Steve Jobs Had to Get Fired to Learn How to Build Apple to Last

In 1988, Steve Jobs walked into a classroom, settled on the floor to face the students, and asked, "so what do you want to talk about."

The scene was not what the legend would suggest. Jobs had been forced out of Apple, the company he had co-founded, about three years earlier. He was running a new computer company called NeXT, which had not yet become the next big thing. He told the students plainly that he had been booted out of his last company. What followed was a nearly two-hour seminar on creating companies, creativity, where computing was headed, and how to assemble teams.

The invitation had come from Jim Collins, then a young management researcher and teacher who would go on to write Good to Great. Collins had cold-called Jobs, and Jobs, in his telling, was gracious. Jobs was so far out of favor at the time that he had not been invited to a gathering of the top 500 Silicon Valley leaders. If you listened to the conversation that day, Collins said, you would not have sensed defeat. It was all pointed forward.

That forward drive is what stuck with Collins. Collins said Jobs "was utterly driven for the actual quest of the work, not what the work would bring." He had no way of knowing whether he would ever regain his earlier stature, and he kept working anyway.

That choice is the thread of the Jobs that Collins came to know. The brash young founder grew into a disciplined builder whose ambition moved off himself and onto the company.

Collins divides the arc into Steve Jobs 1.0 and Steve Jobs 2.0. The first was the young entrepreneur, famous for intensity and difficult behavior. The second was forged by being fired, by years in the wilderness, and by learning from people like Ed Catmull, the computer scientist and leader at the animation studio Pixar. The later Jobs was, in some ways, less colorful, Collins said, but far more effective.

By the end, Collins believes, Jobs had become what his research calls a level 5 leader. In the study of companies that rose from good results to great results that endured for well over a decade, those companies tended to be led at the turning point by people with what Collins described as "personal humility and indomitable will." Their ambition burned as fiercely as anyone's, but it was channeled outward into a cause larger than themselves.

For Jobs, Collins said, the wilderness added humility that had not been there before, while the will never wavered. In his final years, Jobs called Collins a couple of times to talk about the future of Apple. The question on his mind was not how to be celebrated, but how to make Apple an enduring great company whose, as Collins put it, "ultimate proof would be that it didn't need him." He wanted it to keep making what he called bicycles for the mind, tools that would unleash the creativity of millions and billions of people.

So Collins does not describe Jobs as a success story. He calls him a growth story, proof that entrepreneurs and company builders are not different species. The best founders, he argues, often start as one and grow, by choice, into the other.