
The Fascinating Bromance Between Steve Jobs and Ross Perot (2018) - rfreytag
https://www.cake.co/conversations/DwwvjtB/the-fascinating-bromance-between-steve-jobs-and-ross-perot
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apo
> I come from an environment where, if you see a snake, you kill it. At GM, if
> you see a snake, the first thing you do is go hire a consultant on snakes.
> Then you get a committee on snakes, and then you discuss it for a couple of
> years. The most likely course of action is — nothing. You figure, the snake
> hasn't bitten anybody yet, so you just let it crawl around on the factory
> floor. We need to build an environment where the first guy who sees the
> snake kills it.

I can't help but read this quote in Ross Perot's voice. Hilarious and
illuminating at the same time.

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cvs268
Now wondering whether the following is true...

> In a sufficiently large team/group/organisation, it is a hard problem to
> differentiate between a snake (imminent catastrophic showstopper) and
> someone else's "autonomous robot without wheels" (experimental feature).

Hmmm?...

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setr
I can imagine this actualy occurring between the low-level employee who spots
the snake, and the game of telephone that occurs as the news travels up the
command hierarchy to reach someone with authority to do something about it

Which is the tradeoff issue with hierarchies; you want the person at the
bottom to be sufficiently autonomous to deal with the problem, as he’ll have
the most information about it, but at the same time, its the person at the top
who has the global knowledge to determine how it actually effects the rest of
the ecosystem. But as the information travels up the chain, it gets
(necessarily) aggregated and details are lost

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heymijo
I love coming across posts like these. There are historical narratives, and
then there are these anecdotes, which add flesh and color from people who were
there.

Much better read than the title alone suggests.

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rchaud
> Perot: “Or, our customer has a problem with our computer we don’t know
> about. Why don’t we call them and ask, if ya ain’t buyin’, why ain’t ya
> buyin’? If ya tell us why ya ain’t buyin’, we can fix it so you can buy it!”

This seems anathema to what we've heard about Jobs' MO, which was "Apple knows
best". They won the MP3 and smartphone wars (more or less), so I'm not
questioning their judgement. But I am curious as to what Apple's customer
research process was like during the microcomputer era compared to the
post-2000 era.

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close04
When it comes to the iPod and iPhone the discussion may be a different one.
The problem wasn't that Apple wasn't selling enough of them but that the
product and market weren't there at all. Once the market is there and you
still can't sell enough then you should start asking "why?".

And these 2 aspects of business (creating vs. maintaining a market) are as
different as a startup and an established business, with different targets and
different leadership styles.

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jacobush
From reading half of Steve Jobs' self(-ish) biography (wouldn't read all of
it, too dark reading to me at the time) I figure Steve had bromances with many
people by virtue of narcissistic bonding.

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motohagiography
Both of them were iconoclasts tolerated by establishments because of talent
and success, so it makes sense they became friends.

Have to ask though: Does bromance mean friendship, except somehow inferior as
the result of being tainted by a backhanded implication of homoeroticism, or
just viewed through the lens of it? That one seems like a candidate for some
unwrapping.

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heymijo
Friendship, yes. Inferior or tainted, no.

Wikipedia has a good definition.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bromance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bromance)

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motohagiography
Thank you for reference. That description seems to be a wiki article that
deconstructs friendship and then reconstitutes it with hooks for critical
theory elements designed to imply empowerment of the critic over the subject.
I'd say that's a load of crap. :)

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RickJWagner
Huh. So that's what Steve Jobs looked like before he adapted his famous closet
full of black turtlenecks.

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purpleidea
Just say "Romance". Men can love too.

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p1necone
I think "Bromance" more accurately translates to just "Close Friendship".
Which seems even worse to me - forget romance, we even see a simple close
friendship between two men as "unusual" enough to warrant a separate term.

