Steve Jobs Brainstorms with the Next Team

Cristóbal León Barla

2 ADE Bilingüe

Industrial Sociology

 Essay: Steve Jobs brainstorms with the NeXt team

In this video of Steve Jobs and his team, we can find a lot of things we talked about status and roles the last day of class. We said, that status and roles are part of the social structure and we can also find them in companies as Next used to have. Every single person of the team were assigned and related to a certain rol.

Firstly, Steve Jobs was fired from his own company, Apple, and decided to create a new one which name was Next. He took a few employees over there and they started to put in motion the new ideas to build this start-up. It was a big challenge for him because like he said, it is a lot of work to do to start a company, how you are going to enter in the market place, ideas, name, logo, products, bank accounts…etc.

Therefore, Jobs needed the collaboration of his team and one of the best things to do was going in a retreat and that is what they did in Pebble Beach. As we saw, status and roles facilitate social interaction, because they provide people with information about expected behaviours in specific circumstances. In this case the take-off of Next. In this retreat, they interacted with each other and discussed several issues about the company activity.

Connecting this with Industrial Sociology, this represent an organization, more specifically an utilitary secondary social group, which is focused in how they were going to launch some of the products that Steve Jobs had in mind. They were oriented towards these goals but with this type of activities as retreats, they made a difference with a lot of secondary groups found in companies.

This helped to make better relationships with each other and later on for the company to work in a better business atmosphere.

Said that, in the group we see how people played different status and roles. Starting with Jobs, his social position or status was clearly acquired. He also played a decisive rol, which was the one of making decisions for the group, being the managing director. The rest of the team is inside in another social category in the company that defines their status. On the other hand, they played the rol of being the employees with iniciative, being creatives, confident and much more personal skills was what Jobs was expecting from every single member of the team. And the same, in the other way around, the rol of Jobs is also what the group expected from him, and that is being a good leader, communicative, boss-friendly and the one making decisions after all.

Finally, it is quite interesting to see how one of the best, Steve Jobs, interact with his employees, how they work in such a good way and the connection with the theory of the subject with status and roles of everyone.