Great read but did Steve Jobs really have personal integrity? He was famously double faced, manipulative and as petulant and petty as a child, often settling personal scores with business decisions.
You bring up a good point that illustrates an important distinction. There are two aspects people look at when they evaluate a leader's integrity:
1. Are they true to their values?
2. Are their values my values?
Steve Jobs was remarkably true to his core values, which consisted of building great products for the masses to use. His values did not include being kind to people, coddling peoples' feelings, telling the truth (except insofar as it helped great products get built & distributed), promoting social justice or equality, or many other things that people care about. If your primary mission in life is to build great products, Apple was an excellent place to be. If you cared about work/life balance, free exchange of information, building products for the underprivileged, or any number of other causes, Steve Jobs was probably not the right leader for you.
Sometimes it's possible for a person to score really well on #1 but not make the cut on #2. Antonin Scalia, for example, is someone who IMHO had great personal integrity, and yet I still detest because that integrity stood for causes that I find reprehensible. Or for a more extreme example, Adolph Hitler - he totally believed in what he said and did, but what he said and did was atrocious.
No, because personal integrity is a fairly unimportant concept to leadership, besides being a made-up trait that has almost no meaning.
Leadership is about the ability to understand and manipulate reality. To do that, you need to know about systems, psychology, variation, and knowledge. None of the rest matters. People didn't have to like Jobs, nor even look to him for integrity. Rather they trusted him because he was effective at moving a whole organizational system in one direction toward an incredible result.
It's not integrity that matters—but reality. Are you bringing the company, through your model of reality, closer to a result? If not, your model is wrong, not your personality.
Thanks. It's difficult to maintain composure in the face of almost comical wrongness throughout the business world, and saying things like that tends to get you shunned. My fault, I need to improve my tact.
Basically, the Pixar crew followed W. Edwards Deming's model of organizations, which is one fairly accurate and useful model. By doing that they were able to bring all the pieces together and lead. Heck, Catmull even wrote a book about it, detailing how he thought about managing and leading a company that works for creative minds. But I guess the important part is his integrity and hiring abilities. :)
1. Are they true to their values?
2. Are their values my values?
Steve Jobs was remarkably true to his core values, which consisted of building great products for the masses to use. His values did not include being kind to people, coddling peoples' feelings, telling the truth (except insofar as it helped great products get built & distributed), promoting social justice or equality, or many other things that people care about. If your primary mission in life is to build great products, Apple was an excellent place to be. If you cared about work/life balance, free exchange of information, building products for the underprivileged, or any number of other causes, Steve Jobs was probably not the right leader for you.
Sometimes it's possible for a person to score really well on #1 but not make the cut on #2. Antonin Scalia, for example, is someone who IMHO had great personal integrity, and yet I still detest because that integrity stood for causes that I find reprehensible. Or for a more extreme example, Adolph Hitler - he totally believed in what he said and did, but what he said and did was atrocious.