him to one of the most powerful periods in his history. However, this would probably never have happened if jobs had not been very publicly dismissed on his own business. Here I want to show you why.
Strength test at Apple
In the mid -1980s, Steve Jobs directed the Macintosh division at Apple, taking the lead on a product that was going to change the world of computer science forever.
At the same time, Apple was looking for a new CEO, and Jobs thought he had found one in the form of the Pepsi marketing chief John Sculley. After attracting Sculley with his famous persuasive powers (“Do you want to spend the rest of your life to sell sweet water, or do you want to have a chance to change the world?” Asked Jobs), the new rental was on board.
But after a one -year honeymoon period, the cracks began to appear. Jobs estimated that Sculley was not a “product person” and simply failed to think. For Sculley, Jobs was too obsessive and odious.
The force test intervened in 1985, when disappointing sales of the chaotic management style of Macintosh and Jobs led to questions about its leadership capacities. Although it was suggested that Jobs could lead a small “Skunkworks” team developing new exciting devices, Jobs rejected the idea, which led Sculley to conclude that he had to be forced to leave the business.
Finally, Sculley convinced the board of directors to withdraw the jobs from its role as head of the Macintosh division, a plan which was executed over a few days in May 1985.
Jobs received the symbolic role of the Chairman of the Board of Directors, but it was a position without being able or real influence within Apple. He had been trapped inside the SAS, unable to influence the business or the direction he took. Jobs recognized this, and in September 1985, he left to form his own IT company rightly called.
He was 30 years old and exiled from the prosperous company that he had founded ten years earlier. For many people, it would be a chance to leave industry and never look back. But for jobs, it was the beginning of a learning process that brought it stronger than ever.
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Jobs (not surprisingly) took his dismissal very personally, feeling that he was both a personal failure and that he had dropped those around him. However, that did not prevent him from directing companies and being practical with their operations.
At first, he showed some of his worst habits in Next. Released from the restrictions of a board of directors and a CEO who did not seem kindly about his antics, he gave his taste for perfectionism in each turn, whatever the cost or time implications.
As such, then, he struggled to publish a competitive product in time and in the budget. After a few years of small progress, he completely left the world of hardware, focusing rather entirely on software. This would later prove to be a fortuitous decision.
But it was in Pixar that he really knocked things up. After having become CEO, he adopted a more practical approach and focused on the financing and treatment of Disney, with which Pixar had joined forces to make films. Pixar was led by a team of artists and creatives – a class of people who really work admire – and he was happy to let them do their thing.
Pixar has become the most important animation studio in the world, with a series of success like Toy Story, Monsters Inc. and a Bug life. Jobs could marry technology with art – the thing he thought he was doing in Apple, and an idea that would define how he worked later in his life. Jobs had found a way to be concentrated, creative and productive without imploding.
The value of being dismissed
At the end of the 1990s, Sculley was gone and Apple was almost bankrupt, but he had enough money to buy then and bring jobs on board, first as an acting CEO, then as a full -time CEO. Next’s operating system – which is now part of the Apple stable – has become the basis of what we now know under the name of MacOS.
When Jobs returned to Apple, he was a changed man. Under its renewed direction, the company made an incredible creative tear: the iPhone, the iMac, the iPod, the iTunes and much more were produced under its watch. He not only brought Apple back from the dead, but made it one of the strongest – and most trendy technological companies in the company.
However, Jobs thought that none of this could have happened if he had not been dismissed from Apple. As he said in the start speech that he delivered at the University of Stanford in 2005, years after being ousted from his own business, “the heaviness of succeeding was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure of everything. He freed me from entering one of the most creative periods of my life. ”
The most important aspect was perhaps that Jobs realized that he always liked what he was doing. “Your work will fill a large part of your life,” he said, “and the only way to be really satisfied is to do what you think is a great job. And the only way to do a great job is to love what you do. ”
For jobs, Apple was necessary to make it. But things could have been very different if it had never happened at all.
