NRO on Steve Jobs as the Greatest Failure in the History of Business

Nick Schulz is an AEI Fellow who hits the nail on the head with this article about how often the guy who changed the entire planet's way of life by introducing us all to things we DIDN'T know we needed or wanted committed epic fail after epic fail.

Jobs failed better than anyone else in Silicon Valley, maybe better than anyone in corporate America. By that I mean Jobs did what only the greatest entrepreneurs can do: learn from their failures. I don’t mean learn from their mistakes. I mean learn from their abject, humiliating, bonehead, epic fails.
Everyone today thinks of Jobs as the genius who gave us the iPod, MacBooks, the iTunes store, the iPhone, the iPad, and so on. Yes, he transformed personal computing and multimedia. But let’s not forget what else Jobs did.

Jobs (along with Steve Wozniak) brought us the Apple I and Apple II computers, early iterations of which sold in the mere hundreds and were complete failures. Not until the floppy disk was introduced and sufficient RAM added did the Apple II take off as a successful product.

The list goes on and on and on......

Jobs was the architect of Lisa, introduced in the early 1980s. You remember Lisa, don’t you? Of course you don’t. But this computer — which cost tens of millions of dollars to develop — was another epic fail. Shortly after Lisa, Apple had a success with its Macintosh computer. But Jobs was out of a job by then, having been tossed aside thanks to the Lisa fiasco.

Jobs went on to found NeXT Computer, which was a big nothing-burger of a company. Its greatest success was that it was purchased by Apple — paving the way for the serial failure Jobs to return to his natural home. Jobs’s greatest successes were to come later — iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, and more

Schulz left out Newton, the forerunner of iPad and who wouldda thunk that Jobs would return to the concept of a small handheld tablet after getting scorched on that particular venture into fiscal futility...? But Steve did. He had that indefinable and almost extinct genius that Thomas Edison and Henry Ford had, the ability to make our lives different through dozens of inventions [with Edison the light bulb and stock ticker and movie projector etc & with Ford the assembly line enabling everyman to own a cheap automobile], things we never really knew we needed until they came to us in cheap & BRILLIANTLY ENGINEERED & DESIGNED & AFFORDABLE forms that suddenly captured the country and then the entire planet by storm.

Jobs is a great entrepreneur for another reason. Lots of ninnies can give customers products they want. Jobs gave people products they didn’t know they wanted, and then made those products indispensable to their lives.

I didn’t know I needed the ability to read the Wall Street Journal and The Corner on a handsome handheld device at my breakfast table, on the Metro, on the Acela, or in any Starbucks I entered. But Steve Jobs did. I didn’t know I wanted to mix and match my music collection on a computer and take it with me wherever I went, but Steve Jobs did. I didn’t know I wanted a portable multimedia platform that would permit me and my kids to hurl angry birds out of a slingshot at thieving pigs. But Steve Jobs did.

All those successes were made possible by failure after failure after failure and the lessons learned from those failures.

Of course, Schulz put the moral of the story front and center:

There’s a moral here for a Washington culture that fears failure too much. In today’s Washington, large banks aren’t permitted to fail; nor are large auto firms. Next up will be too-big-to-fail hospital systems. Steve Jobs is a reminder that failure is a good and necessary thing. And that sometimes the greatest glories are born of catastrophe.

Nowadays, kids are given pass/fail courses in school and every participant in every sports league gets a trophy. The idea of competition is now being suppressed and the fear of psychologically harming youngsters who may lose in a hard-fought contest actually is now being used to lessen the spirit of Vince Lombardi, for instance, when he proclaimed "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing."

[WARNING: Long Slightly Off-Topic Autobiographical Excursion Follows:]
All of which reminded me of an episode in my life which is a tiny vignette: I was about to be interviewed for a very good and prestigious position at the Woodrow Wilson Institute in the Old Iconic Smithsonian HQ Building with the turrets and parapets looming over the south side of the Mall before a small panel of four or five Wilson Center graybeards and their female colleagues, if memory serves, but happened to overhear a sort of pre-briefing on my qualifications given by a young woman who knew nothing about me personally except that I had served overseas in several countries for the State Dept & done a couple of Foggy Bottom positions, then left State to do TV production & other very interesting work as Asst. Producer for "Death of a Princess" for PBS on the murder of a young princess by public execution for running off with a young Saudi of non-royal status. Georgie Ann Geyer told me subsequently that the viewer ratings for the three-part series were the highest in the history of PBS EVER and my work with Bert Van Munster, later creator/producer of "Cops" and still the executive producer of "The Amazing Race" had been one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life.

Meantime, waiting for the Wilson job, the door had [inadvertently, I believe] been left slightly ajar and as I sat waiting outside for the panel's inquiries, I could overhear her telling the panel that I had "failed in every job which I had taken on in my State Department career and thereafter." This advance prepping done by a young Ivy female preppie was blatantly tendentious, but since I was not supposed to have eavesdropped, I thought it would be bad form to bring up this rather silly and superficial prejudicial and slightly dumb as well as non-classy and ignorant faux pas by a young woman whom I had met and conversed with for less than ten minutes in my whole lifetime. The panel interview turned out to be bland and uneventful---no one asked any "hard" questions. And the young woman who had given the sort of chilling pre-curtain raising appraisal had been briefed by another woman with whom I had had some difficulties on the PBS shoot---as they would have said much more colorfully in Goodfellas---it was an inside-the-Beltway thing with all the inconsequential and unimportant lack of gravitas that academic politics has in a slightly similar environment---like a tenure squabble of the sort that drove Amy Bishop into being a homicidal maniac, but which hardly left me breaking a sweat.

And I reflected on how little it meant to be regarded as a "failure in every job" when I had glowing personnel reports, but had always been a little "out of the box" on certain positions & may have seemed a square peg to some who wanted seamless round peg/round hole orthodoxy on every issue. As a final coda and denoument, I learned very shortly after that a very qualified person, more qualified than I in my own view, had already secured a lock on the position. Not only that, I was a friend of the dude and subsequently he performed very well, having been a Middle East Ambassador to Syria, & my own relations with him had previously been and continued to be warm and even friendly.

But as it happened, the short-term result was that there were no fallback positions available and I took on a couple of jobs way out of my accustomed skill set [being a courier, a pizza delivery man, then a bartender and then a member of Mondale's national staff in 1984, although by then I had come to admire Ronald Reagan. I soon got a job at selling bonds, passed my NASD 7 & NASD 63 and embarked on a whole new direction in my life, while my faithful wife took on jobs as a country representative with a very well-connected PR firm and even represented [she had a law degree] the National Society of Tort Lawyers as well as countries such as Panama and Greece. And during my wife's success at PR, she was also able to sell reak estate working with a broker's license. She even sold a couple of homes to State Dept. friends of mine, including David Welch, just yesterday in the Al Jazeera news supposedly implicated in trying to get Qaddafi out of his PR jam as recently as August 12th [David's subsequent career after Marilyn sold him and Gretchen the home in Chevy Chase was spectacularly successful, as Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Asst. Sec'y of State for the Middle East, and upon retirement, a Bechtel corporate official.]

In the same period, I then rebounded to work in a DC boutique stock & bond firm connected to Drexel Burnham Lambert, then segued to working for Denis Neal's lobbying firm, working on Morocco, Pakistan, the Sudan and backstopping other countries in the region. I even met Charlie Wilson and have a bit part in the book [though not the movie] "Charlie Wilson's War." I ended up suddenly with a job offer to take the position of International Editor of the Oil Daily & my first overseas trip was to Vienna just after my daughter Nicola was born in May, 1989. I can remember calling home from the famous Imperial Hotel in Vienna, where Wagner composed several of his best musical scores, during the Tienanmen Square fiasco which coincided with an OPEC meeting in Vienna, hearing Niki's crying and laughter across the Atlantic where I had been driving as a courier & pizza dude just two-three years before. I also worked for Charlie Waterman at Jefferson Waterman on side projects The Oil Daily was aware of and which didn't interfere with my daily reporting. The weirdest moment was a phone conversation with the chief stockholder & virtual owner/megaboss of Occidental Petroleum, the [in]famous [?] and eccentric Armand Hammer, who told me admiringly he thought my columns in The Oil Daily the best reading of his day [Of course, when the colorful AH died a year later, the stock in his company rose over 20%!!!]. I also had a chance to travel to the Gulf War in 1990 as the ONLY oil reporter in the Gulf War, which of course was primarily over oil and subsoil rights. My good friend Adel Al-Jubair [currently Saudi Ambassador to the US] had managed to get me the visa, over the strenuous opposition of the Saudi Ministry of Information, who wanted a strict prohibition on reporters for oil publications. My access to high-ranking Saudis due to my previous residence as Political Officer in Saudi the previous decade gave me face-time on CNN, MacNeil-Lehrer, NBC & CBS as well as the opportunity to ask questions on the televised daily briefings in Riyadh. In addition, I drove Pulitzer reporter Caryl Murphy around town [she needed a chauffeur as a Washington Post reporter doing her interviews] and got some sidebar info using her status as a door-opener. Soon after Desert Storm was over, out of all this print & TV exposure, Amoco Corporation noticed and hired me for a salary & benefits package in late 1991 amounting to close to six-figures. In the five years after that humiliating Wilson interview [there were other episodes and vignettes not quite so shaming, but looking for a job is always a humbling exercise.

All this boring personal commentary is a feeble attempt to elucidate that when life presents you with lemons, there are many ways to make lemonade and an occasional lowering of income and social status [delivering pizzas to then radio DJ Larry King broadcasting out of Alexandria and a famous black sportscaster whose name escapes me this late at night [Crossman?!?} was hardly suitable resume-building material, but bouncing back is an essential component of what life is all about.

So when I see the bizarre ups and downs of Steve Jobs' and Steve Wozniak using their talents [and Jobs' admitted fast-and-furious razzle-dazzle] to recover from failed attempts that blew a lot of hopeful shareholders' money out the window, I can only remember my own much less successful, but similarly chequered career. Driving as a courier & delivering pies & slinging drinks in a Georgetown disco-bar & restaurant [closed for too many violations due to fake IDs shortly after I graduated to selling municipal bonds through cold calls in a bucket shop ] are hardly suitable bullet points in my long and singular resume. I do remember that Steve Jobs went to Pixar---a much more glorious sidestep on his way up the ladder to ultimate planetary domination of innovation & growing his Apple firm [being rehired by a company that fired you reminds me of Churchill's famous apothegm---"it takes courage to rat, but considerable ingenuity to re-rat" when WC jumped from Conservative to Liberal and then back to Conservative] to a size larger than Exxon/Mobil if only for a few days. His life is the most interesting biography, perhaps, of anyone still alive in the business world of the last seven decades---making Trump & Buffett & even Gates look dull boring in comparison....!

Taking his Newton concept and reworking it several different technological twisting ways and finally massaging a glorious failure in the nineties into the greatest success in IT history in 2010 with the phenomenal sales of iPad & the iterations of his other innovations---you have to hand Jobs a unique and singular laurel wreath of the Unbeatable "Comeback King of Corporate Chutzpah." [TM]

I don't think you can find anyone in the history of Sports, Politics or Business who can even approach Steve Jobs in magnitude and sheer glorious triumph even after he was finally downed by the worst adversity anyone can ever encounter---the "Big C," as film legend John Wayne used to call the dreaded and still ultimate champion---Cancer.