What Donald Trump can learn from Steve Jobs
Summary
Simplicity and quality, irrespective of marketing, are the keys to advancing a prosperous enterprise.
A mercurial and brash narcissist with a propensity to bend the truth. That’s how people close to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs (1955-2011) described him. Such foibles contributed to his ouster from the company in 1985 amid a power struggle with its board. But 12 years later, after Apple had lost its way, Jobs returned to serve as CEO and led the company to its best days. His comeback and successes offer lessons for Donald Trump.
Like the president-elect, Jobs adhered to crazy ideas. During his 20s, according to a 2011 biography by Walter Isaacson, he “clung to the belief that his fruit-heavy vegetarian diet would prevent not just mucus but also body odor, even if he didn’t use deodorant or shower regularly." Jobs’s colleagues described his propensity to ignore and twist the truth to his own ends as a “reality distortion field." “He would assert something—be it a fact about world history or a recounting of who suggested an idea at a meeting—without even considering the truth," Mr. Isaacson writes.
A more egregious example: Jobs denied being the father of his daughter Lisa for many years. “He can deceive himself," former Apple engineer Bill Atkinson told Mr. Isaacson. “It allowed him to con people into believing his vision, because he has personally embraced and internalized it."
On the other hand, Jobs “also indulged in being brutally honest at times, telling the truths that most of us sugarcoat or suppress. Both the dissembling and the truth-telling were simply different aspects of his Nietzschean attitude that ordinary rules didn’t apply to him," Mr. Isaacson writes. “He had the sense that he was special, a chosen one, an enlightened one."
Like Mr. Trump, Jobs was a jerk who rejected social conventions. He lambasted colleagues at meetings with colorful epithets, which spurred many to leave during his first stint at the company. In his view, you were either “enlightened" if he agreed with you or “an a—h—" if he didn’t. His classifications would frequently change.
The tech titan evidently had no mental filter. “It was as if Jobs’s brain circuits were missing a device that would modulate the extreme spikes of impulsive opinions that popped into his mind," Mr. Isaacson explains. Former Apple engineer Andy Hertzfeld recounts in Mr. Isaacson’s book that “after a few cycles of him taking alternating extreme positions," people learned to “filter his signals and not react to the extremes."
“Just because he tells you that something is awful or great, it doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll feel that way tomorrow," software designer Bud Tribble told Mr. Isaacson. But Jobs could also be charming. “He applied charm or public humiliation in a way that in most cases proved to be pretty effective," Mr. Tribble added. He used insincere flattery to manipulate people.
“Jobs could be charming to people he hated just as easily as he could be insulting to people he liked," Mr. Isaacson writes. All this made him difficult to work with and lead to his ouster. But as Jobs reflected in a 2005 Stanford commencement address, “it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me." It humbled and liberated him to pursue fresh ideas.
When he returned as CEO in 1997 after Apple acquired his startup, NeXT, he tempered his abrasive management style and used his reality distortion field to motivate workers to accomplish what had seemed impossible. This is what Mr. Trump will need to do if he wants to have a successful second term. Other lessons he can learn from Jobs’s example include the following:
• Simple is best. Jobs aimed to design simple, user-friendly products. This should be the goal of Mr. Trump’s tax and regulatory policies. Tax breaks for special groups are complex and inefficient. So are tariffs, which invariably result in exemptions for certain businesses and products. A better way to increase U.S. manufacturing is to cut government bureaucracy. Jobs said that one reason Apple manufactures products in China is that America imposes costly and cumbersome regulation.
• Quality is king. Jobs believed that the best way to win customers and build a durable business is to build great products. Similarly, if Mr. Trump wants to solidify a durable, diverse GOP coalition, he’ll have to advance policies that generate widespread prosperity, such as lower taxes.
• Don’t let polls dictate the policy agenda. “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research," Jobs explained to Mr. Isaacson. Mr. Trump’s campaign sops—from higher tariffs on Chinese goods to exempting Social Security benefits and tips from taxes—may poll well, but they won’t generate rising real incomes Americans are hankering for.
Mr. Trump has an opportunity to expand support among minorities for small-government policies by showing how they make everyone better off. It’s something he may be uniquely suited to do with his Jobs-like charisma. To accomplish it, he’ll need to follow another Jobs slogan: Think different.
