maybe5 » Leadership http://blog.maybe5.com This is where my random thoughts go. Sat, 19 Feb 2011 16:09:07 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.5 Steve Jobs Handles an Epic Failure http://blog.maybe5.com/2008/08/06/steve-jobs-handles-an-epic-failure/ http://blog.maybe5.com/2008/08/06/steve-jobs-handles-an-epic-failure/#comments Wed, 06 Aug 2008 17:43:38 +0000 kareem http://blog.maybe5.com/?p=6 Imagine the challenge of a large scale roll out like the new Apple iPhone, app store, iTunes and MobileMe all at once. Well, you don’t have to. Apple rolled out all those new releases at once and we saw what happened. Phones couldn’t be activated, people using .mac weren’t able to access email for up to 8 hours and so many of the applications on the app store were and still are buggy.

With a failure this epic, how would you expect a company CEO(or any leaders in the company for that matter) to react? I have to give credit to Steve Jobs. His memo to the company is pure class.

At a time when you think execs would be tearing a strip off of managers(who knows, maybe Steve did behind closed doors), he managed to get the perfect message across to the company as a whole. – We screwed up, we have the potential to get it right. Let’s do it. -

He let everyone know that what happened was a terrible mistake without coming across too harsh, and without minimizing his disappointment either. He then summed up the mistakes they made, how they plan to prevent them from happening again, then finished off by providing the motivation to inspire everyone to make things right.

Hats off to Steve Jobs for a handling a negative situation in a very positive way.

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