Steve Jobs, a super persuader?

Perhaps it is silly to ask if Steve Jobs was a super persuader. He came from nowhere and walked into the sunset not as a shrewd peddler of a bunch of overpriced i-products, not as the CEO of a highly successful technology company, but as a great human being who changed the world, as an extraordinary visionary who made the world a better place.

People who worked for him found him a dictator and a hard task master. He micromanaged his company like a jealous mother-in-law. He didn’t spare even a small fraction of his substantial personal fortune for philanthropy. No other person in living history, other than Princess Diana of UK, however, stole the world’s heart the way he did.

A more sensible question then is, ‘Why was Jobs a super persuader?’ To answer it let me take you to my home village in Kerala in 1991. That year, I brought back to my village a young maid (let’s call her Leela) my mother had hired to stay with me and my wife in Hyderabad and look after our young kids.

A few days later my mother came to know that Leela had taken her younger sister to the only beauty parlour in a town about ten km away and blew Rs 50 on some facial treatment. Mother was furious. Leela’s family was so poor and had so little to eat that she shouldn’t have wasted money like this. Did she think she was an apsara? Beauty parlours were for rich women who had nothing better to do.

I also found Leela’s behaviour inexplicable. What would she get from a one-off visit to a beauty parlour? Wasn’t it a senseless waste of her hard earned money? In rural Kerala twenty years ago, a visit to the beauty parlour was like air travel, a luxury reserved for the rich. But I defended her decision because she had every right to do what she wanted with her money. Of course, mother was not at all convinced because Leela’s family could have eaten well for a week if she had bought food for the money she burned at the parlour.

When I look back at that episode, what strikes me is how little we know about what really moves others. Perhaps poor Leela derived more joy from that single sitting in a beauty parlour than she would from a sumptuous meal at a fancy restaurant. Or from buying a week’s supply of food for the whole family. We don’t know.

Strangely, people don’t know their inner motives well enough to tell us even if we ask them earnestly and they are willing to open up. That is why extensive market research often fails to identify what customers really want and what makes them truly happy. We tend to judge others by our norms, our values. We may be broadly right, but rarely do we hit the bull’s-eye. If they have no choice, they may buy our products. We think we have persuaded them. But we are wrong.

Steve Jobs figured out what really moved people. He didn’t have any faith in market research. He wondered how people could talk about something they had not experienced or they didn’t even know was possible. Jobs could touch a spot somewhere in us that was inaccessible to research, to logic, to articulation. Once he touched that spot, we couldn’t resist him. It was almost like turning the ignition key of a car. The engine hidden under the hood can’t help roaring into action.

We knew his prices were atrocious; but we justified to ourselves that they were worth it. We would queue up to buy his products. We may explain our behaviour by saying that Jobs had style, taste, and an extraordinary sense of design. The fact is that we fell for him when there were other products which would do nearly everything that his i-products did for a much smaller investment.

Steve Jobs was a super persuader because he could touch a spot that we ourselves didn’t know we had somewhere in us. He was intuitively persuasive. Perhaps there won’t be another Steve Jobs because what he did was not born of education or reasoning.  

Photo credit Steve Jobs by Robert Galbraith/Reuters; Young woman after beauty treatment - http://www.istockphoto.com/