I also feel it's wolves who make the best entrepreneurs.
But everything is make against the entrepreneur wolf. Even accelerators may destroy the potential of a very strong vision that wolves can't explain. Steve Jobs was certainly a wolf.
Of all the Apple legends, I would not have picked Steve Jobs to fit the OP's description of a "wolf". Steve Wozniak seems a much more appropriate choice, given that he pretty much single-handedly wrote Apple BASIC (despite not formally studying compilers or languages himself), built the floppy disk (with some help), and the first connection between keyboard and terminal. From the various biographies of Woz and Jobs, it seems unlikely that Jobs would've even realized the potential of a color monitor had Woz not brilliantly designed it for maximal efficiency.
Consider that many organizational structures are designed to get maximum benefit from most employees - and, almost by definition, most employees are average. HR, for example, exists partly if not primarily to 1) identify those in the bottom fraction (whatever that fraction is) and make them harmless as painlessly as possible (this might mean getting them out the door or it might mean shunting to a position where the {harm, value, cost} equation works out adequately well; 2) identifying those in the middle and retaining them as cheaply as possible, possibly with non-financial incentives appealing to affiliation motives, sloganeering, etc.; and 3) to identify the crème-de-la-crème, the wolves, the going-places-and-will-rock-it-along-the-way, etc., and tailoring incentives, including compensation, for these.
I'd go so far as to say that most managers (not all, and not the best ones, but most) will attempt to game HR into forcing their misfits into the bottom fraction (these could be potentially stellar performers who don't fit with the manager) and will attempt to convince everyone that they have stars when they don't, because it makes them look good.
The managers and executives who want the top percentile players recognize that they have to fight HR to make the right things happen, because often HR, like all other organizations, is filled with average players who recognize those whose performance is below theirs and cannot fathom those whose performance is above - they see only the bared teeth, the feral eyes, and assume the wolf must be culled.
They do not recognize its value.
(Yeah, OK, this meandered a bit. Honestly, I'm too lazy to write it well, so I'm going for metaphorical effect. But you might know what I mean....)
It's an interesting theory, but I'd take it a step further. HR does not exist to do the identifying or the sorting per se. The sorting takes place at the executive levels, on down through the chain of management. HR just carries out the sorting. Formalizes it. HR cannot identify wolves, because HR does not perform that function in the first place. Management identifies the wolves and lets HR know that they're special. HR doesn't write the script; it carries out the script.
> almost by definition, most employees are average.
This is not clear to me at all. it may be that we have two equally numerous groups of employees, and the first class is three times as effective as the first class. In this example, no single employee is average, everyone is either 50% or 150% average workers.
You can make the numbers as extreme as you want and you can think of various explanations that would explain this skills gap's existence and persistence. (Maybe we are comparing different departments, the company has normal sales reps and stellar engineers.)
Was he? I have't read his biographies but my general impression is that while Steve Jobs was certainly a visionary and an entrepreneur, he was not really an engineer. Did he write a lot of code? Did he really engineer anything? Or did he surround himself with excellent engineers who could create his visions?
I worked around Steve for years, I couldn't stand him so I spent as little time in his company as possible, but I can say he wasn't an engineer or a serious coder. He was what is now called a "visionary", a catch-all phrase that can mean anything or nothing.
When Bill Gates saw bad code, he would sit down and rewrite the code to shame the perpetrator. Steve didn't have that option. This is how he acquired a deserved reputation as a tyrant -- he could only fire people or humiliate them before their coworkers, but he couldn't outperform them.
In the early days at Apple, and not to oversimplify, people like me coded the software, while Steve coded the customers.
On the general topic of Steve Jobs, I highly recommend the Isaacson biography, excellent book, and one that openly acknowledges Steve's core malady -- pathological narcissism.
> On the general topic of Steve Jobs, I highly recommend the Isaacson biography, excellent book, and one that openly acknowledges Steve's core malady -- pathological narcissism.
There are lots of great things in that book, like all the chances you get to see Isaacson's blissful ignorance of technology and apparent unwillingness to get his sources checked over. (Bill Gates is directly quoted in the book as saying a "disk drive has too low latency".)
Although he also skipped over most of the contributions by Steve's wife (instead Steve is just magically really good at business one day, totally unrelated to her?), he did seem intent on getting embarrassing quotes from their kids memorialized forever. I seem to remember Reed appearing in a few different chapters only to make dick jokes and leave.
>I worked around Steve for years, I couldn't stand him so I spent as little time in his company as possible
So, did you tell that to his face? Because this sounds like post-mortem sour grapes. As if all he did was shout at people and look at his fabulous self in the mirror...
He created and brought several companies to the top -- on of those twice, first from a garage, then from near banrunptcy.
And he did that while ignoring all the BS advice given by analysts and industry pundits, as well as the directions and fads of the industry for a whole decade.
Heck, his "most failed" company was sold off for $400 million, and ended up domineering the buyer company, saving it and leading it to become the hugest company in America.
> Because this sounds like post-mortem sour grapes.
Not really. Most people who worked closely with Jobs held the same views, and didn't express them. But read the Isaacson book, see for yourself. Narcissists aren't a role model for self-criticism or a willingness to hear the criticisms of others.
> Heck, his "most failed" company was sold off for $400 million, and ended up domineering the buyer company, saving it and leading it to become the hugest company in America.
You're overlooking several factors -- the influence of very creative people who worked with Jobs, a prime technological opportunity (new technical devices and abilities culminating in the personal computer), and chance.
Of several companies in competition, if you somehow were able to erase anything but superficial differences, one of them would still come out on top, because of a snowball effect in which people decide en masse that they prefer A to B for no particular reason.
>You're overlooking several factors -- the influence of very creative people who worked with Jobs, a prime technological opportunity (new technical devices and abilities culminating in the personal computer), and chance.
I don't say he created OS X or the iPod, etc. Neither in their technical details, nor even in their high level UI (although he had some influence in that too)().
Just that he created a very specific climate and culture were those things could be produced in the way they were, and steered towards specific approaches to product lines, pricing, etc that could make those products thrive.
Competitors with the same amount of assets (or even far more at the start), and tons of "very creative people" couldn't get something as coherent out, and seemed to miss the whole point time and again. Not with things that require luck or money or access to talent, but with things that require specific decisions.
Similarly, those "prime technological opportunities" were available for all who could see it, and "very creative people" were working in all companies too. It's not like Apple, NeXT, Apple-2-in-near-bankrupcy were even a particularly attractive employer (at least before the iPod's success).
>Of several companies in competition, if you somehow were able to erase anything but superficial differences, one of them would still come out on top, because of a snowball effect in which people decide en masse that they prefer A to B for no particular reason.*
Don't know, the IBM PC market for example had IBM, Dell, HP, Compaq, etc competing rather strongly for 2 decades or so (which are aeons in IT).
And I don't think most competitors to Apple products had just "superficial differences". Following the scene since the late nineties I see a repeated, generalized lack of a plan and understanding of the markets they tried to compete with Apple in.
(*) Also I don't doubt that he had sociopathic aspects, although I'm not his doctor and I didn't have to be around him, so I don't care about that. At least he didn't kill anyone, which is better that lots of people in my book. I'd call any banker or golden parachute type of manager a worse sociopath.
None of these things has anything to do with the parent commenter's claims, which are that Jobs was not very technically proficient, and a raging asshole.
Your appeal to his business success is a complete non-sequitur.
>Your appeal to his business success is a complete non-sequitur.
Sorry, but the parent wanted to downplay Jobs, not just in his technical profeciency but in general (hence the "visionary" label, which can mean "nothing at all" etc). So my reference to his business success was to counter-balance that. And it shows a kind of "10 x" Wolf type, which is what we're actually discussing, in business too. Hardly a non sequitur.
Second, if you're going down that road, the parents comments about how Jobs had "pathological narcissism" and about how he couldn't "stand him" are also non-sequiturs in a discussion about the Wolf type, and wether Jobs was one. How are his personal feelings towards Jobs revelant in this discusion?
The fact that you seem to revel with the "raging arsehole" accusation and dislike my "business success" comments, doesn't make the first any more relevant.
The parent actually has personal experience working with Steve Jobs, which isn't something a lot of people on this forum can say. That makes his views on the man much more interesting than yours or mine, whether or not you agree with him.
The 'Wolf' type we are discussing is basically a cartoon superhero outfit for aspiring engineers to wear. Lopp is adept at these kind of character sketches of fantasy nerd stereotypes (he doesn't play by anyone's rules, but he also works miracles!). The fact that no one in the thread seems to be able to agree quite what it means demonstrate what a nebulously defined concept it is.
I'd much rather sit and read some Steve Jobs stories from someone who was actually there.
>The fact that no one in the thread seems to be able to agree quite what it means demonstrate what a nebulously defined concept it is.
Isn't "agree to quite what it means" a nebulously defined concept itself?
Some disagreement you can kind in any topic, even the most objective and well established ones.
But more specifically, the Wolf base description is just what the original (T)FA says -- the variations in the comments are because people draw upon their own individual encounters with such types, which of course differ in details.
He was probably the world's best incarnation of the "product manager" role. He conceived and designed (not necessarily visually or technically) most of apple's flagship products, including the Apple Store, which has the world's highest retail volume per square foot.
And I can easily see that role being a great place for a Wolf.
"Wolves" -- if you accept the concept -- are basically the anti-entrepreneur. We're talking about engineers who get head-down in deep problems, without the interest or ability to turn them into actual products. I learned the hard way that when a startup's key differentiator is "run by a brilliant engineer/scientist/mathematician," back away slowly.
Someone on this thread mentions Woz as a prototypical "wolf," which is probably right -- what made him work within the later Apple environment is that he could work on very focused, discrete projects such as the Disk ][. Compare with Burrell Smith, who was equally brilliant and equally idiosyncratic, but was able to function within the confines of the Mac development team (albeit with a certain degree of effort by management).
But everything is make against the entrepreneur wolf. Even accelerators may destroy the potential of a very strong vision that wolves can't explain. Steve Jobs was certainly a wolf.