Berating people over their shoddy work and making them cry is undoubtedly at the outside limit of what’s acceptable in the workplace, the stuff lawsuits are made of. While Jobs didn’t break any laws, per se, he clearly disregarded the prevailing rules of interpersonal relations. And he didn’t seem to care. Much has been made of Jobs’s character flaws. These incidents are the proof his critics cite when they dismiss him as a jerk and a bully and suggest that Apple’s freakish success was somehow tainted and unrepeatable. What isn’t often noted, however, is that in many cases people responded to
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This is a false equivalency. In sports there are rules and governing bodies to punish you if you break them. There's no such thing in business. In the situation Walker just described, Jobs is not doing what captains do. He's being a bully, using his position as CEO and founder to browbeat others. It's worth noting that firing the guy in charge of the project didn't make the product any better. It failed. So he didn't get the oucome he says the captains get.
