Steve Jobs Had One Management Blind Spot. His Longtime Advisor Says This Is What Leaders Get Flawed.
What Kamini Ramani thinks the former Apple CEO got wrong, and what she learned from him.
EXPERT OPINION BY DAN SCHAWBEL, MANAGING PARTNER OF WORKPLACE INTELLIGENCE
Kamini Ramani worked alongside Steve Jobs at NeXT and Pixar before becoming a longtime Silicon Valley CMO. Her new book, Lotus Leadership, argues the best leaders stop treating traits like toughness and empathy as a trade-off.
A scene from Steve Jobs’s exile
Kamini Ramani remembers exactly where she was in November 1995. Steve Jobs had been fired from Apple a decade earlier, and NeXT, the company he built out of spite, had debuted its sleek black box computer to a market that found it too custom and too expensive. Much of the tech industry had written him off.
Jobs hadn’t lost conviction in NeXT, or in Pixar, the animation studio he had rescued with a 10-million-dollar investment. That month he hosted the San Francisco premiere of Toy Story, pulling together Silicon Valley and Hollywood under a dress code of creative black tie. Ramani watched titans in jeans and polka-dotted golf pants paired with tuxedo jackets walk three blocks of red carpet to a Cadillac dealership Disney’s party planners had transformed into a scene from the movie.
“There was an air of wonder and unqualified admiration for Steve,” she says. Less than two years later, Apple acquired NeXT, and Jobs went on to build some of the most influential products of his generation. “My biggest takeaway from working with Steve Jobs: never underestimate a genius, particularly when everyone else has decided he’s finished,” she explains toInc.
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The blind spot she refused to copy
Ramani also learned what not to copy. She recalls Jobs calling one of her press releases “bullsh*t” because the headline left out the word blockbuster in describing Toy Story, even though Pixar’s CFO had advised her to avoid the term since the film hadn’t technically crossed the 100-million-dollar mark that defined it in Hollywood.
“I kept the audacity. I never adopted the abrasiveness,” she says. “You can demand excellence, speak truth to power, and hold an incredibly high bar without making people collateral damage along the way.” That mix of toughness and tact carried into her work as CMO at the venture firm Mayfield, where the throughline was storytelling. “The best stories don’t just communicate information. They make people feel something and help them see a future that doesn’t exist yet. That was one of Steve Jobs’s superpowers.”
Why she wrote Lotus Leadership
That blind spot in Jobs brilliance, paired with a willingness to bulldoze people, became the seed of Ramani’s new book, Lotus Leadership: A Modern Playbook of Ancient Wisdom, drawn from interviews with more than 100 women. Her argument is that most leaders wrongly treat traits like toughness and empathy, or confidence and humility, as a trade-off instead of a toolbox. She points to Aparna Bawa, who spent years succeeding inside an investment banking culture built on hard-charging competition before a boss described the next level up as shark-infested waters. “She realized, I don’t want to lead this way,” Ramani says. Bawa moved into tech and built what she calls a “loving tough” style, delivering hard feedback with real empathy.
Source: www.inc.com
