Posted on 04/08/2019 10:37:23 AM PDT by Red Badger
Ping!.....................
“There were days where he was impressed by my work, and there were days when I was certain he would fire me.”
Classic Narcissism.
There’s an old business adage:
One ‘Aw S#!t’ wipes out ALL ‘Attaboys!’........................
Baloney. Customers define need. Engineers and designers who want to meet those needs must learn to ask the right questions.
The Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor scarcity)states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.
The insanely great people matter. They are few in number, but they will do 80% of the work. I've seen management focus on the crappy 80% and try to turn them into insanely great people. It never works. I think management should shower attention on the best people, consider most of the staff as just deadweight. Because that's what they are. And if management showers attention on the deadweight, they will have nothing to show for it -- and the insanely great people will start to leave because they feel unappreciated. You really don't want that.
Kawasaki is a joke. His real fame has been to be an author and a speaker not so much as evangelist in the early days of Apple. People became aware of this role at Apple because of his books.
Ah yes, I see in the last sentence of this article - he has another book out. His books do keep his name out there.
I remember meeting him after he was fired from 4th Dimension, the database company, I kept thinking this “guys is trying to sell himself by bitching about others”. At this meeting he was complaining about how bad the founders of the company had been...which probably became a chapter or two in subsequent book.
Steve really scared employees. I’ve heard about it. He was intimidating and as many have learned not very nice.
He himself admitted as much in the end.
What was so revolutionary about the Macintosh really? Apple didn’t invent the GUI. Xerox did many years before.
No, he was just smart enough to sell what someone else invented.
I saw GK at the user group conference in Dayton. When my fellow geek and I arrived and checked in, we headed down a very crowded corridor, and GK was sitting on a bench of some kind, hands clasped, elbows on knees, leaning forward, just smiling and taking it all in. GK gave a great presentation, I don't remember much about it, merely a lot of rah-rah, and it was his last weekend with Apple before his jump to the company that made the DB software 4th Dimension.
Looks like he's peddling another how-to-have-a-great-career book. Better books exist to read about Steve Jobs.
The best things that ever happened to Steve Jobs? He met Steve Wozniak; he got his way for commercializing the Apple II; and by following his base instincts, he got himself removed from any decisionmaking role by CEO Mike Markkula. Thanks Red Badger.
Most of the time, Dilbert makes sense. That one just doesn’t reflect reality in my line of work.
I sometimes get customers feeding specifications, when they should in fact be feeding requirements ... but that level of cluelessness just doesn’t match reality.
My analysis has always been simple and I use it frequently: “What would happen if this person suddenly wasn’t here?”. With some the honest answer is “not much would change”, and with others it is clear that the loss would hurt greatly.
Delusional much?
If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.
As is the “insanely great” and “crappy” dichotomy, which ventures toward borderline splitting.
Something that Xerox wasn’t smart enough to do.
It seems to be a recurring theme among liberal groups:
Fight totalitarianism by being totalitarian.
Fight Fascism by being Fascist.
Fight hate by being a hater.
Fight lies by lying your ass off........................
I met Jobs in the 70s, as Apple II was really taking off, as a potential supplier. His managers said we had to get his buy-in as VP Engineering before they could proceed. He was over an hour late for the meeting, and dismissed us in the reception area with “I know what you have and I don’t like it”.
Being a visionary and an asshole are not mutually-exclusive.
But its fun to have his business card from that era.
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