Simon’s Blog

There’s a fun article in today’s Guardian newspaper, that describes what it’s like to have a face-to-face meeting with Apple CEO Steve Jobs. It’s definitely worth a read.

Meetings with Steve Jobs don’t really sound that different to meetings with many senior people in many organisations. One of my favourite quotes from the article is:

Once, when renegotiating a Pixar distribution deal with Disney, he humiliated Disney’s chief information officer in front of his staff. Steve pointed to a couple of recent Disney flops, and told the attendees that they could expect more of the same as long as the CIO was stupid enough to keep Macs out of the creative process.

That’s hilarious! I don’t see why the CIO should buckle with a little comment like that. It’s not a difficult point to address.

I can see why people would find him intimidating, but, I suspect he just doesn’t suffer fools gladly. I know someone that’s a family friend of Steve Jobs (yes, contrary to popular opinion, he has friends ). From what she has said about him, he seems like a nice guy. Hell, he even used to push her on her swing when she was a child. Sounds like he’s bit of a pussycat to me…