How to Tell a Know-It-All He’s Wrong
IN 2007, when I was an editor at Time magazine, Steve Jobs visited our office to give us a peek at Apple’s newest gadget: the iPhone. We passed the device around the conference table carefully, as if it were a moon rock. When we handed it back to Jobs, he slam-dunked it on the floor to demonstrate its durability. Jobs knew how to win over a room—even in a small group, his confidence and showmanship were mesmerizing. After that meeting—and again years later, when reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of the Apple cofounder—I wondered what it must have been like to work for him. On one hand, what an opportunity to observe an extraordinary genius at close range. On the other, Jobs was a know-it-all and a bully, so how could subordinates…