In Command

The time Steve Jobs killed a Q&A with bluntness

I know I had seen this video before, but in re-watching it thanks to Rands’ post, I’m struck by a few things.

First, of course, it’s almost unbelievable how prescient nearly everything Steve Jobs says here actually is. If not all of it came to pass, nearly all of it did.¹ And he spoke about things in great detail. As Rands notes, Jobs wasn’t underestimating the future, he was writing it, seemingly on the fly in that conversation.

But almost as interesting as the content of the talk was the delivery and presentation. This was not the highly-polished keynote that gets rehearsed for weeks leading up to the event. This was a full-on, open Q&A. The thought of such a forum would likely terrify most people. Not Jobs. He uses the opportunity to show who is in command of a company he’s not yet technically in command of again.

Usually, such Q&As tend to veer off the tracks because anyone can ask anything. And while the questions people often ask in this format may not be dumb, they are often seemingly irrelevant or uninteresting to most others in the audience (including us, watching nearly 20 years later). But Jobs has such command over every little thing asked that he turns dull minutia interesting. This is no small feat, it’s a massive one.

Too often it feels like we see leaders of companies give rote, canned answers that it almost feels as if questions aren’t even worth asking. This is not only true in public settings, but also in more private ones as well. Some of it is certainly chalked up to not wanting to reveal something one shouldn’t — or, at least in public, saying something one shouldn’t. But it also strikes me as sometimes coming down to a lack of command of the material. It’s not only hard to give an interesting answer to a question if you don’t know the actual answer, it’s impossible.

Maybe this can be chalked up to Jobs being too much of a micro-manager. But it doesn’t come across that way in this talk. It just sounds like he truly, passionately cares about everything going on with Apple at the time, and he’s thought deeply about all of it.

Which leads to the other element that comes across in the Q&A: bluntness. You can argue about whether Jobs is actually being sincere or fully honest in all of his answers, but he sure makes it sound like he is. The reason is that he’s giving very direct, frank answers to the questions asked. He’s not trying to give the most PR-friendly answer, he’s telling you what he thinks (or, at least, what he wants you to think he thinks — which, again, takes true command of material in order to do).

In most such settings, leaders end up saying what amounts to nothing. We all understand why that is, but it’s a waste of everyones’ time. Jobs, of course, didn’t have much to lose at this point (including his company, again, as it wasn’t yet his, again), but my god, how refreshing is it to hear a talk like this? I feel like we never see that anymore.