The Apple Paradox

Effective Leadership That You Won't Read About in Class 

By Rob Kaiser, Kaplan DeVries Inc.

According to conventional wisdom, leadership is about influencing individuals to contribute to group goals. Although the preferred way for leaders to influence followers has changed with the times—command and control leadership during the predictable days of industry, a more engaging person-oriented approach for the softer and less certain knowledge economy—the core assumption remains that leaders contribute to the bottom line by cajoling, inspiring, and motivating followers.

The problem is that this view cannot explain the Apple paradox.

By all accounts, Steven Jobs, the founder and CEO of Apple Inc., is a difficult person—abrasive, angry, mean, hard to satisfy, volatile, and supremely arrogant. He reduces subordinates to tears, takes credit for their ideas, curses them in public, and even yells at Board members. According to the conventional model, Jobs is a horrible leader.

Nonetheless, under Jobs' leadership, Apple has become a highly profitable and deeply admired corporation. Jobs was brought back in to lead the company in 1997 when Apple's stock (AAPL) was trading about the same as a decade earlier, around $10 a share. Its opening price on April 25, 2009 was over $124, making Apple one of the most dramatic turnarounds in the history of Silicon Valley.

The resolution to the Apple paradox is that leadership concerns more than interpersonal influence. In addition to being interpersonally difficult, Jobs is also considered a brilliant engineer (his name is on over 100 patents), a true visionary (he has created both radical new products and new markets), deeply involved in the business (he weighs in on design, technology, portfolio, and customer decisions), and has recruited some of the best talent in the world (both at Pixar and with the current Apple leadership team). It appears that the best managers in the technology industry would rather play for a winning team than a happy team.

I don't think that Apple is a unique company or that high tech is a unique industry in this regard. Rather, I think that interpersonal influence is only part of the leadership story. Another part of the leadership story—perhaps the most important part when you get to the top—is about good judgment in terms of big-bet decisions like strategy (what are we going to do?), staffing (who is on the team?), and structure (how will we organize our efforts?). But you won't find this in consultant manuals or psychology textbooks.

Comments

[Pandora Beads UK]

It's great to hear from you and see what you've been up to. In your blog I feel your enthusiasm for life. thank you.

[Rob Kaiser]

Dear Dan,

I take your point that plenty of psychological models of leadership discuss such behaviors as setting strategy, building teams, organizing work and so on. However, my point wasn't about engaging in these behaviors. Rather the point was to identify a class of leadership activity that is more about making big-bet consequential decisions than about behavior per se. And most important is the quality of those decisions. Psychologists have discussed the behavioral processes in decision making a great deal--for instance, the Vroom and Yetton/Jago model of when to make decisions indpendently versus use various levels of inclusion. What we haven't really explored is the quality of decisions, their substantive content, the consequences of particular choices, and the factors that influence how good are the decisions.

In other words, I'm suggesting we think about leadership in terms of interpersonal influence behaviros and business judgment as reflected in major decisions about strategy, staffing, structure, and so forth.

[Rob Kaiser]

Hi, Gary B. Brumback. I hastily note that SIOP did not endorse this little essay; it is purely my observation and opinion.

At the same time, I didn't mean to advocate for Jobs' abusive way of treating people. Rather, I was struck by the curiosity that by the conventional psychological model of good leadership, Jobs fails miserably--yet it seems indisputable that his leadership of Apple has produced oustanding and sustained results. The point was to use the "Apple Paradox" to suggest a broader view of how leaders affect organizational performance.

That said, I suspect that were Jobs to treat his people better and be less self-righteous and arrogant, he would have an even greater impact on Apple's performance.

[Pablo Xia]

Since when is it SIOP's responsibility to preach morality? Isn't it up to the organization to decide what is right or wrong and then live with the consequences?

[Gary B. Brumback]

If SIOP is putting a stamp of approval on the Steve Jobs style of leadership then advocates of moral leadership and democratic, psychologically healthy workplaces ought to put a stamp of disapproval on SIOP.

[Dan]

It is very informative to constantly remind ourselves that leadership, while commonly defined as involving social influence of others, is much more than a single definition. It is very helpful to highlight how great leaders do not necessarily influence others through emotional inspiration.

However, I must point out that all the behaviors you point out (i.e., create strategy, select teams, organize work) are commonly identified in both textbooks and journals. In fact, initiating structure, one of the behavioral categories identified in the Ohio State studies of the 1950's, has been with us for a long time. Virtually every textbook on leadership cites this series of studies. This dimension deals specifically with defining everyone's role and the task itself; that is, organizing the work arrangements.

Furthermore, many taxonomies of leadership/managerial behaviors include some form of planning/strategic direction (Borman & Brusch, 1993; Fleishman et al., 1991; Tett et al., 2000; Yukl,2002). Yukl's (1999) recent three-dimensional taxonomy of leadership behaviors clearly specifies a "change-oriented" cluster which is concerned primarily with improving strategic decisions; making major changes in processes, products, or services; and gaining commitment to change.

Also, as the previous commenter pointed out, it is unclear as to why these other behaviors might not constitute influential processes? A strategy guides the direction of the organization, structuring the work influences how the work is to be done, and selecting employees is about influencing people to join you. Also, just because he may be cantankerous does not mean he does not possess power. He could be influencing individuals through fear of punishment, coercion, appeal to authority, or even by merit of his expertise.

Overall, it almost sounds as if you are discussing the somewhat contentious manger vs. leadership debate. To the extent you believe these roles to be different, you may be correct in that most people tend to associate certain behaviors with managers and others with leaders (i.e., transactional vs. transformational). However, even in these models, transactional forms of leadership are seen as the base of transformational leadership (Bass, 1985).

So, I would conclude that almost any course or introductory leadership book does, indeed, provide the information needed to explain Steve Job's success. While social influence is seen as core to leadership, it does not constitute the constructs entirety.

[Milica]

I consider this article very interesting and inspiring. But I think that I have some different opinions about leadership influence. First of all, I must say that I think that Steven Jobs was actually influencing his colleagues, but in a different way. Leaders can use different kind of power to influence teams to contribute to group goals. In some work and organizational psychology textbooks I found that there are no desirables ways of influencing people to achieve group goals. It depends on situation. Sometimes, if workers are less motivated, and situation in company is wondrous it is desirable to be directive than permissive. I made the conclusion from the article that Steven Jobs had the mission, when he was brought back in to lead the company , to achieve some financial goals. So, perhaps because of that he was so rough with his team members who perhaps didn’t realized his mission and was very stricken and startled with his behavior?
Also, I must say that I think that his way of influencing people is based on his great experience and knowledge like specialist in his area. I know lot of young people who had finished their universities and who are motivated to work for experts in spite of their ‘bad temper’. The fact that they can work for them is so motivated, that they are capable to ‘tolerate’ them. So, I think that it is all about influencing, but in a different way.