Nearly four years after Steve Jobs died, a debate is still raging. Does Jobs deserve to be so admired?
That's the underlying question that emerged in a new documentary released over the weekend by Alex Gibney in Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine. It is also a question that lies beneath the surface of the coming biopic by Aaron Sorkin, Steve Jobs, which had its premiere at the Telluride Film Festival this weekend and will open on October 9.
Jobs was a complicated leader: Brilliantly creative and obsessive about details yet so maniacal that he could make his colleagues cry and, yes, he created his own truth at times. (That's the polite way of putting it.)
Gibney, who directed the recent HBO documentary Going Clear about Scientology, explained what appeared to be his rationale for pursuing a documentary about Jobs in a voice-over at the beginning of the film.
"When Steve Jobs died, I was mystified," Gibney said, as he showed images of people all over the world mourning his loss. "What accounted for the grief of millions of people who didn't know him? I'd seen it with John Lennon and Martin Luther King, but Steve Jobs wasn't a singer or a civil rights leader." He added: "The grief for Jobs seemed to go beyond the products he left behind. We mourned the man himself. But why?"
Gibney, a talented and persuasive filmmaker, uses the next two hours to seemingly make the case that Jobs, the man, doesn't deserve the iconic status he attained. Through a series of interviews - including one with the mother of a child Jobs denied for years was his own - Gibney paints Jobs as "ruthless, deceitful and cruel". Gibney goes through a laundry list of Jobs's sins: Backdated stock options, factory conditions in China and secret agreements with Silicon Valley rivals to prevent employee-poaching.
But all these efforts to paint Jobs as a hero or a villain miss a larger truth: He can be both and still be worthy of acclaim. More than 700 million of his iPhones have been sold around the world, and a new version is to be announced on Wednesday. Hundreds of millions of people spend more time with their iPhones - and all the copycat and derivative devices - than just about anything else on any given day. He managed to create an emotional attachment between humans and a device.
You don't have to be an "Apploonian" to appreciate that he has an authentic claim on changing the world during this last generation.
Not surprisingly, most people who have had a huge influence on the world have been flawed, some deeply so. Most people are flawed in one way or another.
Gibney held out John Lennon and Martin Luther King Jr as somehow more worthy than Jobs of the wave of grief that took place after they died. But both Lennon and King were terribly troubled, too.
Lennon's son Julian told The London Telegraph in 1998: "I felt he was a hypocrite. Dad could talk about peace and love out loud to the world, but he could never show it to the people who supposedly meant the most to him: his wife and son. How can you talk about peace and love and have a family in bits and pieces - no communication, adultery, divorce?"
King had his own personal demons: It is well chronicled that he was a serial adulterer.
That history is worth remembering not to cast judgement on their huge accomplishments, but to remind us that they are human. (Whether Jobs does or does not deserve to be compared to King is a different question.)
Sadly, it does appear that being flawed in one area may help in others. In an article in The Atlantic titled "Why It Pays to Be a Jerk," the author Jerry Useem quotes several studies that show that nice guys don't usually win. Donald Hambrick, a management professor at Penn State, told the magazine, "To the extent that innovation and risk-taking are in short supply in the corporate world, narcissists are the ones who are going to step up to the plate."
Not everyone thinks Jobs was a jerk. Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice-president for internet software and services, wrote on Twitter that he felt the Gibney film was "an inaccurate and meanspirited view of my friend. It's not a reflection of the Steve I knew."
But the black hat-white hat version of Jobs may be too confining.
In a fascinating interview last year with Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair, Jonathan Ive, Apple's famed designer and longtime friend of Jobs, recounted a telling story. He remembered a time when Jobs had been tough - too tough, in Ive's estimation - on his team. Ive pulled him aside and told him to be bit nicer. "Well, why?" Jobs replied. "Because I care about the team," Ive responded. "And he said this brutally, brilliantly insightful thing, which was, 'No, Jony, you're just really vain,' " Ive recalled. "He said, 'You just want people to like you, and I'm surprised at you because I thought you really held the work up as the most important, not how you believed you were perceived by other people.' "
That story and the documentary left me with me with two questions: Would you rather do something extraordinary that benefits the lives of millions of people? Or be liked by several hundred? And does it have to be an either-or question?
The answer, like Jobs, is complicated.
©2015 The New York Times News Service
