Steve Jobs

The death of Steve Jobs is on everyone’s mind this week.  The accolades for his leadership and creative genius at Apple are everywhere in the media.  The accolades are appropriate because of the results he turned in over his career.  I think it is very worthwhile to look at the “whole person” who was so successful and learn from it.  

Steve’s reputation was that he was a very smart and driven person.  That was characterized by his extremely high expectations for himself and the organization he led coupled with a passion for excellence.  From what you can piece together from comments now but especially over the years when people were discussing a living and not a dead man paint a picture of a difficult person to have as a boss.   More than one person who worked with him has said he did not suffer fools at all.  He also did not suffer in silence when confronted with what he saw as work that did not meet his standard.  His feedback in such circumstances was swift and biting.  He created a work environment where political correctness had no place.  Perhaps above all he understood the technology and what it could and couldn’t do at the current time or the short term future.  This objective and realistic but stretching view of what was possible led Apple to success after success.

So let’s compare the Job’s approach to management with that employed by our education “leaders.” 

1. ·         Results - our education system is turning in results as abysmal as Job’s results were positive.
2. ·         Expectations – educators do not have high expectations of themselves or of their students.
3. ·         Objectivity – educators continue to use education approaches which are technically wrong in spite of the results they aren’t able to achieve.  This is compared to competitor nations who use technically sound approaches and teach their kids much more effectively as is shown by the international testing.   The approach in our education system is to try to do the wrong thing better when they should stop doing the wrong things and start doing the right things.
4. ·         Work environment – in education political correctness and group think run amok.  This creates a workplace where constructive feedback (that is, you are not getting the right results, shape up or ship out) simply does not occur.  Kids and our increasingly uncompetitive society globally continue to pay the price.
5. ·         Mental Toughness – Job’s created an environment of mental toughness where robust dialog was encouraged as a way to perfect the quality of the work teams.  The education environment is one of people walking on eggshells because conflict is not allowed and thus creates a bunch of wimps.
6. ·         Passion – in education passion is not allowed because it might lead to conflicts.  Conflict is required if you want to really perform well.  It results in much better decisions.  Oh, people “say” they are passionate about things but it is all a charade.  If passion for doing the education mission in an excellent way were ever allowed to break through the educations fiefdom’s fortress walls it would have a remarkably positive impact.

Therefore, we must conclude that there are good reasons why Steve Jobs and Apple were successful and equally valid reasons why our education system is a miserable failure compared to the money spent and the quality of the kids who have far more potential than they are given credit for.