Steve Jobs: Technical Marketer Extraordinaire Passes

Steve Jobs: Technical Marketer “ENTP” Passes

Steve Jobs was the quintessential ENTP Inventor*,  and a role model for that small percentage of the population that see’s the world through the lens of an ENTP temperament.   It has been annoying seeing the media begin a dialog in the short days since his passing comparing Jobs to Edison.  There is no comparison!  Edison was a polar opposite on the (2) primary personality traits that made Steve Jobs a unique inventor, and to my own biased temperament – Uniquely Brilliant.  Steve Jobs’ Extroversion and Perception versus Edisons Introversion and Judgement.   It would be fair to compare Bill Gates to Edison, but when we speak of Jobs we are dealing with a completely different animal.   Steve Jobs viewed his world with an External focus and not the Internal focus of Edison.  While Edison was relentless in his pursuits to solve primarily personal problems, Steve Jobs put his focus on solving problems for the world at large.  While Bill gates was happy with his geeky DOS program that only other rational geeks like myself could ever learn and master,  Steve Jobs had his focus on designing computers and software that the rest of the world could learn and use with ease.  Without the competition with Jobs who was pushing the envelope on making computing a user friendly endeavor smart phones and Pad computers would still be a decade or two from implementation.   How is it that a man who passes at the relatively young age of 56 have completed so much that so many in the media take for granted?   The Apple logo has always represented to me the answer  to that question.   Though the folklore to the logo’s creation is different than what I presume to be true, as an entp I am sure  that jobs chose the “bitten” apple in order to show his personal quest of knowledge represented by  the  forbidden fruit in one of the oldest stories from Judeo Christian literature.

The apple logo represents “The Search and Acquisition of Knowledge”  represented in the story of Adam and Eve in the garden. This fact would have surely been a negative symbology to an overwhelming “Christian” population that Steve  was planning to sell his personal computers to in the early 1980’s. So, in typical entp  fashion  his line all those early years was that he put the “bite in the apple” so that it  did not get confused with a tomato”

ENTP’s are often misunderstood within  corporate institutions, and often can only pursue their quest for knowledge  within their own entrepenurial endeavors.  Steve Jobs was misunderstood by his own company!   (Evident by Jobs ousting from the very company he founded, Apple many years ago) Technical Marketer’s like Jobs are generally not driven by money or power, greed or control – They are simply Pretenders with an ability of naturally putting themselves into the shoes of the other personality types – whether consumers (Marketer) or the myriad of different engineers and designers (Technical)  required to design and build such elegent items asthe Ipad.    This ability that Steve Jobs mastered could only be compared to the man who kept the original “Bill Gates” – Thomas Edison on his toes – Nicola Tesla.   Profits seem to be non-important to men such as Tesla and Jobs,  Quality, Efficiancy and “an ability of seeing the future” is what drove them.  This is the paradox which corporate boards fail to understand and which was eventually rectified in the case of  apple whith their rehire of jobs after dismal profits without him.  Quality,Function and a constant look to the  Future are key to Profits not only today but tomorrow…..

Milton Fleitas

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*ENTP’s are referred to as (Inventor’s) by Keirsey, yet this is an imperfect description, ENTP’s are best described as “Technical Marketers” because of their Extroversion which allows them to design products for the “External” world.  It is the INTP’s (Architects) and INTJ’s (masterminds) and ENTJ’s and Others that truly get involved in the nuts and bolts of “Invention”.