In Search of Fairness

Barack Obama has been called the “smartest man with the highest IQ ever to be elected president” by presidential historian Michael Beschloss, he was referred to as “God”  by Newsweek Managing Editor Evan Thomas in 2009, and just recently Jamie Foxx asked his audience to give honor to “our Lord and Savior Barack Obama.”

Apart from the risks in not disclaiming such deific encomiums, the characterizations themselves don’t square with fact. An intelligent man, not to mention a god-like one, would yield to the laws of economics that have predicted human behavior since Eden; namely, that hard work, risk-taking, and determination produce outcomes that in a free society are not disturbed by government seizure. When keeping is permitted to happen without interference, all of society will benefit. Labor that produces a surplus – i.e. more than can be consumed by its owner – becomes capital in one form or another. Individuals do not keep their capital to themselves for it does them no good when hoarded. They invest it to create more capital alongside their labor, which creates jobs, community wellbeing, and economic growth for all of society. A virtuous cycle of making, keeping, and investing ensues that makes those who began to create capital early richer than those who created it late. Both are richer than those who create no capital, laboring for wages and consuming all that their wages permit.

There is no perfidy in this process. Capital is produced by willingness and ability. Willingness is the propensity to save and set aside rather than consume. This usually reflects emotional maturity. Ability is the disposition to work, make constructive decisions, take measured risks, persist, and to learn from one’s experience – all of which is leveraged by preparation, either formally via education or experientially via the “school of hard knocks.”

Either willingness or ability or both explain why individuals reside at the top, middle, or the bottom of economic society. A person who over-consumes his means is destined to reside at the bottom. With rare exception, that behavior is always under the control of the individual. A failure to prepare, work diligently, decide well, understand when risks become gambles, persist through setbacks, and learn the lessons of experience will destine a person to live below her potential regardless of the starting point in life. None of these attributes of ability can be fobbed off on fate or happenstance.

The Left in all of its manifestations cannot accept this explanation. Life’s casualties have to be due to a villainous “other” or the dice of cause and circumstance. The individual is never responsible and must be a lifelong ward of the state. All of our social legislation is rooted in this mindset.

Sir Dudley North, an economic predecessor of Adam Smith, recognized the behavior of achievement more than three centuries ago. Writing in his 1691 Discourses upon Trade, North observed that:

The main spur to Trade, or rather to Industry and Ingenuity, is the exorbitant Appetites of Men, which they will take pains to gratifie, and so be disposed to work, when nothing else will incline them to it; for did Men content themselves with bare Necessaries, we should have a poor World.‎

A poor world indeed.

We are now wallowing in the fifth year of an economic morass made worse by government incompetence. Poverty rates are the highest in a generation. Over 46 million people are in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the successor to the food stamp program, a number which has considerably exceeded the number of jobs created. The Great Food Stamp Handout was exacerbated by Obama’s expansion of its coverage to income levels which shouldn’t need food assistance but took it when offered. After-tax incomes have fallen since Obama assumed office even though the economy since 2009 has been technically growing. Why has this happened? Because the economy has been prevented by the policies of this administration from providing opportunity as an alternative to welfare. Because policy-making ineptitude prevented 23 million jobs from being created. Because over $2 trillion in capital coupled with immeasurable entrepreneurial talent is sitting leashed rather than unfettered on the sidelines, intimidated by the uncertainties of Obama’s economic policy de jour.

Notwithstanding North’s correct recognition that the pursuit of self-interest invariably benefits all of society, Obama favors taxes rather than individual initiative to promote economic growth – despite the fact high tax rates have historically proven to be contra growth – and he imposes on society his view of fairness, which disturbingly mirrors that of Karl Marx: "Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen!" – “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”

Obama sees society as composed of “haves” and “have nots” which he must correct because its existence is rooted in unfairness, if not wrongdoing. This view is the common thread running through all three of his books … a belief that life is fundamentally a zero sum affair, and thus what one gets another must have lost. His ideological preoccupation, therefore, is with redistributing wealth rather than creating more of it – a zero sum, fixed pie perspective.

Unsurprisingly, when candidate Obama was asked by ABC news reporter Charles Gibson why he advocated increasing the capital gains tax rate when there exists a substantial body of evidence that it causes the government to suffer less rather than more revenue, Obama thought for a moment and then replied, “Well, Charlie, what I've said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness." Fairness? In other words, notwithstanding the impotence of increased taxes in raising government receipts, Obama wants them increased anyway? Since his rationale is obviously not economic, what could it be? To penalize “excessive” success and redistribute its rewards in the name of fairness?

Once elected, Obama exploded the national debt with year after year deficit spending. Trillions were wasted on flawed programs for which society received no benefit. Obama’s reelection now assures that the national debt will rise to $20 trillion – up from the $10 trillion he inherited. Tax-paying Americans must pay down this debt, which means diverting money out of the private sector, where it would produce the benefits Sir Dudley North understood, and into the public sector where it will produce no social good. Having now run up the nation’s credit card debt, and imperiled our national security in the process, Obama whines that the rich are not paying their fair share of taxes.

What does it mean to be fair?

In civil society creative people are not permitted to pursue their ambitions by using their abilities to exploit others because that would be unfair. OK. Should they be penalized by a government that disproportionately expropriates the fruits of their abilities simply because they produce more value for themselves than others produce for themselves? Only in America would a Steve Jobs be able to live a freaky lifestyle that led to the creation of Apple, making him rich beyond measure and made others rich within measure. The world is better off because of Apple but it is also more unequal – benefiting Jobs in billions, others in millions, and still others relatively little. Is that fair? Is it fair for an allegedly all-knowing and benevolent government to seize some portion of Jobs’ fairly-gained assets because he had them to spare? Obama believes so.

No one got poor as a consequence of Jobs getting rich. No poor person would become better off if Jobs had lost everything. What rationale, then, justifies taking one cent of his wealth under law if no one was injured in its creation? Doesn’t this imply that the people, or the government that allegedly represents them, own the franchise for wealth creation and are thereby justified in taking a share of all wealth created? This seems to be Obama’s belief when he declared this past August that no entrepreneur could take credit for the business he built.

Is the goal of fairness to make the “haves” and “have nots” economically equal or at least to reduce the economic disparity between them? I have previously blogged on why the rich are rich and why they are likely to remain so. This seems to be the heart of the “fairness” issue with Obama. Earlier this year he gave a speech in which he said:

Can we succeed in a nation where a shrinking number of people do exceedingly well, while a growing number struggle to get by? Or are we better off when everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same rules?

This is classic Obama straw man-speak. The situation described in his statement doesn’t exist. Those who do well are not a shrinking number – certainly not in a prosperous economy, which his policies have prevented for the past 36 months. Moreover, the populist question, “Are we better off when everyone gets a fair shot,” implies everyone doesn’t get a fair shot. That’s intentionally misleading and false. The American economy isn’t a country club which excludes non-members. Who would have bet that an adopted lower middle class kid in San Francisco with serious psychological maladjustments raised by a struggling high school-educated blue collar family would grow up to create an entire industry and become a billionaire?

Less than one in five “rich” people inherits wealth. The rest create businesses as Jobs did which produce products and services that we want and were willing to pay lavishly to own. Who among those reading this blog is not better off than his parents were at the same age?

The idea that there is a permanent underclass, or a permanent “any class” as Obama would have us believe ignores income mobility. Suppose there are three houses side by side and their addresses are 1, 2, and 3 from left to right. Multiple families live in each house. The house in which each family lives is determined by their income. Let’s say that all families in 1 may not earn over $10,000 as a condition of living there. Likewise, those in 2 can’t earn over $20,000, but since the cap to live in 1 is $10,000, they can earn as little as $10,001. House 3 is a little strange. To live there, a family must earn $20,001 but there’s no upper limit because there’s no other house to move up to as incomes grow.

Let’s designate these houses as Lower Income, Middle Income, and Upper Income (Obama would call Upper Income “the rich”)

Over the course of years, the families in these houses receive raises and promotions increasing their income. When a family in Lower Income exceeds the income limit to live there, they must move out, most moving into Middle Income. What happens to the total income in the Lower Income house? It declines. In contrast, the total income of Middle Income increases – unless some of its members have had raises and promotions that exceed the Middle Income cap, in which case they have to move into Upper Income. Since there is no house to move to as raises, promotions, and good fortune increase their income, the residents of Upper Income – unlike Lower and Middle Income – remain as more and more people move in over time.

What happens to the total income as more people move into Upper Income? Well it increases, of course, because there’s no place to go except down, which occasionally happens with retirement, reduced income, and bad luck. But for long periods growing incomes move families into Upper Income raising its total income. The same thing happens in Middle Income, which is gaining families from Lower Income and losing families to Upper Income, Even if Middle Income had the same number of families as Upper Income, their collective income would be less because of the upper income limit to live there.

In the course of time, Lower Income is losing families to Middle Income (and occasionally Upper Income) and its collective income is falling. But it won’t fall to zero because people are entering the workforce by virtue of age or immigration and most will start in Lower Income

We would look at the dynamic economy represented by these three houses collectively and conclude that it’s doing well because families are prospering and moving up. Over time the total income of Upper Income becomes the largest percentage of the three-house economy because there’s no way out of it except down. And unlike the other two houses, there’s no income cap for living there so in Upper Income you would find managers and executives, lawyers and doctors, and small business owners, but you’d also find rock stars and professional athletes, and superstar CEOs like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Jeff Bezos since there is no other place for them to live.

Middle Income earns the next largest percentage of the incomes in this economy, but not as much as Upper Income. The upper end of Middle Income is capped and it doesn’t have rock stars, athletes, and super CEOs living there. Lower Income has the smallest share of total income because the income per family is less and people move out as they prosper to be replaced by low-paid entry level workers, immigrants, and part-timers. In the course of time most will move up.

While we mere mortal earthlings look at the three-house economy and conclude things are going swimmingly, the divinely intelligent Obama concludes it’s a disaster. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer in terms of the percentage of total income each house represents. Something must be done. He immediately calls for new taxes on Upper Income to redistribute to Lower Income. Transfer payments might move a few out of Lower Income, but not many. Moreover, if they move out of Low Income via transfer payments rather than effort, is that good for society? Would you help your children that way?

In fact, if Obama devoted his populist energy to growing the economy (maybe by permanently playing golf or vacationing in Hawaii – whatever keeps him out of the White House), the well-being of the families in each house would improve even if their share of the economy remained the same. A Rasmussen poll this week showed voters want economic growth over fairness by a 54% to 37% margin, quite possibly realizing that a rising tide lifts all ships. That’s hard to understand when a person has a fixed pie, zero sum view of economic distribution. As in this fictitious economy, Upper Income’s percentage of wealth in the real world is growing and Lower Income’s is shrinking and Obama thinks that’s not fair – regardless of its explanation. A more equal distribution would be better, he believes – a fool’s errand that was tried by Lyndon Johnson and is bankrupting the country. Ironically the more “equal’ income classes become, the more it short-circuits the highly progressive tax system we have in this country.

No egalitarian society has ever prospered – except in terms of political egalitarianism, which originated in the post-war Colonies of America. Communism failed in its scant 70-year Soviet experiment. Its citizens became neither more rich nor more equal. The early 19^th century Utopian experiments of Robert Owen and others of his ilk all failed because it is not in the nature of man to work hard for the benefit of the community. The Pilgrims learned this in their first year’s flirtation with socialism. Starvation taught them that private enterprise “made all hands very industrious …” Even as Obama is gutting the Clinton welfare-to-work program, the economies of France, Italy, Greece, and Portugal are collapsing as the Pilgrim experiment predicted, showing in sharper contrast what happens when government confiscatory welfare enables more than a relative few non-workers to live off of the industry of others.

An intelligent, divinely Olympian president would accept the argument presented in this blog as Exhibit A against raising taxes. An intelligent president, especially a God-like one, would delay the current fiscal cliff confrontation until a new Congress was seated and had two years to work on comprehensive tax and entitlement reform before it had to deal with a partisan, agenda-driven electorate again. An intelligent leader would push Congress to work together to create a fiscal and regulatory climate that would allow the private sector to flourish as it did in the Reagan and Clinton years.

Instead, we have Obama.

“If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that”

When Obama is speechifying on the campaign stump before an usually receptive crowd, he often goes off script and his words reveal his true self. That happened a couple of weeks ago when he was stumping before a gushing crowd of adorers in Roanoke, Virginia – a must win state for Obama. His comments subsequently created a rage and backlash from entrepreneurs and small business owners around the country whom he let know deserved no credit for their business accomplishments. The government deserves the credit:

… look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

Let me deal with the Internet lie straightaway – in fact, I may blog on “the government invented the Internet” horse hockey in the future and include Al Gore’s claim to have helped bring it into existence.

Gordon Crovitz wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal soon after Obama’s “government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off [it]” hogwash. The Crovitz editorial triggered teeth-gnashing among the “yes but” liberal bloggers, articles, and apologists with transparent government sympathies. To them and others who believe that a benevolent and enterprising government ever created anything so others could make money off of it, my offer a couple of blogs ago to sell them the Golden Gate Bridge still stands. My question for them is this: where would government get the capital for such an undertaking since the government possesses no money of its own? Private citizens, of course. Moreover, why and how would government find the economic motivation and managerial ability to create such a commercially successful project as the Internet? This is the same government that can’t run a postal service or Amtrak profitably! This is the same government that invested a trillion dollars of the people’s money in Solyndra, Beacon Power, Spectra Watt, Brightsource, Eastern Energy, Raser Technologies, and an unending list of snake oil schemes, all of which are bankrupt.

The tree of technology has many branches. Technology develops – indeed morphs – by borrowing the fruits of lower branches and using them to make something quite different than where the lower branch was headed. Henry Ford, for example, combined well proven technologies – the meat packing industry (disassembly), the canning industry (continuous flow production), cereals and granaries (conveyors and hoppers), and the machine tools industry (interchangeable parts) – to create the automobile and its continuous flow manufacturing process. That Ford had no government help doing this is notable. Moreover, by his own admission, he invented none of these technologies. Yet only a fool would deny that Ford’s borrowing from the technology tree and his reconfiguration of existing technologies into a new thing was not an “invention.”

That’s the way technology and business breakthroughs develop. If the meat packing or canning industry were to claim that they invented the auto and assembly line, it would be laughable. In like manner, the ARPANET and modern Internet are distant cousins, but it’s ludicrous to claim – as the government apologists do – that the ARPANET became the Internet and, therefore, since the government financed the development of ARPANET (for a totally different reason and with taxpayer money to boot) that the government should be credited as the creator of the Internet.

Continuing, it is outrageous for Obama to claim that entrepreneurial achievements pale because “somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that.” Uh, say again? The “somebody” who invested in roads and bridges would be individual and business taxpayers last time I checked. The builders of the roads and bridges would be private designers and contractors. The rationale for building roads and bridges would be the over-regulated, over-taxed commercial activity created by the sweat and risk-taking of private businesses, last time I checked. Absent private demand for infrastructure, you’d have another Amtrak government boondoggle – a train that no one uses and whose continued losses are foisted on taxpayers.

Obama’s socialist worldview, which slipped out in the Roanoke speech, comes from his own experience. Obama naturally thinks others are the fount of every blessing because that’s the way it was in his life. Without well-heeled, influential, and often white sponsors to shepherd him into privileged opportunities, make doors open, arrange influencers to throw their connections behind him, where would he be? He has never held a real job. He has never accomplished anything of particular merit. He’s not even managed anything in government such as a city mayor or state governor must do. All of his life, Obama has been a taker, not a maker. All of his accomplishments – including fundraising and campaign management – were done by others. Even as President, he didn’t manage his own political agenda. ObamaCare was delegated to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and in effect Obama said, “Let me know when it’s done and I’ll sign it.” A guy for whom all the doors are opened and the heavy lifting is done by others would obviously think that that’s the way it is in business formation – all of the important work is done by others including the federal government.

Of course, realizing how politically and utterly stupid Obama’s Roanoke comments were, his handlers went into full damage control mode, telling the press that the outrage sparked by his remarks was due to “out of context” reporting by the media. No it wasn’t. The text of the speech is posted by the White House Press Secretary’s Office online. Inconveniently, the speech video is also online dismissing any argument that the text of the speech said one thing and the actual speech said another.

It’s plain to see in the video that from the outset, the adoring crowd and the gushing periodic interruptions of “Four more years” became the Siren’s Song that lured Obama into revealing the real deal Obama – the Obama without the fraudulent façade of his public persona replete with polished, teleprompter-fed rhetoric. Ah! Would that Obama had used beeswax as Odysseus and his fellow seafarers were encouraged to do, for he revealed that he really does believe business creators are undeserving of the success of their accomplishments – that lots of smart people and lots of hard working people labored out of sight, unrecognized for their contributions, and were exploited by the guy who gets the glory – Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, Charles Schwab … you name them – because that’s the way Obama’s world works.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’ve never met a successful entrepreneur who believed that his success was a solitary accomplishment. Not only did they know that their success was helped by others, but also they made sure to reward the helping hands, in some cases making the key contributors very wealthy. But without Steve Jobs there would be no Apple, I don’t care how many smart, hard working people might have been employed there. Without Bill Gates, there would not have been a Microsoft despite the contributions of others. Without Fred Smith there would have been no Federal Express and who knows where American business would be today if his “Absolutely, Positively, Overnight” had not replaced the glacially incompetent performance of the postal service.

Curiously, Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard professor of Cherokee Nation fame, whose bush league senatorial campaign to oust Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) from Teddy Kennedy’s old seat is funnier to watch than old Laurel and Hardy movies, personifies the same anti-business instincts of Obama. A speech she delivered last September sounds as if Obama plagiarized it. Listen to her:

You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.

“The rest of us?” You mean there is one group that uses the roads, the educated workforce, the police and fire protection – the apparent “takers” – and then there’s “the rest of us” – the “makers” – who paid for these munificent blessings? Pray tell, Professor Full of Gas – or whatever you call yourself when imitating a real Cherokee – who paid for roads, education, and public safety? Uh? A little louder Full of Gas, I can’t hear you. Ah, the taxpayer, you say. Well, that eliminates half of the workforce because they pay no taxes. So “the rest of us” would be the other half, i.e. private businesses and the workforce they created – society’s real makers – wouldn’t you agree? In fact, half of “the rest of us” would include the 400 people who pay 50% of all taxes paid. Why, I could put 400 people in my office building, Gas, and still have room to spare.

Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

I don’t think entrepreneurs need risible investment advice from Elizabeth Warren, who’s never created a single job or created wealth for others, to tell them to “pay forward for the next kid.”

The entrepreneurs I know feel an enormous debt to society and devote their wealth and expertise to generous giving for a good part of their lifetimes. Andrew Carnegie, who sold his steel business to J.P. Morgan’s U.S. Steel Company and became the richest man in the world as a consequence, gave most of it away before he died. In 1889, he wrote The Gospel of Wealth, whose homilies advocated that all personal wealth beyond what was needed to care for one's family should be regarded as a trust fund administered for the benefit of the community.

When I hear Obama, Warren, and people of that ilk talking about achievement, private enterprise, the economics of equitable distribution – subjects that are light years outside of their expertise – I’m reminded of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s observation of a dog walking on his hind legs – it’s not done well and it’s surprising that it’s done at all.

President Ronald Reagan got it right when he said in a June 1983 speech to the National Federation of Independent Business

The character and conscience of small business built this nation. … They are the heroes of economic life and those who begrudge them their rewards demonstrate a failure to understand their role and their promise. Well wouldn’t it be nice to hear a little more about the forgotten heroes of America? Those who create most of our new jobs like the owners of stores down the street, the faithful who support our churches, synagogues, schools and communities. The brave men and women everywhere who produce our goods, feed a hungry world, and keep our families warm while they invest in the future to build a better America. That’s where miracles are made. Not in Washington DC.

Contrast Reagan’s view with Obama’s as shown in the farcical Life of Julia appearing on his election campaign website. Julia’s partner in life is not a husband, although she does decide to have a child; her partner is the federal government à la Barack Obama. The all-wise, ever-nurturing, deep-pocketed avuncular government cares for Julia from cradle to grave. Why, it’s just like “Whistle up a Rainbow”! Whenever you’re in need just clap your hands and the government Genie is there to help. This is the way Obama sees life – the Life of Julia, a production co-starring government and people incapable of taking charge of their own lives.

There’s no room in that picture for Howard Schultz, who took a commodity – coffee – and turned it into Starbucks, a multi-billion dollar business. There’s no room for András Gróf, a Hungarian Jew who survived Hitler’s “Final Solution,” the Soviet Red Army invasion of his homeland, the Hungarian uprising, and who came to the US at age 20 with essentially no money in his pockets and unable to speak English. He taught himself English, maneuvered his way through three college degrees, including a Ph.D., anglicized his name to Andrew “Andy” Grove, and joined Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore as the third employee of a start-up company that became Intel, which he would guide as CEO through its most productive years. About 90% of the computers made today run on Intel microprocessors.

In Obama’s view of the world there could never be a Clarence Birdseye who, at the beginning of the 20th century, was taught by the indigenous Inuit of Labrador and Newfoundland to ice fish in temperatures 40 degrees below zero. He noticed when he caught fish, they froze immediately in the frigid air and when they were defrosted, sometimes much later, they were as fresh as the moment they were caught. With $7 in capital he developed the process of flash-freezing, went bankrupt, and started over building a second company. Distribution was a problem because grocers had no way to hold frozen food, so Birdseye had to invent the entire distribution chain, including the refrigerated rail cars and retail frozen food display cases in order to have a successful venture. Clarence Birdseye pioneered the frozen food we eat today and his company is still with us as the Birds Eye Foods division of General Food Corporation.

People like Birdseye, Grove, Moore, Noyce, Schultz, Jobs, Gates, Schwab, Fred Smith – people who changed the quality of American life and with it the world – have no place in Obama’s world or speeches because they weren’t co-productions of government. In contrast theirs are stories of failure and determination, under-capitalization, and hard-earned success, often after combatting interference by incompetent government.

To wit:

As he waxed eloquent in his Roanoke speech, Obama claimed government credit for building the Golden Gate Bridge. He obviously hasn’t read Kevin Star’s book, Golden Gate: The Life and Times of America's Greatest Bridge. Not only did the federal government not build the bridge as Obama claimed but it did everything to prevent its building for almost a decade. It’s a tale that would make Kafka envious.

Most local San Franciscans wanted a bridge but the property for its logical end points was owned by the government – more specifically, the Department of War – which wouldn’t sell. Political pressure eventually forced the sale, but the government refused to sell to a private contractor. The only acceptable buyer would be a state commission. Federal unions held up the project even longer as they tried to elbow their way to the table for a cut of the action. The advent of the Great Depression of 1929 finally called a halt to government silliness as bond financing dried up and doomed the project. Or so it seemed. Enter Amadeo Peter Giannini, Chairman and President of the Bank of America, who made private capital available to build the bridge without union labor, which contributed to bringing it in under budget. Not a dime of government money was involved. Not an hour of government participation occurred. The Golden Gate Bridge was a production of private enterprise.

Now you know the rest of the story.

The novelist and philosopher, Ayn Rand, was strongly individualistic. She is best known for her works, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. In a lecture given in late 1961 she observed:

Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation’s troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.

Vote November 6. And send this blog link to your friends asking them to do likewise.

iJobs v.2.0

(… continued from last week)

When it came to the architecture of the Apple I and II and later the Macs, Jobs decided the operating system and applications should run only on Apple hardware. It was a strategic mistake. PCs had not yet become mainstream and that is always a dangerous time for technology developers because the format that the market will ultimately embrace is not yet known. Remember VHS and Betamax? They were not interchangeable and since more content could be stored on the larger, bulkier VHS, it became the ultimate winner. Betamax players became relics.

Jobs’ decision to stick with an integrated design left the door open to developers who pursued modular designs. For example, when IBM decided to introduce a PC, even though its management believed the company’s future was in mainframes, it had to get into the market fast because it was a latecomer. The PC development team was sequestered in Boca Raton, Florida and told to produce a product in one year. The IBM mainframe processor, operating system, hard drive, and applications couldn’t be quickly converted to work in its PC, so IBM chose a modular design. Intel provided its processor, several suppliers provided hard drives, and Microsoft created a GUI-based Windows operating system for IBM, reserving the right to sell it to other PC manufacturers. Ironically, the Apple operating system was superior to Microsoft, but it would only run on an Apple product, whereas the Microsoft operating system was adaptable to any PC. In time the Apple equivalent of a PC – the Mac – would garner only 5% of the market because of its vertically integrated design. Third-party printers and other peripherals also wouldn’t run on Macs because they couldn’t interface to Apple’s integrated design. The market quickly recognized the restrictions of the Apple and the flexibilities of other PCs. Apple lost.

Woz had anticipated that this would happen and wanted to sell his operating system to other PC producers from the outset, even though those producers would use it compete in the market against Apple. But even then, Apple would be successful because vendors and competitors would be using the Apple operating system. Instead, that advantage shifted to Microsoft. Unwittingly, Apple put Microsoft in business. Jobs – and later John Sculley who had come to Apple as its new CEO – recognized that the integrated architecture was a mistake.

Apple became a public company in the last month of 1980. About 300 people became millionaires, multimillionaires, and several venture capitalists became billionaires. Among them, at age 25, Jobs was a multimillionaire as was Woz, barely 30. But many who should have gotten stock before the public offering were left out. Some were old friends who went back to the days when Jobs and Woz were headquartered in the Jobs’ garage. Because he was by nature a generous person, Woz began giving some of his stock options to people he thought deserved them.

One of the people denied options was Daniel Kottke. He had been a college classmate of Jobs, gone to India with him when Jobs was searching for himself, and he had helped in early trade shows for the Apple II, manning a demo table and doing the grunt work. Kottke had been Jobs’ housemate for two years. He was truly upset that he hadn’t gotten stock options and, marching to Jobs’ office, tried to talk to him about it. But confronted by Jobs’ unblinking stare, Kottke broke down in tears, turned around, and left. It bothered one of the Apple engineers so much that he told Jobs, "We have to take care of your buddy Daniel. If you will give him some stock, I’ll match whatever you give. Jobs said, "OK. I'll give zero and you give zero." So much for loyalty.

As a public company the rules of the game changed and Jobs’ cavalier management style cast doubt among the Board that he was suited to run the company’s day-to-day operations. Persuaded that he would continue to lead product design and strategy, Jobs participated in recruiting the new CEO, John Sculley, whom he enticed to leave the presidency of Pepsi Cola in 1983. With predictable Jobs bravado, he challenged Sculley: "Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?”

For a while the two were able to stay out of each other’s way, but Sculley and Jobs held different visions of the future and Apple’s role in it, so Jobs was increasingly isolated and ultimately resigned in 1985. In a fit of petulance, he sold all of his Apple shares for $70 million in a down market. But now he had the ability to finance himself and started NeXT computer, which went nowhere. He also acquired a small company from George Lucas for $5 million that would become Pixar. Creating computer-generated animation occupied Jobs’ creativity for a while but it wasn’t his first love. At one point, he put the company on the market for $25 million but there were no takers. Then came the technology breakthrough at Pixar which resulted in Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Monsters, and Finding Nemo. Jobs sold Pixar to Disney in 2006 for $7.4 billion. It was a happy ending for Jobs but not for the people who created the breakthrough. They got very little money out of the sale. Kottke redux.

Jobs had been in the wilderness for ten years when the Apple Board announced in 1996 that it was buying NeXT for $427 million, ousting its CEO, Gil Amelio, and bringing Jobs back to run the company. Apple was only months from bankruptcy. Remarkably, Jobs persuaded his arch-rival, Bill Gates, to put $150 million into Apple. Jobs performed a quick survey of the company’s product line and announced to the senior team that they were to get out of all of the product proliferation that had occurred since he left. Apple would make a desktop and a laptop for the home and professional markets – four computers. No more. Almost overnight 3,000 people were terminated and the company retrenched.

The iMac was introduced in 2000 at a time when Napster was riding high and young people (the primary market for iMacs) were ripping tunes and sharing them. A CD player/copier was added to the iMac design but there was no software to manage a music library. This led to the iPod and ultimately iTunes. Jobs negotiated a deal with the recording artists – reminding them that something is better than nothing, and nothing was what they were getting – and the iTunes store began selling the recording artists’ music by the song rather than by the album. Each song sold for 99 cents, with Apple retaining 29 cents. Overnight, the iTunes store became the biggest music retailer in the world selling a million downloads the first day it was open and eight million four months later. The songs were just a way to sell iPods with its proprietary file format and high margins. Yes, Jobs stuck with the integrated architecture.

In 2007 Jobs released the iPhone to the market, which bought over six million units in 15 months. It was a combination phone, camera, content player, and Internet client and browser, allowing emails and text messages to be sent and received. Then in 2010 the iPad was released and sold 300,000 on the first day and three million in the first 80 days. The “i” products, including those not yet released orbit around the iMac as its digital hub, which will possibly migrate to the iCloud in the future.

The integration of these satellite products around the digital hub was likely envisioned by Jobs sometime after he returned to Apple. He concluded that the age of the Internet was fast reaching maturity and that a new age of digital device integration was beginning. In his MacWorld 2001 presentation, Jobs discussed his conception of the digital hub business model – whose satellites would be digital phones, digital photograph and movie cameras, PDAs, CD players, and MP 3 music devices. It was remarkable insight for the time. The iPod/iTunes, iPhone, and iPad became those satellites, albeit in more modern formats as digital technology advanced.

It’s interesting, therefore, to hear Isaacson’s account of the iPad creation when told by Jobs and when told by one of the senior engineers also interviewed. Remember that Jobs had envisioned the PDA as a satellite to his digital hub as early as 2001. As the iPod and iPhones assumed their orbits in the Apple digital constellation, they were not single-function devices. More and more functionality was added to them both at launch and in successive versions. When it was introduced, the iPad was also not a single-function PDA. It was a digital platform for text (books, periodicals), audio (music, audio books), video (movies), games, applications, and Internet browsing.

Jobs recalled the genesis of the iPad for Isaacson. It occurred at a party he attended in 2009 at which a Microsoft engineer boasted that his company was working on a tablet PC. Afterward, Jobs said, “F--- this, let’s show him what a tablet can really do.” He called his team together and directed them to come up with a touch screen tablet with no keyboard or stylus.

Jony Ive, the head of design for Apple, recalled a different genesis story. He told Isaacson that his team had been experimenting with a touch input screen device in a sort of “skunk works” without Jobs’ knowledge or direction. Until its functionality was more or less perfected, he was loath to let Jobs’ know about it for fear that it might earn another “this is s---” summary judgment with an order to kill it. “I realized that if he pissed on this, it would be so sad, because I knew it was so important,” Ive told Isaacson. When the device was bulletproof, Ive showed it to Jobs privately with no audience to posture for and Jobs loved it.

Here again is the accursed Reality Distortion Field convincing Jobs that the ideas of others had really been his own and that things really had happened in the inflated way he later recalled them. Jobs frequently took credit for the work of others. It revealed not only a character flaw in his leadership style, if it can be called that, but also his tendency to look upon the senior executive team as personal staff rather than an organization of specialized functions, each with its own agenda. Even when he took the ideas of others and made them better, Jobs failed to give credit; he always took credit. Predictably the turnover at the top of the organization was high.

For all that he did well, Jobs was inept at human relations. Nowhere was that ineptitude more evident than in his family.

Lisa Brennan-Jobs is the daughter of Steve Jobs and his on-and-off girlfriend Chris Ann Brennan. She was born in May 1978 just after Jobs and Woz formed Apple. Initially Jobs denied paternity, going so far as to file a sworn statement with the court that he was sterile and incapable of fathering a child. When Apple went public, making Jobs a multimillionaire, his daughter and former girl friend continued to live in poverty on welfare. Only because of court-ordered DNA tests was Jobs finally compelled to admit that he was Lisa’s father. The court not only ordered him to pay child support, he was ordered to repay $5,000 to the county for the welfare it had paid to Chris Ann Brennan.

Lisa was a teenager before she had any kind of a relationship with Jobs and only then when she moved in with him, his wife, and their children – Reed, Erin, and Eve. Lisa lived there for several years before she left for college, which Jobs financed. It’s odd that someone who was so hostile to his parents for abandoning him would do the same to his daughter. But that was Steve Jobs.

As many adopted children do, Jobs began to search for his biological parents. He found his mother in 1986 through the doctor who delivered him. His mother, Joanne Schieble Simpson, was living in Los Angeles and revealed that Jobs had a sister by his biological father, Abdulfattah "John" Jandali. He met his sister, Mona Simpson, and they hit it off at once. She was at his bedside when he died.

When Jobs was searching for his mother, he learned things about his father that convinced him he didn’t want to meet him. But Mona did. The man who abandoned her and her mother was managing a small café and coffee shop in Sacramento. Jandali asked about her brother, but she feigned ignorance, saying he had gone off somewhere and they would likely never hear from him again.

Her father told Mona about the “good old days” … "I wish you could've seen me when I was running a bigger restaurant. I used to run one of the best restaurants in Silicon Valley. Everybody used to come there, even Steve Jobs used to eat there. He was a great tipper.” Jandali didn’t know his son’s adopted name was Steve Jobs. Mona said nothing.

She later revealed the conversation to her brother. “Yeah, I was in that restaurant once or twice and I remember meeting the owner who was from Syria,” Jobs said, “it was most certainly him. And I shook his hand and he shook my hand. And that's all.”

Jobs was first diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003. Tests revealed that his was a slow growing type that had a good chance of being cured, but for certain, with surgery, his life could be prolonged many years. Enter the Reality Distortion Field. Instead of surgery, Jobs chose unorthodox diets, acupuncture, fasts, purges, even a psychic. He delayed surgery for nine costly months before scheduling it. The tumor was removed and his health rebounded for a while. But the 9-month delay in surgery had crossed the tipping point and it was apparent to his public that his weight loss and increasing gauntness revealed a very sick man. He began to set his affairs in order in Apple. A successor was named to run the company. And in his own way, he began to think of his family.

My story has now come full circle. Walter Isaacson consented to write Jobs’ story. When asked why the notoriously secretive Jobs would grant such a license after all these years to write of a life filled with so many shortcomings, Jobs said he wanted his kids to know who he was. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did,” he said.

When Isaacson interviewed Erin Jobs, just a teenager at the time, about her father she said, “Sometimes I wish I had more of his attention, but I know the work he’s doing is very important and I think it’s really cool, so I’m fine. I don’t really need more attention.” Having four children myself, two of them girls, it’s hard for me to believe Jobs’ children didn’t need his time and attention regardless of the importance of his work to the world. Mine did. But it’s really hard for me to believe that a man who is dying and truly wanted his children to know him would choose a biographer and a book to do it.

In his last interview with Jobs, Isaacson recalls sitting with him in his backyard garden. Jobs began talking about God. "Sometimes I believe in God,” he said,

… sometimes I don't. I think it's 50-50 maybe. But ever since I've had cancer, I've been thinking about it more. And I find myself believing a bit more. I kind of – maybe it's 'cause I want to believe in an afterlife. That when you die, it doesn't just all disappear. The wisdom you've accumulated. Somehow it lives on.

He stopped and thought. "Yeah, but sometimes I think it's just like an on-off switch. Click and you're gone."

Then he paused again. "And that's why I don't like putting on-off switches on Apple devices."

iJobs

On October 5 of last year, Steve Jobs died after a long bout with pancreatic cancer. He was 56 years old, still a young man by today’s standards, and yet in the years beyond his adolescence he managed to create the PC age, co-create a business that at his death had a market capitalization of $364 billion – a valuation at the time second only to Exxon, which it has since exceeded – he’d created a gaggle of products prefixed by the inscrutable letter “i”, he had lost and then regained control of Apple, the company he helped develop, he’d revolutionized computer animation in developing a new genre of film-making, and he had created a personal fortune of $8 billion. To have done any one of these things would have been breathtaking and yet he did them all – and more.

Seven years ago, confronted with his mortality after learning that he had a serious form of cancer, Jobs asked Walter Isaacson, a journalist-biographer, to write his story. Isaacson, unaware of Jobs’ cancer, initially turned him down because of Jobs’ relative young age and because his story hadn’t been fully lived out in the years Isaacson thought remained. But when Jobs’ lethal condition became known, Isaacson relented and in 2009 began to collect data and interviews from Jobs, his friends, enemies, and former colleagues. Other than requesting that he design the book’s cover, Jobs said he had no interest in reading the book and gave Isaacson complete editorial freedom. The result is a lengthy tome – almost 700 pages – which was on the book shelves a few weeks after Jobs’ death.

Almost 30 years ago I saw a curious looking box in a retail window with an odd, partly eaten, multi-colored apple for a logo. It was a “personal computer” I learned, in a time when the only computers I’d seen were quite impersonal and filled entire rooms despite a memory of only 256K. The one I used to perform the calculations for my doctoral dissertation had a memory of only 10k and the user interface was a teletypewriter with a punched paper tape reader.

As an engineer, I had a natural interest in the guy who created the curious box. And in the 30 years since I first saw it, I have followed his rise and fall, first through articles written about him and later through books that chronicled Jobs and the company known as Apple.

I was interested in how Walter Isaacson, the only person to write Jobs’ “authorized” story, would treat this American icon whose products have touched so many people living today. Every author asserts he is objective but how the objective facts are reported can tell many a different tale. I’ve listened to the audio book version and now I’m reading it. If you decide to do either, you won’t be disappointed. It is not a whitewash. Jobs is presented warts and all. Well, most of the warts, at least.

I am not going to review Isaacson’s book. There are ample reviews online. And there are many other “unauthorized” books – and in-depth articles – about Jobs and his company which I think are also worth reading. Most tell the biographical story of Steve Jobs – facts about his life and accomplishments. But there is the equally important back story – Steve Jobs the person – which is often glossed over and evidentially not understood by his admirers, judging by the worldwide candle lighted adoration the news of his death evoked. There is no disputing Jobs’ accomplishments. Arguably few people could do what he did. But Jobs did not descend from Olympus. He was an abrasive, belittling, manipulative, narcissistic, sociopath. He lived outside of the constraints that mere mortals are compelled to observe with a genius flawed by character. Apologists argue that his genius and flaws are related, as if one couldn’t happen without the other.  My experience indicates otherwise. I’ve personally known many entrepreneurs and read about others who accomplished great things without burning up the people who helped make them happen. Herb Kelleher, the creator of Southwest Airlines comes to mind.

Steve Jobs was conceived by an unmarried couple. Both were university students, although his father had a Ph.D. and was teaching when the child was born. He was put up for adoption, allegedly because his father was Syrian and his American mother’s family disapproved of their relationship. This didn’t prevent a later marriage which produced another child – a girl – before the marriage ended in divorce.

Steve’s mother wanted him adopted by college-educated parents who would assure that he would receive a college education. The prospective new parents were a lawyer and his wife. But when Steve was born, they changed their minds and decided they preferred a girl. Thus, Paul and Clara Jobs – the next names on the list that February in 1955 – were called and told there was a baby boy available for adoption; did they want him? They took him and later adopted a sister for him.

Clara Jobs had not graduated from college and Paul Jobs had not graduated from high school. When the biological mother learned this, she initially refused to sign the adoption papers and relented only with their promise that they would send Steve to college.

Notwithstanding his limited formal education, Paul Jobs could do almost anything – repair cars, rebuild household appliances, build almost anything with his hands – and whatever he did was done right. He was a craftsman and a precision machinist who was employed making housings for lasers, which were just becoming of age in the 1960s.

During one of Isaacson’s interviews with Jobs, the author was shown a 50-year old fence which still stands enclosing the backyard of the modest house where the Jobs lived. Young Steve helped his father (he always said his adoptive parents were his parents) to build it with the understanding that the craftsmanship on both sides of the fence had to be the same. Just because Steve couldn’t see the other side of the fence, his father said, was no excuse for cutting corners on its workmanship.

The Jobs family moved to Cupertino in 1960 where Steve would grow up, attend elementary and high school, and begin being Steve Jobs. Perhaps that story begins with Lisa McMoylar, a little girl who lived across the street from the Jobs house. One day Steve confided in her that he was adopted – something that Paul and Clara had been quite open about with both Steve and his adopted sister.  “Does that mean your real parents didn’t want you?” Lisa asked. Struck by that thought, Steve ran into the house to the people he always acknowledged as his parents. They told him that they had specifically picked him. He was not abandoned. He had been chosen and was therefore someone special.

Jobs seems to have been anointed by that assurance rather than comforted by it. In later life he was non-conformist and anti-authoritarian. His car had no license tag despite the fact he was a billionaire. Told that the law required a license tag, he chose instead to lease a new car every six months and drive it without a tag, since six months was the limit to do so. He parked in handicapped spaces.  The fact that he was adopted because he was special allowed him to live his life independently of rules, he later confessed.

Paul and Clara Jobs were liberal, indulgent parents of a precocious child – the kind of parents that would have been influenced by the childrearing guru of the time, Dr. Benjamin Spock, a proponent of indulgence. Their permissiveness and lack of restraint may further explain a lot of Steve’s adult behavior.

Moreover, he grew up in California of the 1960s and 1970s, which largely rejected the influence of traditional religion or the restraints of traditional morality. Jobs called it a “magical time” and for him a spiritual time. “… taking LSD was one of the most important things in my life … not the most important … but right up there,” Jobs later recalled. Zen, yoga, meditation, the human potential movement, drugs, sex, and other pop psycho-cultural expressions became vehicles in the search for aimless youngsters and adults to find meaning in life.

It was also the dawn of the high-tech age, and technology companies were springing up in the pre-Silicon Valley era, competing with the area’s ubiquitous fruit orchards for real estate. The Cold War and Vietnam War were in full swing, spawning California’s electronic firms, chip makers, military contractors, not to mention the sub-culture of geeks, hobbyists, and non-conformist engineers unsuited to jobs in conventional businesses.

It was during this time that Steve Jobs met Steve Wozniak, five years his senior and his future partner in Apple Computer. Other than the fact that both Steves were long-haired, bearded hippies who were interested in technology, they were almost polar opposites in every other respect. Jobs was cocksure and arrogant, Wozniak was shy, almost child-like. Jobs was assertive and outgoing, Wozniak was reclusive and preferred to work alone. Jobs was disingenuous and manipulative, Wozniak was ethical and sensitive to others. Wozniak was generous in virtually everything, Jobs wasn’t.

Woz had dropped out of UC Berkley and was working on mainframe computers at Hewlett Packard when the two hooked up. He was the technical genius of the duo with a natural talent for the arcana of technology solutions. He would have been happy to invent technologies and give them to the world in the belief that he was making it a better place.

Jobs understood almost nothing about engineering and science and was unable to write a line of programming code. Yet he had an uncanny grasp for esthetic detail, probably the legacy of his father’s love for craftsmanship and doing the little things well. He was as good at seeing the big picture as he was at hammering out its details – a rare combination. Jobs, unlike Woz, could see the future in a product by looking at its inert carcass on a workbench.

Jobs would spend hours admiring the design of high-end kitchen knives in a department store and certain kitchen appliances, like the Cuisinart food processor, whose ideas found their way into the exteriors of Apple computers. He bordered on pathological about the curvature of the corners on Apple computer cases. The iMac colors were supposedly inspired by a visit to a jelly bean factory. For years his house had no furniture because he couldn’t find any with a design he considered worthy of his home. And near the end of his life when he was being treated for cancer, he refused to wear a surgical mask because he hated its design.

Woz was the creative genius who labored out of the limelight while Jobs was the promoter and market maker.

Thinking of Jobs and Woz, I’m reminded of a scene in Schindler’s List in which Liam Neeson’s character, Oskar Schindler, has organized the Polish Ghetto Jews to put up the money and perform the unpaid jobs for Schindler’s pots and pans factory. He has asked Ben Kingsley’s character, Itzhak Stern, also a Ghetto Jew, to be the plant manager and its business accountant. The following dialog takes place between Stern and Schindler.

Itzhak Stern: Let me understand. They put up all the money. I do all the work. What, if you don't mind my asking, would you do?

Oskar Schindler: I'd make sure it's known the company's in business. I'd see that it had a certain panache. That's what I'm good at. Not the work, not the work... the presentation!

The Jobs-Woz relationship was similar. Neither could have accomplished anything without the other, but Jobs had the flair, the intuitive understanding of the customer, and the obsessive focus on product detail down to the way it was packed in a box. The MacBook Air makes no keyboard sound as it’s used. Was the click of a keyboard so distracting that users complained? No. But noise in Steve Job’s world was a product negative so he insisted that the keyboard design make keystrokes silent.

Similarly, there is no fan, and therefore, no fan noise in the Apple II or Macs. Fans were installed in early PCs to get rid of heat. Preventing heat would eliminate fans which in turn would eliminate fan noise. So while Jobs didn’t know how to design or build a power supply that generated minimal heat, he found a power supply designer and told him that is what he wanted. The result was a low heat generating, pulsed power supply which is now the industry standard.

This drive to bend the realities of the natural world and bend the abilities of the people who inhabit that world became known as Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field. It’s believed that a co-worker borrowed the term from Star Trek. Jobs’ insistence that things be as he wanted them was not his force of will – it was his belief that reality existed as he saw it. For example, if he disbelieved the law of gravity, he simply acted as if it didn’t exist. Therefore, alternating between charisma and intimidation, Jobs bent the world and the people around him to match his Reality Distortion Field.

He used various methods to accomplish his ends. For example, Jobs practiced staring into the eyes of others without blinking, and if he asked someone a question, he expected that person to maintain eye contact and answer. It was like some weird form of mind control with him. One former employee of Apple said that after talking with Jobs he almost felt the need to be deprogrammed.

When the original Mac was created, Jobs announced to a work team that certain tasks had to be completed within a month. When the team protested that the volume of code required couldn’t be done in a month, Jobs answered, “Yes, you can do it.” Over the howls that he was asking the impossible, but knowing that the consequences would be unpleasant otherwise, the impossible task was completed – which only reinforced Jobs’ belief that he was right all along. Apple’s coding productivity (lines/hour) was no longer adequate if it met conventional industry standards; it now had to meet standards mandated by Jobs, who wasn’t a programmer.

Another by-product of Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field was his belief that a fruitarian diet consisting of no vegetables or protein was not only healthy but also eliminated the need for bathing and body odor control. As a result he smelled like a bum, which coupled with his long hair, beard, scruffy dress, and the fact that he was usually barefoot, completed an image of a solipsistic person living in his own reality. To deal with stress, he would often soak his feet in a toilet bowl. He thought nothing of meeting with someone he intended to impress – like an investor to sponsor a substantial amount of capital – and putting his filthy feet on the person’s desk. He was shocked because they were shocked.

People told Jobs that he smelled awful. Yet, he never considered that they might be right. Reality Distortion. He once decided that he would go to work with Atari. The person in charge of hiring took one look at him and turned him down. Jobs said he would stay in the lobby until he was hired. Nolan Bushnell, the owner of the company, came out, interviewed him, and decided he was a bright kid – so he hired him. His fellow workers complained so much about his body odor that he was assigned to the night shift – the only person on the night shift.

Meeting with the Chairman of Lotus Software for breakfast once, Jobs observed the amount of butter the man was spreading on his toast. “Have you ever heard of serum cholesterol?” Jobs volunteered. “Look,” said the Chairman, “I’ll make you a deal. You stay away from commenting on my dietary habits, and I’ll stay away from the subject of your personality.”

The weirdness of Jobs’ persona was who he really was – not something he imitated – and it led to treatment of colleagues that was beyond cruel. His language at times was so profane that I cannot use it here. He could be (and was) so abusive to a waitress that she would flee the restaurant in tears. Once when interviewing a candidate for a job in Apple, he asked the young man when he had lost his virginity. Obviously flustered and embarrassed by the question, the candidate began shifting in his chair and flushed through several shades of red. “You mean you’re still a virgin?” Jobs asked. One Apple manager told herself before meetings with Jobs that she was already dead in order to dull her senses to the humiliation she knew awaited her.

A programming team might stay up all night to meet one of Jobs’ impossible deadlines and be told the performance of their software was s---. Subordinates were screamed at and told they – not their work – were (expletive), (expletive), (expletive) and then they were fired on the spot. Jobs could be equally brutal in hiring: “Everything you’ve done in your life is s---,” he told one prospective employee, “so why don’t you come and work for me?” He didn’t learn that in charm school.

Laurene Powell, his wife for 20 years, tried to put a pretty face on her husband’s bizarre behavior in interviews with Walter Isaacson. “Like many great men whose gifts are extraordinary,” she said, “he’s not extraordinary in every realm.…He doesn’t have social graces, such as putting himself in other people’s shoes, but he cares deeply about empowering humankind.” Co-workers who had learned to tolerate his abuse convinced themselves that it was just his perverted way of challenging them to higher levels. “We learned to accept ‘This is s---’ as a code that meant ‘Tell me why this is the best way to do it’.”

Jobs excused his behavior by saying that he wanted to work with people who demanded perfection; “that’s who I am,” he said. “If you’re an insanely great person, wouldn’t you want to work in an insanely great organization?” he once said. In Jobs’ Manichean world, people were either heroes or zeros – or “s---heads” as he called them – usually to their face.

In contrast, I recall the leadership methods of Vince Lombardi, no performance pushover in the world of professional football. In one practice session, things weren’t going well. There was a player, a hulking guard, who wasn't playing up to Lombardi's standards, and finally the coach had enough. "You're not putting out! In fact, I doubt whether you're going to make this team. Go to the locker room!"

About an hour and half later, Lombardi entered the locker room with the rest of the team, and the big guard was still there in his sweaty practice uniform with his head in his hands. Lombardi walked over to him, put his hand on the man’s shoulder, and said, "Son, you are a lousy football player. But inside of you is a great football player, and I'm going to stay by your side until that football player comes out." With that assurance, Jerry Kramer stripped off his uniform, and took a shower. Years later, he would be elected to the Football Hall of Fame.

Unlike Lombardi, Jobs apparently never believed leadership can be used to make great people as well as make great products.

(Continued next week...)