The Other Side of Genius: 5 Times Steve Jobs Nearly Tanked Apple Before Saving It
There’s a story that doesn’t get told often enough about Steve Jobs. It’s not the one about the iPhone launch or the “Think Different” campaign. It’s the one about a man sitting alone in a small office across the street from his own company, stripped of power, reading corporate reports that no longer flowed to his desk. His colleagues called it “Siberia.”
That was May 1985. Apple’s board had just sided with CEO John Sculley in a brutal power struggle. Jobs, the cofounder and chairman, was exiled to a cramped building while executives stopped returning his calls. “It was amazing to see how ostracized he was in the Valley,” Susan Barnes, a former Macintosh financial controller, later recalled. “It was really cruel.”
But here’s what most people forget: Jobs earned that exile. Before the comeback narrative took over, before the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, Jobs made a series of decisions that pushed Apple to the brink of extinction. He didn’t just almost destroy the company once—he nearly did it five times.
The uncomfortable truth? The same traits that made Jobs a visionary—his perfectionism, his refusal to compromise, his overwhelming force of will—also made him a liability. And the lessons he learned from those failures became the foundation for Apple’s greatest triumphs.
1. The Dictatorship Problem: Jobs Made Himself the Center of Every Decision
By early 1985, Apple wasn’t a company—it was a battlefield. Jobs had turned internal politics into a blood sport. He actively undermined CEO John Sculley at every turn, challenging his decisions in front of executives and board members. “I am the board,” Jobs reportedly told one executive, asserting his authority as chairman while simultaneously eroding the CEO’s credibility.
The civil war paralyzed Apple at the worst possible moment. Macintosh sales were cratering. IBM and its clone-makers were eating Apple’s lunch. For the first time in company history, Apple laid off employees—more than 1,200 of them. The company posted its first-ever quarterly loss. Behind closed doors, Apple secretly entered talks to sell itself to General Electric.
Sculley’s supporters eventually stormed HR to complain about Jobs’s behavior. No one knew who was actually running the company. The board finally sided with Sculley and stripped Jobs of his authority, but the damage was already done—months of progress lost to internal warfare.
2. The NeXT Cube Disaster: Launching a Product Before It Was Ready
When Jobs left Apple in autumn 1985, he didn’t disappear. He started NeXT, a new computer company. And he immediately repeated his worst mistakes.
Ignoring warnings from his cofounders, Jobs rushed out the first NeXT computer in October 1988. They called it the Cube—a stunning black magnesium box that looked like it came from the future. One small problem: the operating system wasn’t finished. The price tag? More than double what target customers said they could afford.
The Cube was a commercial disaster. NeXT sold only a few dozen units per month. Within months, the company laid off half its workforce. Jobs had created a beautiful product that nobody could buy and nobody needed.
3. The Price of Perfectionism: Killing Profit Margins for Aesthetics
Jobs’s obsession with design wasn’t just expensive—it was destructive. At NeXT, he insisted on manufacturing processes that would make any CFO cry. The Cube’s magnesium case alone cost more to produce than most complete computers sold for. Every millimeter had to be perfect, every curve precise.
This wasn’t just about the Cube. Jobs had the same problem at Apple. He demanded that the original Macintosh have a completely sealed case—no expansion slots, no internal upgrades. It made the computer elegant but impractical for business users. It also meant customers couldn’t fix their own machines, creating massive service costs.
The perfectionism that would eventually make Apple the most valuable company on earth was, in these early years, a recipe for bankruptcy.
4. The Refusal to License: Destroying Market Share Through Strategy
While IBM and its clone makers were building an entire ecosystem around Windows, Jobs refused to license the Macintosh operating system. He believed that controlling hardware and software together was the only way to ensure quality.
He wasn’t entirely wrong—Microsoft’s licensing strategy eventually led to the nightmare of viruses, crashes, and compatibility issues that plagued Windows for decades. But in the 1980s, Jobs’s refusal meant that Apple held less than 5% market share while IBM clones dominated.
When your competitors are selling millions of units and you’re selling thousands, it doesn’t matter that your product is better. The platform with the most users wins. By refusing to license, Jobs guaranteed that Apple would remain a niche player—until it nearly died.
5. The Ego Trap: Not Listening to Customers or Employees
Jobs famously said, “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” That’s a great quote for a keynote speech. It’s a terrible philosophy for running a company.
At both Apple and NeXT, Jobs consistently ignored market research and customer feedback. He knew what was best, and anyone who disagreed was wrong. When the Macintosh was launched in 1984, it had no hard drive, no color display, and no networking capabilities. Business users laughed at it.
The same thing happened at NeXT. Target customers told Jobs the price was too high. He ignored them. Employees warned him the operating system wasn’t ready. He launched anyway. The result? A beautiful product that collected dust on shelves.
The Twelve-Year Detour That Saved Apple
After leaving Apple in 1985, Jobs spent twelve years failing at NeXT. Those failures were brutal: layoffs, product delays, missed revenues, and a company that never made a profit.
But here’s the part that matters: NeXT taught Jobs things he never could have learned at Apple. He learned that you can’t be the center of every decision—you’ll burn out your team and paralyze the company. He learned that perfectionism has to be balanced with practicality. He learned that listening to customers isn’t weakness.
When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he was a different leader. The man who once shouted “You don’t understand!” at board meetings now listened to engineers. The man who rushed out unfinished products now waited years to launch the iPod. The man who refused to license now worked with competitors like Microsoft.
Apple didn’t just get its cofounder back in 1997. It got a Steve Jobs who had been humbled by twelve years of failure. That version of Jobs was the one who built the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. That version was the one who made Apple the most valuable company on earth.
The Takeaway for Growth Leaders
There’s a lesson here that goes beyond Apple history. The same instincts that make founders extraordinary—vision, conviction, perfectionism—can also destroy companies. The key is learning when to trust those instincts and when to override them.
Jobs’s early mistakes came from believing he was always right. His later success came from learning when he was wrong. The greatness of Steve Jobs isn’t that he was always right. It’s that he was willing to be wrong, to fail, and to learn from the wreckage.
That’s a lesson worth remembering, whether you’re building a startup or scaling a growth team. Sometimes the biggest risk isn’t your vision—it’s your certainty that the vision can’t be improved.