Walter Isaacson Quote
Jobs had not tempered his way of dealing with employees. He applied charm or public humiliation in a way that in most cases proved to be pretty effective, Tribble recalled. But sometimes it wasn’t. One engineer, David Paulsen, put in ninety-hour weeks for the first ten months at NeXT. He quit when Steve walked in one Friday afternoon and told us how unimpressed he was with what we were doing. When Business Week asked him why he treated employees so harshly, Jobs said it made the company better. Part of my responsibility is to be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected. But he still had his spirit and charisma. There were plenty of field trips, visits by aikido masters, and off-site retreats.
Jobs had not tempered his way of dealing with employees. He applied charm or public humiliation in a way that in most cases proved to be pretty effective, Tribble recalled. But sometimes it wasn’t. One engineer, David Paulsen, put in ninety-hour weeks for the first ten months at NeXT. He quit when Steve walked in one Friday afternoon and told us how unimpressed he was with what we were doing. When Business Week asked him why he treated employees so harshly, Jobs said it made the company better. Part of my responsibility is to be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected. But he still had his spirit and charisma. There were plenty of field trips, visits by aikido masters, and off-site retreats.
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About Walter Isaacson
He has been the president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan policy studies organization based in Washington, D.C., the chair and CEO of CNN, and the editor of Time.
Isaacson attended Harvard University and Pembroke College, Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He is the co-author with Evan Thomas of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986) and the author of Pro and Con (1983), Kissinger: A Biography (1992), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), American Sketches (2009), Steve Jobs (2011), The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (2014), Leonardo da Vinci (2017), The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race (2021) and Elon Musk (2023).
Isaacson is an advisory partner at Perella Weinberg Partners, a New York City-based financial services firm. He was vice chair of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which oversaw the rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina, chaired the government board that runs Voice of America, and was a member of the Defense Innovation Board.