Sep
2
On Steve Jobs’ Resignation as Apple CEO
Since Steve Jobs announced his resignation as CEO of Apple, the web has been full of tributes to the tech icon. Given his health issues, many of the tributes read like obituaries, but it’s understandable. If his health weren’t failing, he’d still be running the company.
As a life-long Apple user and creative professional, I can’t help but to reflect a bit myself. Jobs gave us a lot of insanely great products. As Seth Godin wrote, we owe him. But it was more than the products; it was also the man himself that impacted many of us, even if we didn’t know him.
Jobs was a visionary. Jobs was a risk-taker. Jobs was an artist.
As many note, Jobs was also a master marketer and salesman, a part of him that is often misunderstood. Whenever there’s an article about Jobs on the web, anti-Apple comments crop up like flowers after a spring rain. Apple haters are eager to sneer that Apple consumers have all been duped by Jobs into buying overpriced garbage. If you ask most Apple fans, we’re often at a loss to respond to the hate. Yes, he was a good salesman, but he bore no resemblance to the archetypal used car salesman. Oh well, we shrug, haters will hate, but the big thing is they just don’t see what we see.
So as Jobs begins to leave the world stage, I’ve reflected on what it is that I’ve seen all these years in Steve Jobs and Apple, and what I’ve seen is an authentic belief in human potential at its highest expression, and I apologize to every Apple employee, but it’s been embodied in and has radiated from Steve Jobs.
Let me try to explain this, because it’s a little subtle and elusive. Jobs’ famous “reality distortion field” represents for me his ability to use the medium of a product announcement, and ultimately consumer products, to give us a glimpse into something important — the limitless possibilities of technology, creativity and human potential to transform the world.
Sure, the cynical among us saw in each keynote speech only the polished act of a master illusionist, but I believed in Jobs. It’s not that I believed the latest Apple product would change the world or that each new product represented the most amazing human artifact ever created. Rather, I believed that Steve Jobs believed it, and it amazed me that someone could see so much in the work he was doing. I believed him also because he was sincere; when he wasn’t into it (like announcing the Motorola ROKR), you could tell, it was obvious.
But more than that, I believe Steve Jobs was authentically connected to a depth of meaning most CEOs and engineers are oblivious to. If you were intuitive enough, and listened hard enough, if you saw beyond the presentation, you could almost see in Jobs the intangible force that animates the long chain of human tool-making, from the first hand axe to the wheel to the cotton gin to the automobile. And you could see everything social, cultural and existential good technology represents, but that we never talk about — an expansion of our senses, our intellect, our ability to be together in the world and do useful things.
That was the impact of Steve Jobs for me, the depth of his engagement in his enterprise, his work, and its connection to the human experience. Again, when at his best, I believe that he believed in it. And, to paraphrase Fox Mulder, I wanted to believe in it too.
I’ve bought so many Apple products for the normal reasons. They work, they help me do creative things, they look cool. But I’ve also bought them because there’s that depth in them. In a unique way, like Jobs’ life, they are a celebration of human possibilities.
I hope Tim Cook understands.
