The illness and untimely passing of Steve Jobs have been accompanied by an outpouring of commentary on his life, all of which has afforded the opportunity to consider his contributions in the various disciplines in which he worked. Jobs’ contributions also can shed light on the nature of engineering, art, and leadership and on how skills in these areas complement each other.
Was Jobs an engineer? MacWorld U.K. reported May 9 that in a survey of 900 engineering undergraduates in the United Kingdom, Jobs placed third on a list of engineering heroes behind the 19th century British civil engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel and (oddly) James Dyson of vacuum cleaner fame. (Dyson’s selection may owe more to his efforts on behalf of the James Dyson Foundation, which supports engineering education, than to innovative vacuum cleaners.)
But in another view from the United Kingdom, Ian Douglas, writing Oct. 6 in the Telegraph, says Jobs’ prowess was not in engineering or design—he relied on people like Steve Wozniak, Jef Raskin, and Jonathon Ive for that, exhibiting the leadership that brought out their best work.
On the occasion of the introduction of the first iPad, Jobs attributed Apple’s success to its position at the intersection of technology and liberal arts. That, writes Walter S. Mossberg in his Oct. 6 Wall Street Journal remembrance, drove Jobs to “… delight and empower actual users, not intermediaries like corporate IT directors.” (That’s not to say IT directors aren’t important. See this issue’s cover story for more on that.)
According to Mossberg, Jobs “…was a historical figure on the scale of a Thomas Edison or Henry Ford.” But Robert J. Samuelson expresses a contrary viewpoint in an Oct. 10 Washington Post item titled “The legacy of Steve Jobs.” Samuelson admits to a resistance to digital technology, noting that he abandoned his typewriter only recently, and he finds much of the coverage of Jobs “over the top.” He credits Jobs with building a company with a market capitalization around $350 billion. But, he says, Henry Ford’s advances in the manufacture of automobiles fostered suburbanization and oil dependence while Edison’s electrification efforts altered how factories were designed and operated and enabled the development of everything electric, including Jobs’ computers and mobile devices. In contrast, he says, Jobs’ achievements are tiny: “Transforming the music industry is not the same as transforming society.”
I agree with Samuelson that innovations from air travel to antibiotics are considerably more significant than iPods. But, to my mind, the iPod may be the least of Jobs’ initiatives. The user interface Jobs brought to the masses is transforming how we work, just as electricity transformed factories. With a personal computer and a smart phone, I can work from my home office in Boston although our company is headquartered in Nokomis, FL.
Engineers at fabless chip companies in the United States can share real-time test data with their subcontractors in Asia. Mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad show considerable promise to augment applications including instrument control, data acquisition, and medical diagnostics—topics I will address in more detail in our January issue.
But was Jobs an engineer—or something else? My favorite anecdote that sheds light on this question, recounted by Malcolm Gladwell in a May 16 New Yorker article, involved Jobs’ examination in 1979 of the Xerox PARC mouse—a $300 device with a two-week mean time to failure. Jobs demanded that his industrial designer develop one that could be built for $15 and last a couple of years.
Jobs may not have known how to design the mouse himself, but he could identify what was possible and could motivate engineers to realize his dreams. He may not have been an expert circuit board designer, but in recognizing that Wozniak had that skill, Jobs showed himself to be a superb engineering manager.
So I agree with the U.K. students. I could quibble with their order (I would definitely put fourth-place Tesla ahead of Dyson), but Jobs belongs somewhere on the list.
For additional commentary and links to the articles cited above, visit my blog: https://www.evaluationengineering.com/index.php/ricks-blog/
Rick Nelson
Executive Editor
[email protected]