What he didn’t do, what he did do and why that doesn’t count as genius
Published in Rome Magazine
6 days ago (Medium.com)
The last in this series was about the muskrat, otherwise known as Elon Musk. Elon is doubtless innovative, perspicacious and talented, and has had a great deal of help from the American Government; he’s also a million moons away from the saintly soil of genius.
The next in our series of why someone isn’t a genius is Mr. Steve Jobs. And before you cry out, ‘how about saying who IS a genius instead of saying who isn’t’ or ‘why are you being so negative?’ or ‘who the hell are you to judge?’, I’ll save you the trouble of crying out and address all those perty little perturbances from the start.
Despite the human predilection for the positive, it’s just as valuable to disprove something as it is to prove something. And I think I understand enough about big business, capitalism and luck to know when I smell charlatanism. Not that the golden boys of Silicon Valley are simply snake oil salesmen and women; they’re just not geniuses.
Negative? Well, it’s all about balance, and when there are so many fanboys who trenchantly believe the richer and more visible a tech giant becomes, the more their genius is assured, it’s imperative to balance out the bullshit.
And I don’t think I’m any more or less qualified than most apropos the assignation of genius. But I know what I know and I think what I think, and, as always, I’ll back up what I say with argumentation and fair analysis.
So, Steve Jobs. A titan of a man in terms of the shadow he cast on contemporary society. We all know his story; the driving ideological and conceptual force behind Apple, a tyrant to work for who could lead with the best of them, the poster child for the tech revolution and someone who has sadly passed away.
What Steve Jobs didn’t do
In the film Steve Jobs of 2015, the fictionalised Steve Wozniak turns to Jobs and asks:
‘What do you do?’
Jobs responds:
‘I play the orchestra.’
I don’t know if such an exchange is apocryphal or did indeed take place, but regardless it raises the very real and most persistent of flies in the ointment when it comes to Steve Jobs — what did he actually do?
It’s the sort of thing that sounds great and makes Jobs look like a visionary propelling the whole enterprise onwards to a future that only he can perceive. I don’t know if such an exchange is apocryphal or did indeed take place, but regardless it raises the very real and most persistent of flies in the ointment when it comes to Steve Jobs — what did he actually do?
If Jobs was blessed with any sort of genius, it is essential that we understand where his talents lay and where they did not. And for this, we need to do a little bit of whittling.
Jobs was neither a scientist nor an engineer nor a philosopher. He was not an inventor or creator of devices or technology. He did not come up with any theory or idea that helped to unravel the universe or better explain the workings of our species.
He did not create the first Apple computer; that was Steve Wozniak.
Neither Jobs nor Apple invented the graphical user interface (GUI) which makes a computer usable for the general public. This was the work of Xerox PARC in 1979 drawing from a number of earlier systems.
Neither Apple nor Stevie Jobs had any hand in creating the smartphone. That was IBM in 1992.
Jobs didn’t come up with the iPad; that was other folks at Apple, with Steve acting as the ‘visionary’ leading the orchestra on to ever loftier heights.
And it can be argued that the underlying technology upon which Apple’s most famous creations are based had nothing to do with the company itself and actually owe their existence to the American Department of Defence.
Jobs is not an inventor of wheels. But perhaps he was the sort of person who could perfectly tap into the collective imagination to bring wheelness to the masses.
If we are being very generous, Jobs stood in that poorly-lit seldom-understood space where the forces of invention and utility meet the forces of desire and imagination — that penumbra where science and business, creation and capitalism merge and intermingle.
If we’re being less generous, Jobs was a master of marketing, packaging and form who understood (sometimes) how to sell other people’s ideas and creations to the public.
What Steve Jobs did do
So, we’ve got the lay of the land. Letting Jobs into the rarified ranks of genius-level thinkers and we will be saying the man was blessed with a business acumen second to none, that he could spur people on, through fear and adulation, to heights they could barely hope to fathom, and that he could take any company or idea and with his Midas touch turn all to gold dust.
Business, marketing, leadership, presentation — this the narrow bandwidth wherein the mind of Jobs plays its music, be that the music of a genius or merely an uncommonly talented human.
Let’s take a look at business and leadership first.
Steve Wozniak was the brains behind the first Apple computer, completed and fully functioning in 1976. He was responsible for everything you would imagine goes into creating something of such sophistication — the planning, designing, configurating, the continual testing and endless back and forth, the optimising and the marriage of hardware and software.
Wozniak had tried to sell his idea to Hewlett Packard, the company where he worked, but they turned him down a reputed five times. It’s obvious that Wozniak was aware of the power and potential of his idea; albeit not quite as aware as Jobs was.
And it was Steve Jobs that convinced Wozniak to found a company to get his creation out there and so Apple was born. Jobs clearly understood the broad implications of the concept of a personal computer. Just how far he saw into the future and how broad he perceived these implications is impossible to tell. He knew enough to fully buy into the idea and to convince Wozniak to buy in too; and the two threw everything they had into the idea — money, time, dedication, obsession.
Jobs was clearly gifted with prescience and refined business instincts from the get-go.
If we fast-forward to when Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 after being fired in 1985, we can see, on top of his foresight and business savvy, just how potent and powerful he was as a steward of a large company, most especially the company he founded.
Apple were tanking and had been on a downward spiral for some time. Stock prices for the company hit an all-time low of $3.19 by the end of the year; grim times for the company when it almost collapsed.
Apple lost $1.04 billion in 1997 but just over a year later, after the second coming of their erstwhile CEO, the company turned a profit of $309 million. By the time of Jobs’ death on the 5th of October 2011, after having left the company a few months prior due to his cancer, Apple stock was valued at $378.25.
This is a gargantuan transformation; from crumbling giant to thriving behemoth. And despite the presence of forces in big business that are beyond the will and control of any human, Jobs should probably be given the lion’s share of the credit for the resurrection of his brainchild with Steve Wozniak.
And how did Jobs achieve such a miraculous 180-degree change in fortunes? — chopping, changing, tweaking, integrating, streamlining, bringing in and doing away with.
The iMac, the iPhone, iTunes and the Mac OS X (later MacOS) were all rolled out to great success during his second tenure. Jobs was also shrewd enough to accept investment from Apple’s great rival Microsoft during the initial fallow years.
To further bolster his business credentials and nose for what will be big if only given the right push, we need only look at Jobs and his investment into Pixar.
Yet, even within the narrow bandwidth of Jobs’ business, leadership and marketing qualities, there are a number of salient caveats.
This is hugely impressive stuff and the results speak for themselves: rescuing companies and turning them into world-beaters, helping to spearhead the rise of CGI films and continually changing the fabric of popular culture.
Yet, even within the narrow bandwidth of Jobs’ business, leadership and marketing qualities, there are a number of salient caveats.
Firstly, under Tim Cook, company CEO since 2011, Apple have done pretty well. Scratch that ‘pretty’; astoundingly well.
Under his guidance Apple became the first US company to reach a $2- trillion valuation, and in 2021 it was worth six times what it was worth in 2011.
Is Cook a genius then too? Or just an extremely shrewd CEO who knows how to make the market work for him in a system where the market usually has a habit of favouring the big fish, the biggest fish most of all?
And then there’s that matter that just won’t go away — who exactly came up with all these wonderous ideas?
I always thought the little ‘i’ idea was inspired. It is the perfect antithesis of the big state; that capitalised monolith and coldest of all cold monsters looking down from on high at its lowly subjects. The little i is down here with us as we search for individuality, innovation and intelligence, all together on the boundless expanse of that other little i, the internet.
It’s a touch of genius, but actually an executive at Apple’s ad agency called Ken Segall came up with it. Jobs had been pitching the clunky and just plain woeful ‘MacMan’ for what came to be known as the iMac.
And we have iTunes, the idea for which may have been stolen from Scott Sanders.
And the groundbreaking MacOS was made without Jobs.
The same deal with the iPad which would come later.
So, at the end of all this, we’re left with an extremely skilled CEO and leader. Someone who could tweak other people’s ideas and creations. Someone who would pillage and plunder the minds of others. A man with an uncanny sense for how to get technology, innovation and invention from the laboratory and research facilities over into the hands, minds and imaginations of the public who firmly believed that the ends justified the means — Steven Paul Jobs.
Does what Steve Jobs did constitute genius?
We live in the scientific episteme, which is the epoch when all discourse, meaning and truth are weighed according to the yardstick of hard science.
In the past, we existed within the religious episteme which meant all knowledge and thought was judged according to its comportment or conflict with dogma, scripture, the decree of the Church and the Word of God.
The upshot of this is that science acts as the lodestar for what constitutes truth and valid knowledge, and in this case, for whether one is or isn’t a genius.
List off a few geniuses and see how many are scientists and inventors; you’ll probably find that these top the list, as well as a few writers and painters.
Einstein developed the theory of relativity, which, among many other earth-shattering implications, predicted the existence of black holes 107 years ago.
Both Gottfried Leibnitz and Isaac Newton independently discovered calculus in the 18th century.
Nicolaus Copernicus turned the human universe upside down with his heliocentrism.
And the great Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī is the founder of modern algebra.
The scientific episteme is superior to the religious episteme because of what science can prove and predict, because of the power it gives to shape and make use of the world around us, and because it shows its workings.
The above humans and their achievements should really be on everyone’s lists of geniuses.
Then there are the great writers and artists who possess the most superlative of abilities to reify the human condition in their works.
Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Joyce, Michelangelo, Dali, Hendrix, Kubrick — all creators who were at the very top of the art of creation.
We also have the philosophers whose thoughts and theories sometimes spill off into realms beyond science and the scientific method — into the moral and ethical, the metaphysical and the subjective.
Aristotle, Descartes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Jung — all thinkers occupying the highest echelons of human questioning and understanding.
And, of course, we have the sportsmen and women, blessed with prodigious physical prowess and skill — Lionel Messi, Sierra Williams, Mike Tyson, Michael Jordan, Usain Bolt and the like.
Despite superhuman fleetness of thought, I wouldn’t include this last group as it mostly revolves around the physical and not around the mental and cognitive, which I see as the quintessence of genius.
So, where does this leave Mr. Steve Jobs? Well, there are two points here.
The first is that I don’t see businessmen and women as being folks that trade in the currency of genius. So, even if a CEO were to have a very successful run with their companies and products, I would see this as more about being extremely shrewd and cunning, about possessing a refined instinct and being good at inspiring people.
More to the point, there are just so many unknowns and unknowables in the world of business that luck plays a huge role, which becomes ever greater, the bigger you get.
CEOs are more like captains of ships negotiating the wild seas. This necessitates an admixture of action, instinct and thought; it is not primarily or solely a game of the mind.
And let’s not forget just how much government will bend over backwards for you when you become one of those big fat fish.
CEOs are more like captains of ships negotiating the wild seas. This necessitates an admixture of action, instinct and thought; it is not primarily or solely a game of the mind.
The second is that so much of Jobs’ success is down to the reshaping, rebranding and recalibrating of the creations and ideas of others. And this often extended to outright theft, as with Xerox, as with iTunes, as with the Department of Defence, which Jobs openly admitted.
Even within the small bandwidth of Jobs’ aptitudes he seems to be equal parts tweaker and thief.
Tweaking is central to innovation, as it has been for a long time. Jobs was an arch-tweaker who would stand back from the work of others and understand more often than not what needed adjusting to make it viable and buyable. He was also a master magpie when it came to the creations of others.
And lastly, he was a great leader. No one should question this; the man knew how to get where he wanted to be going and how to get there.
Be that as it may, the first means that genius is all but debarred for a man like Jobs from the get-go. And the second means that even if it weren’t, Jobs was a giant who, though possessing a number of great qualities, became so big by standing on the shoulders of giants.
Steve Jobs — leader, innovator, tweaker, thief, inspired, ingenious? Yes. Genius? No, never.
·Writer for Rome Magazine
Top writer in politics. Political analyst and writer of fiction with a lot to say on a lot of things .