In July 2008, Steve Jobs walked into the Town Hall auditorium on Apple’s Cupertino campus, a room normally reserved for the press launches that made the company famous. He was not there to launch anything. He was there to find the people responsible for MobileMe.
The new cloud service had shipped two weeks earlier and immediately broken in public. Walt Mossberg, the Wall Street Journal columnist whose blessing Apple had relied on for a decade, had written a brutal review. Subscribers couldn’t sync. Email vanished. Press coverage was scathing. Jobs assembled the entire MobileMe team in the auditorium and opened with a question.
“Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?”
Someone gave him a clean answer.
“So why the f--- doesn’t it do that?”
He spent the next thirty minutes telling the team they had tarnished Apple’s reputation. He told them they should hate each other for letting each other down. He told them Walt Mossberg, their friend, was no longer writing good things about them. Then he named a new executive on the spot and disbanded most of the original team. The account comes from Adam Lashinsky’s Inside Apple feature in Fortune, published three years later.
Nobody walked out of that room. No member of Apple’s board called an emergency session. No human resources investigation followed. The CEO of one of the most valuable public companies in the world had just stood in front of dozens of his employees and told them to hate each other, and the organizational response was to ship a better product. Three years later, when Jobs died, he was one of the most admired chief executive in the world.
The interesting question is not whether Steve Jobs was a difficult boss. He was, and the evidence had been public for a very long time. The New York Times described him as “widely hated at Apple” in October 1987. The interesting question is why none of it ever stopped him.
The answer is that we don’t punish behavior. We punish behavior in context. And the context that matters most is whether the numbers are good.
A Framework Hiding in Plain Sight
Most leadership writing treats bad behavior as a fixed quantity. The leader is either abusive or not, either over the line or not, and the only real question is how long it takes the organization to notice. The trouble with this framing is that it doesn’t match what actually happens inside organizations, where the same behavior gets celebrated, tolerated, ignored, and finally prosecuted in rapid succession, often without the behavior itself changing at all.
In 2016, a research team led by Robert J. Bies at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business published a chapter that tried to explain why. Working with Thomas M. Tripp of Washington State and Debra L. Shapiro of Maryland, Bies argued that whether subordinates and outside observers perceive a leader’s harsh behavior as abuse or as motivation depends on a small set of contextual factors that have very little to do with the behavior itself. Their summary, published in Psychology Today, is unusually direct: “Whether one is viewed as an abusive leader or a master motivator is in the eye of the beholder.”
Three filters do most of the work.
The first is whether the leader develops people into top performers. When the team wins, the yelling reads as standard setting. When the team loses, the same yelling reads as bullying. The second is whether subordinates trust the leader’s motives. Trust acts as a translator that turns hostile remarks into “she wants me to be better.” Without trust, the same remarks become “she is trying to break me.” The third is the explanation the leader offers for the behavior. A sincere account of why the standards are high buys an enormous amount of grace. A dismissive “that’s just who I am” buys none of it.
The implication is the part most readers miss. The behavior may not have to change very much for the verdict to change. Context often does much of the work. And the most volatile element in that context is whether the leader is still winning.
This is not an argument for tolerance. It is a description of the machine. When results are extraordinary, harsh behavior gets reclassified as excellence. When results turn, the same behavior gets reclassified as misconduct. The leader didn’t shift. The frame did.
Three cases show the machine in motion.
Linda Wachner, 1986 to 2001
Linda Wachner won control of Warnaco in a hostile leveraged buyout in 1986 and took the company public again five years later. Over the next fifteen years she built it from a sleepy $600 million bra manufacturer into a $2.5 billion apparel conglomerate. By the late 1990s, she held licenses for Calvin Klein, Speedo, Chaps by Ralph Lauren, and Fruit of the Loom. She was one of only a handful of women to head a Fortune 500 industrial company. By the late 1990s her personal stake in the business was worth around $200 million.
She also ran her organization with a public brutality that was reported openly, repeatedly, and without apparent consequence while the company was succeeding.
In October 1993, Fortune magazine published a cover story titled “America’s Toughest Bosses”. Wachner was one of seven leaders profiled, alongside Steve Jobs, Harvey and Bob Weinstein, T.J. Rodgers of Cypress Semiconductor, and Herbert Haft of Dart Group. The piece quoted her telling a newly arrived executive, “You’d better start firing people so they’ll understand you’re serious.” It noted she had once kept another executive waiting three days before dismissing him after a two-minute meeting. Reached for comment by the Associated Press, her explanation was that “that was in a turnaround situation.”
None of this was secret. Fortune put it in print. The board knew. Shareholders knew. Calvin Klein, who would later sue her, knew. And for the better part of fifteen years, nobody did anything, because while Wachner was doing what Fortune had called her out for doing, the share price was climbing toward forty-four dollars, more than four times the post-split IPO price. She had a severance agreement that would pay her $43 million if she were ever fired. The board was not going to fire her. Why would they? She was making them rich.
Then in 2000, Warnaco lost $338 million that year. The stock fell eighty-seven percent, eventually trading at thirty-nine cents a share. Calvin Klein, who had not previously felt the need to comment on Wachner’s management style during the years his licenses were profitable, suddenly described her in a federal lawsuit as “a cancer on the value and integrity of” the Calvin Klein brand. The Securities and Exchange Commission opened an investigation into a $145 million inventory misstatement; documents released years later showed PricewaterhouseCoopers consultants had alerted Wachner and her CFO to the problem in the spring of 1998, nearly three years before it became public. Warnaco filed for bankruptcy in June 2001. The $43 million parachute was voided by the filing. On November 16, 2001, the board fired her, with the directors deciding not to pay severance.
The Wachner of 2001 was the Wachner of 1993. The management style had not softened, and the inventory problem had not been new; the Fortune profile had run five years before PwC first flagged the inventory discrepancy and eleven years before the SEC formally documented it. What changed was the cover the numbers were providing. The moment the numbers turned, every anecdote that had once been chalked up to a “tough boss” became evidence in a fiduciary case. Same behavior. Different verdict.
Bobby Knight, 1971 to 2000
Wachner showed how quickly the verdict can flip when the numbers turn in a single bad year. Bobby Knight shows the slower version: how institutions absorb behavior, decade after decade, until they cannot remember what their original standards were. Knight coached the Indiana Hoosiers for twenty-nine years. He won three NCAA championships, an Olympic gold medal in 1984, and 662 games at Indiana alone. He was, by any reasonable measure, one of the most successful college basketball coaches who ever lived.
He was also, across those same twenty-nine years, repeatedly violent.
In 1975, he grabbed sophomore guard Jim Wisman by the jersey and jerked him into his seat during a game. On February 23, 1985, during a home game against Purdue, he picked up a red plastic chair from the Indiana bench and threw it across the floor as a Purdue player prepared to shoot a technical free throw. In March 1994, he head-butted a freshman named Sherron Wilkerson after pulling him from a game. In 1997, during a closed practice, he put his hands around the throat of a player named Neil Reed.
The notable feature of each of these incidents is not the incident itself. It is what the institution did about it. The chair-throwing in 1985 produced a one-game suspension from the Big Ten and two years of probation. Knight made it into a recurring comedy bit on David Letterman. The head-butt in 1994 was explained away by Indiana’s sports information director as an accident. The choking incident in 1997 was not acted on at all by Indiana.
This is where Diane Vaughan’s work becomes useful. In The Challenger Launch Decision, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1996, Vaughan analyzed how NASA, an organization with no shortage of intelligence, expertise, or safety procedures, came to launch a shuttle that was likely to fail. Her conclusion, what she called the normalization of deviance, was that institutions don’t tolerate single transgressions. They tolerate accumulating ones. Each time a deviation from the standard happens and produces no catastrophic consequence, the deviation gets quietly absorbed into the new standard. By the time something irreversible happens, the organization has been operating outside its original safety parameters for years and calling it normal.
That is exactly what happened at Indiana. By 1997, the institution that would have fired any other coach for choking a player in practice did not act, because Indiana had already been absorbing Knight’s behavior for twenty-six years. The chair, the head-butt, the grabbed jerseys, all of these had already been absorbed into how Coach Knight runs the program. The choking incident in 1997 had effectively ceased being treated as a transgression. By 1997, it was the standard.
What finally moved Indiana was not the behavior. It was the visibility. In March 2000, CNN/Sports Illustrated aired the practice video. Three months later, Indiana president Myles Brand imposed a “zero tolerance” policy. In September 2000, Knight grabbed the arm of a freshman who had said, “Hey, Knight, what’s up?” and Brand fired him.
By that point, Indiana had not been to a Final Four since 1992 and had not won a championship since 1987. The team was no longer a national title contender. Bies’s analysis names this directly: Knight was, in his words, “eventually fired for reasons that pointed to the abusiveness of his leadership style at a time when his team no longer had a winning record.” The behavior had not escalated. The cover had collapsed.
Steve Jobs, 1976 to 2011
Return briefly to the MobileMe room, because the point is not to relitigate Jobs. The point is that he proves the model at the highest possible altitude.
The 1987 Times description of Jobs as “widely hated at Apple” was published before the Macintosh team had even finished metabolizing his first ouster. The MobileMe meeting in 2008 was twenty-one years later. In between, Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, launched the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad, and added roughly $400 billion in market capitalization. Walter Isaacson’s biography catalogs more or less the same behavioral patterns in 1983 and in 2010. The patterns did not soften with age.
What changed, instead, was that by the time of the MobileMe meeting, no internal critic existed who could survive a confrontation with both the CEO and the share price. Bies’s three filters were all maximally pinned in Jobs’s favor. The products were defining a generation. Trust was reinforced every quarter. And Jobs’s standard explanation, that the company existed to make great products, was the most defensible motive any leader has ever been able to claim.
This is what the Bies framework predicts in the limit case. When results are extraordinary, harsh behavior does not get downgraded into motivation. It gets upgraded into legend. The MobileMe team did not leave that auditorium feeling abused. By every account that survives, they left it more committed to fixing the product. That is not a happy ending. That is the system working exactly as Bies and Vaughan described it.
The Uncomfortable Mirror
Most readers of this piece will not be running organizations with Steve Jobs in them. They will be running organizations with a much more ordinary version of the same problem.
The high-performing engineer whose 1:1s leave people in tears, but whose technical judgment is irreplaceable. The salesperson who hits 140 percent of quota every quarter and openly disrespects the legal team. The executive whose strategy is brilliant and whose treatment of direct reports is corrosive. In every case, the same machine is running. Each instance of bad behavior produces no real consequence because the results of the behavior are good. Each non-consequence teaches the organization that the standard has moved. By year three, the behavior is no longer a transgression. It is a feature.
The harder, more honest question is the one Bies’s framework forces on every leader who is paying attention. What would the verdict on this person’s behavior be if their results dropped twenty percent next quarter? Not because their results are likely to drop. They probably aren’t. But because the gap between how you are judging the behavior today and how you would judge it tomorrow is the exact measure of how much coverage their performance is currently providing.
That gap is your normalization of deviance. It is also the headline you have not written yet.
What to Do About It
This week, write down the name of one person in your organization whose behavior you would act on tomorrow if their numbers dropped twenty percent. Do not soften the exercise by adding the people whose behavior is bad and whose numbers are bad. Those are easy. Write down the name of the person whose behavior you are currently filing under “high standards” or “passion” or “she gets results.”
Then ask yourself the harder question. Are you waiting for the behavior to escalate, or are you waiting for the results to fade? Because if it is the second one, your organization is not making a judgment about character. It is making a bet about performance. And if the performance ever turns, the same behavior you are tolerating today will become the headline you are explaining tomorrow.
The verdict is not on the leader.
The verdict is on you.