“It turned out that being fired from Apple was the best thing that had happened to me.”
You would not expect to hear that of Steve Jobs, a man famous for his bad temper and his strong opinions. However, it turns out that it is eliminated from its own company transformed works, helping it become the creative force that, years later, would generate products that change the world such as the iPhone, the iPod and the best Macs and MacBooks.
His exhibition fell 40 years ago in 1985, and it is worth looking back in what happened at that time and how he changed the works, and Apple, and maybe even the broader computer world, for the better.
Far from being the end of the road to work, this was just the beginning. After leaving Apple, he founded another computer company, and then took the helm in Pixar. Under his watch, he became the most important animation study on the planet. In his absence, Apple lost its course, producing products without inspiration and entering the breadth of the bankruptcy of a hair.
Twelve years later, Jobs returned to Apple and took him to one of the most dazzling periods of his history. However, that would probably have never happened if the works had not been fired from their own company. Here, I want to show you why.
Confrontation in Apple
In the mid -1980s, Steve Jobs was running the Macintosh division in Apple, taking the lead in a product that would 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 Pepsi’s marketing chief, John Sculley. After attracting Sculley with his famous powers of persuasion (“Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugary water, or do you want to have the opportunity to change the world?” Jobs asked him), the new hiring was on board.
But after a one -year honeymoon period, cracks began to appear. Jobs felt that Sculley was not a “product person” and simply did not make the way of thinking. For Sculley, Jobs was too obsessive and unpleasant.
The confrontation occurred in 1985, when disappointing sales of the chaotic management style of Macintosh and Jobs led to questions about their leadership skills. Although it was suggested that Jobs could execute a small team of “skunkworks” that develops exciting new moon devices, Jobs rejected the idea, which led Sculley to conclude that he had to be forced to leave the company.
Finally, Sculley convinced the Board to eliminate jobs from its role as head of the Macintosh Division, a plan that was executed for a few days in May 1985.
Jobs received the symbolic role of the president of the Board, but it was a real power and influence on Apple. He had been caught inside the air lock, unable to influence the company or the direction he took. Jobs recognized this, and in September 1985, he left to form his own computer company called, appropriate enough, then.
He was 30 years old and exiled from the successful company that had founded ten years before. For many people, it would be an opportunity to leave the industry and never look back. But for Jobs, it was the beginning of a learning process that brought it back stronger than ever.
Find focus
The works (as expected) took their shot very personally, feeling that he was a personal failure and that he had disappointed those around him. However, this did not prevent the main companies and became practical with their operations.
At first, he exhibited some of his worst habits in the next. Liberated from the restrictions of a Board and CEO that was not kindly seen in its mischief, he realized his taste for perfectionism at every step, regardless of the cost or implications of time.
As such, he then fought to publish a competitive product on time and under budget. After a few years of few progress, he completely left the world of hardware, instead of fully focusing on the software. Later, this would prove to be a fortuitous decision.
But it was in Pixar that things really changed. After becoming CEO, he adopted a more approach without a doubt and focused on financing and dealing with Disney, with which Pixar had associated to make films. Pixar was led by a team of artists and creatives, a class of people who work really admired, and I was happy to let their own.
Pixar became the most important animation study in the world, with a series of successes such as Toy Story, Monsters Inc. and the life of an error. The works could marry technology with art, which 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 focused, creative and productive without implication.
The value of being fired
At the end of the 1990s, Sculley had gone and Apple was almost bankrupt, but I had enough effective to buy below and bring on board, first as an interim CEO, then as full time CEO. The Next Operating System, now part of Apple’s stable, became the basis of what we now know as macOS.
When Jobs returned to Apple, he was a man changed. Under its renewed leadership, the company made an incredible creative tear: the iPhone, IMAC, iPod, iTunes and much more occurred under its clock. Not only brought Apple among the dead, but made it one of the strongest and most modern technology companies in the business.
However, Jobs believed that none of this could have happened if he had not been fired from Apple. As he said in the graduation speech he gave at Stanford University in 2005, years after being expelled from his own company, “the heaviness of succeeding was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less safe above all. He freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”
Perhaps the most important aspect was that Jobs realized that he still loved what he was doing. “Your work will be to 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, it was needed to be fired from Apple to realize that. But things could have been very different if it had never happened at all.
