There were two stories in this morning’s Times that interested me even more when I sensed that there was a connection between them. The connection is not obvious, and I want to try to work it out here.

The first piece is David Brooks’s column about Amy Chua. Amy Chua is a lawyer of Chinese background who, in her book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, describes her career as a very tough mom. Brooks’s “paradoxical” point is that she’s not tough at all; on the contrary, Chua is protecting her daughters from the tough cognitive tests that determine both success and happiness in life. This carries forward the thinking that Brooks outlined in his New Yorker essay last week, and underlines my conclusion that an educational model that takes the cognitive revolution into account will put much less emphasis on individual examinations than today’s best schools do. Chua, subscribing to the received wisdom that finds a high correlation between achievement and advancement, imposed upon her daughters a rigorous program of “practice makes perfect,” neither questioning the value of perfection nor assessing its cost. We agree witr Brooks that this is not very intelligent. 

Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls. Managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group — these and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or a class at Yale.

The other piece is about Apple. Steve Jobs is ailing, and he’ll be taking another leave of absence from running the company. Miguel Helft and Claire Cain Miller report that the “deep bench” of leaders at Apple ought to insure its continued success. But they quote a couple of observers who aren’t so sure. One of them is David Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. 

“The company could not thrive if Steve didn’t have an extremely talented team around him,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School who has studied the technology industry for decades. “But you can’t replace Steve on some levels.” 

Mr. Yoffie and others said Mr. Jobs’s creativity, obsession with a product’s design and function, and management style, as well as the force of his personality, were unusual, not only in Silicon Valley, but also in American business. They said that it would take several people with different skills to fill Mr. Jobs’s shoes.

The reinvention of Steve Jobs is one of the most interesting stories in American business. Always a visionary as well as a gifted engineer, Mr Jobs appears to have lacked good people skills in his first shift at Apple’s helm. He was tossed out of his own company, and languished in the wilderness for over ten years. For the past fifteen years, he has shown himself to be the nucleus of a brilliantly creative team. That I call him the nucleus of the team rather than its leader is an indication of the connection that I see between the two stories. A leader is much easier to replace than a nucleus; it’s also much easier to measure the effectiveness of a leader. Leadership is just another individual skill that can be learned. By “nucleus,” I have something far more complex in mind: the center of a web of semi-conscious (or even unconscious) signals, suggestions, cues, and associations that bind Apple’s top engineers and marketers in a productive unit. Steve Jobs runs that web — again, I would argue, unconsciously. I have no idea what lessons he learned during his exile, but it is not necessary that becoming a more “understanding” leader was one of them. The only thing that Mr Jobs had to understand, at the end of the day, was how to pick compatible executives. (And this may be nothing more or less complicated than a matter of wearing clothes — although the heir-apparent, Timothy Cook, looks as if he’d be much more comfortable in a jacket and tie.) All he had to learn was how to be a more powerful nucleus, a more efficient reader and emitter of personal communications. Insofar as the result was to unleash the true power of Steve Jobs — and this does seem to be what happened — then it is very unlikely that Apple will continue on its course of staggeringly successful innovation. 

Continuing on that course may not be necessary for Apple to continue to be a successful enterprise — but that’s a matter for some other time. My point is that Apple’s success under Steve Jobs appears to have depended on the very skills that, in David Brooks’s view, Amy Chua has denied her daughters the pportunity to acquire. We certainly don’t know very much about teaching them.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 18th, 2011 at 3:00 pm.