Flutterby™! : Jerome on Steve

My friend from the Pixar Interactive Group days is running Bitnana Software, and has a few notes about Steve Jobs. On Facebook I responded:

I remember the aplomb with which he answered your "what's with the turtlenecks?" question in one of the PIG meetings. There was one of those movies about the personal computing boom that was kind of harsh to Steve, and Leo commented that it showed why you wouldn't want to work for him, but not why you would. My interactions with Steve were generally in the "why we would" side of things.

And a few years ago I was down in Cupertino at Apple, talking with their developer relations guys about some issue involving paging that was causing some code to run slower than it should have, and I saw Steve in the parking lot. We nodded to each other, smiled, and carried on. I've no idea if he remembered me, or if I was vaguely familiar, or if he didn't recognize me at all, but I got the feeling that in his day that little acknowledgement was a detail that mattered.

I think that's a trait of a good leader. Even if every time I break down and buy a modern Apple product I'm horribly disappointed.