Steve Jobs in Exile

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're 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 pulled 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're kind of the same package deal throughout their entire careers. Which is why it's 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 Jeffrey Kane. 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 …