Great post. I'm going to show this to management because this is exactly the idea that they advocate yet they keep hearing they should be more like Steve Jobs. Not many people would want to work for a pseudo-Jobs. Problem is, there seems to be a plethora of them out in the wilds of big corporate America.
Steve Jobs was a multi-faceted person. He definitely had a difficult personality, but I've heard he was less of an asshole than he's made out to be; the problem is, when a person lives in the spotlight, all of his worst moments get air.
He also had a different management style at Pixar than at Apple. During his first stint at Apple, he was extremely young and inexperienced. Pixar was like a research department, and he was generally nice to the people working for him. When he returned to Apple, he came into a fairly nasty culture that had been created by people other than him. If you've ever seen a company with a young wolves problem, you know that sometimes the boss has to be an asshole.
Also, my understanding is that he was generally very nice to the line engineers but hard on people VP-level and above-- and that at Apple, VP is a seriously high rank involving high-6 figure compensation (at least) rather than a 50th-birthday present (or in investment banking, a 30th-birthday present) as it is in most companies. I think that if you're making that kind of money, you can take serious scrutiny.
"very nice to the line engineers but hard on people VP-level and above"
That makes me wonder about a "sandwich" model of management - a leader at the top who has a lot in common with engineers at the bottom, together putting the squeeze on management (who still wield most day-to-day authority) in the middle. Looked at another way, authority does mostly flow downward as in the traditional model, but then you "close the loop" by joining those at the bottom back up to the person at the top so that nobody's left without recourse when they think things are going awry.
I'm not really sure where to go with that idea, but it seems to bear thinking about. I'll bet somebody smarter than me already wrote a book about it.
