Shortly after Steve Jobs was removed from Apple, he and select few co-workers founded NeXt in order to market to schools. This video showcases Jobs and his team brainstorming how to get their product to market. It starts getting interesting when it gets to crunch time for the deadlines and with dwindling resources. You can also start to see Jobs' notoriety for being a less than pleasant person start to manifest itself. What can't be denied is that Jobs had a vision and while it is my opinion that Jobs' vision mostly was to take someone else's ideas and then, admittedly, improve on them his driving personality is very much on display in his younger years.
Throughout the video I noticed that the casual atmosphere and informal brainstorming didn't produce much and while we know that NeXt was bought by Apple in 1996 the success that NeXt would find isn't easy to see in the last bit of the video. Jobs saw his role as the grounding feature of a team of technicians that had belief but very little idea of how to make belief a reality. Founding a company is a tremendous undertaking and you can see how Jobs knew these hurdles but allowed the team to start to see them for themselves.
Earlier in the course we undertook a survey that was designed to showcase our managerial traits. For me, this was interesting but I don't place much faith in personality surveys, especially the Meyer-Briggs as much can depend on mood when answering the questions. That being said, it was consistent in much of my results that I tend to push boundaries. The debrief stated that I enjoy know what the rules are and that may be true but that is generally so I know which rules I can break and which rules I can merely bend. Additionally, I had high creativity scores and I do enjoy the arts and have great respect for anyone that creates; be it art or technology. Part of my disdain for Steve Jobs is that he didn't so much create as he stood on the shoulders of giants and improved their hats.
Brainstorming sessions like the one portrayed in this video are some of the most enjoyable aspects of problem solving for me. My debrief indicated that I tend to take process improvement seriously and in many ways I simply find it fun. I like nothing better than taking things apart to see how they work and with people-orientated processes you can often put the pieces back together in new and creative ways.
With regards to the video one can start to see the beginnings of group-think. That doesn't mean that it occurred but the seeds were there. One of the things needed for group-think to occur is that there is a strong leader that needs to be appeased. As the frustration builds you can see Jobs becoming much more task focused. This isn't a bad thing but if other group members start to see appeasing the leader as more important than delivering a good product the results can be less than satisfactory. We know from history that Steve Jobs went back to Apple and that Apple is one of the more successful companies in its field so something went correctly somewhere along the line. Bringing that back to what I know about myself is that I always make sure that someone is playing devil's advocate in any process improvement session that I am in. Sometimes that advocate is me and that suits me well as I sometimes learn more about a process by discussing the ways in which it can fail.
Overall, I don't think that I would have done well in the NeXt startup. I push against the rules a bit much for some leadership and I don't think that would have fit in well with Jobs. Additionally, the subject matter is not one in which I have a great passion.
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