“It turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could ever have happened to me.”
You wouldn’t expect to hear it from Steve Jobs, a man famous for his short temperament and strong opinions. But it turns out to be removed from his own company, transformed jobs and helped him grow to the creative power that would spawn world-changing products like iPhone, iPod and the best Mac and MacBooks years later.
His exhaust went down 40 years ago in 1985, and it’s worth looking back on what happened at the time and how it changed jobs – and Apple, and maybe even the wider computer world – for the better.
Far from being the end of the way of job, this was just the beginning. After leaving Apple, he founded another computer company next, and later took the helm of Pixar. During his guard, it became the most important animation study on the planet. In his absence, Apple lost its way, threw out uninspired products and came within the width of a hair of going bankrupt.
Twelve years later, Jobs returned to Apple and led it to one of the most dazzling potent periods in its history. Still, it would probably never have happened if jobs have not been very publicly fired from his own company. Here I will show you why.
Showdown at Apple
In the mid-1980s, Steve Jobs Macintosh Division on Apple drove the lead on a product that would continue to change the computer world forever.
At the same time, Apple was looking for a new CEO, and Jobs thought he had found one in the form of Pepsi marketing manager John Sculley. After luring Sculley with his famous persuasion powers (“Will you spend the rest of your life selling sugar water, or would you have a chance to change the world?” Jobs asked him), was the new rent on board.
But after a year -long honeymoon, cracks began to emerge. Jobs felt that Sculley was not a ‘product person’ and simply did not get his way of thinking. For Sculley, jobs were too occupied and disgusting.
Showdown came in 1985 when disappointing sales of Macintosh and Jobs’s chaotic leadership style led to questions about his leadership skills. Although it was suggested that Jobs could run a small “skunkworks” team that developed exciting new moonback devices, the jobs rejected the idea, which led Sculley to conclude that he had to be forced out of the business.
Eventually, Sculley convinced the board to remove jobs from his role as head of the Macintosh division, a plan that was executed over a few days in May 1985.
Jobs gained the symbolic role of chairman, but it was a position without actual power and influence inside Apple. He had been caught inside the air lock and could not influence the business or direction it took. Jobs recognized this, and in September 1985 he left to form his own computer company called, appropriate enough, next.
He was 30 years old and exiled from the successful company he had founded ten years earlier. For many people it would be a chance to leave the industry and never look back. But for job, it was the beginning of a learning process that brought him stronger than ever.
Finding focus
Jobs (surprisingly) took his firing very personal and felt that he was both a personal failure and that he had failed them around him. Still, this did not prevent him from managing businesses and getting practical with their operations.
First he exhibited some of his worst habits at the next. He was released from strings by a board of directors and CEO, who did not look kind of his sensations, he spoiled his taste for perfectionism on every turn, regardless of costs or temporal consequences.
As such, the next struggled to postpone a competitive product on time and during the budget. After a few years of small progress, it left the hardware world completely, rather than focusing completely on software. This would later prove to be a lucky decision.
But it was at Pixar that he really turned things around. After being CEO, he took a more hands-off approach and focused on financing and handling Disney, which Pixar had worked with making films. Pixar was led by a team of artists and creative – a class of people who Jobs really admired – and he was happy to let them do their things.
Pixar became the most important animation study in the world with a number of hits like Toy Story, Monsters Inc. and A Bug’s Life. Jobs could marry technology with art – what he thought he did with Apple and an idea that would define how he worked later in his life. Jobs had found a way to be focused, creative and productive without imploding.
The value of being fired
In the late 1990s, Sculley was gone and Apple was almost bankrupt, but it had enough cash to buy next and bring jobs back on board, first as temporary CEO, then as CEO of a full -time capacity. NEAT’s operating system – now part of Apple’s stable – continued to become the basis for what we now know as macOS.
When Jobs returned to Apple, he was a changed man. Under his renewed management, the company went on an incredibly creative tear: iPhone, iMac, iPod, iTunes and much more was produced under his watch. He not only brought Apple back from the dead, but made it one of the strongest – and hippest – tech companies in the industry.
Still, Jobs thought none of this could have happened if he hadn’t been fired from Apple. As he said in the commencement address he gave at Stanford University in 2005, years after he was removed from his own company, “The weight of being successful was replaced by the ease of being a beginner again, less sure of everything. It released me to get into one of the most creative periods of my life.”
Perhaps the most important aspect was that Jobs realized he still loved what he did. “Your work will fill a big part of your life,” he said, “and the only way to be really happy is to do what you mean is a good job. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”
For jobs, it took off from Apple to realize it. But things could have been very different if it had never happened at all.
