You can be an executive and still be in a situation where a higher ranking executive can override you even when you are the domain expert and they aren't. I don't know if that's what happened here or not, but if it did, then there is in fact such thing as "it's not my fault."
If Steve Jobs was talking about himself when he made that statement, then it's spot on. He micromanaged the shit out of that company and nearly always got his way. Fortunately, he did a hell of a job. If he screwed up though, he would have had not a single person to blame but himself, because he personally called most of the shots.
While I haven't been an executive at a billion dollar company, I have a good amount of leadership experience from my time in the military. I always try to be blatantly honest with myself and others. If I personally fuck something up, I tend to immediately own up to it and propose a solution. However, there have been a few very rare occasions where I've either had myself and my team thrown under the bus for something that was beyond our control, or failed to complete a task because it was simply impossible to achieve under the given deadline. Only a coward would let someone place undeserved blame on himself or his subordinates.
We are talking about Tim Cook here. A guy that can get a laptop to your door, to your specifications, in 2-3 days from halfway around the world. If you aren't familiar with international logistics (and you being in the military you probably already know all about logistics) that type of thing is practically unheard of.
If he can do his job and do it so well that the company is known for shipping times then what could you possibly tell him about why your product doesn't work? It's too hard?
Tim Cook is Apple's CEO. While he might negotiate agreements that lead to an improved logistics situation, there are thousands of other people involved in getting Apple products to their destination.
But assuming he was, surely you aren't suggesting that Apple's speedy delivery times are the pinnacle of human achievement, and that by their accomplishment of this, that every other human undertaking must be trivial.
Writing a Google maps clone is extremely difficult, and if Apple expected to be successful with it already with the meager amount of resources they have put into it, then it was an impossible task and I'd be delighted to tell Tim Cook, that it was in fact, too hard.
As it has been mentioned elsewhere, Google has like 7000 people working on maps, while Apple has 13000 people period. It's doubtful that they would have over 60 percent of their workforce plugging away on a maps clone, so clearly they can't expect their program to be better, especially when Google has been doing this for several years already.
But my comment wasn't even intended to excuse the state of IOS Maps, I was simply pointing out that while we don't know for sure what happened, there are some possible scenarios where the failure wasn't this guy's fault. I was also pointing out that the statement "there is no such thing as not my fault" at the executive level, it a statement that is only true when an executive is given free reign over his work, without anyone else overriding or commandeering.
Before Cook was CEO he was SVP of worldwide operations. It was his job to get those thousands of people and suppliers marching to the same beat.
And yes, speedy delivery time is an achievement. It might be for computers in this instance but militaries and countries are run on their logistics. While we take for advantage shopping for fresh food most people don't realise the amount of preparation that goes into getting fruit to ripen in the stores.
So no, I don't think Maps are hard. The hard part (data acquisition) has already been done. But it can't be a "hobby" either. If they were planning to do their own maps, and the purchase of C3 and Placebase years ago meant they were, they could have looked around and saw that Nokia, Microsoft, and Google, were shelling out serious cash to get it right Apple spending a tenth of that was naive.
As CEO, Cook was right take the blame. If he publicly passed the buck to Forstall I would seriously question his leadership.
There is never it's not my fault --- unless you're not attached to your job. Accepting responsibility for your division, even if you personally did nothing wrong, is part of the territory.
If you work with people that constantly offer excuses, even if they are "I was overruled", it is an awful work experience. Imagine you have to team up with that guy to code something and as soon as it goes wrong, he jumps to blame you. Even if it is entirely you're fault (you should claim it yourself, not be called out by a coworker), he still was working on the project. You can't expect to get anywhere by denying your involvement in toxic software that you are clearly involved in.
There is a difference between accepting responsibility for the actions of your subordinates/ your own actions and accepting blame for the failures of one of your superiors who stepped out of his area of responsibility and into yours just to override you on something that he had no business doing. If your leader sets you up for failure, the same logic you are using to assign the blame to yourself assigns the blame to him.
There is an even larger difference between being a person who is capable of recognizing when their employer is wrongfully blaming something on them and the person who constantly blames things on other people.
I don't know if applies in this situation or not. For all I know this guy could have personally written bad code for maps. The point is, universal statements such as "there is never it's not my fault at the executive level" are just plain false. It is an executive's fault if his subordinates do shitty work, but if the executive's boss ordered something that was impossible to accomplish with a given set of time, manpower, and resources then there is a good possibility that it isn't his fault. He might have to take the fall for it, but at the end of the day if that's what happened, then he knows he did the best he could and therefore shouldn't give a shit what anyone else thinks.
I love my job, I also loved having the opportunity to provide leadership and guidance for others. It is because of the love I had for my job that I would accept responsibility only for the things that are actually my fault(which includes the actions of my subordinates.) I understand that as a supervisor there's always the chance that I would get fired, demoted, or otherwise punished for a superior's mistakes, but that doesn't make it my fault or responsibility unless I actually made a mistake.
Steve Jobs can say "there is no it's not my fault" because at Apple, the buck stopped with him. I don't recall hearing anyone ever telling Steve Jobs that he couldn't do something, or overriding his design decisions. For lower levels of leadership, such as I experienced, there were about 50 different people who would constantly tell me what to do, even though only one person was actually tasked with doing so. Sometimes, my orders were poorly thought out. Sometimes they even contradicted orders given by other people. In situations like these, as I stated before, only a coward would accept the blame without evaluating the specific situation beforehand.
I'm not suggesting the person that overruled you is free from blame. I absolutely am suggesting that if you are in that situation you have to take your lumps and accept it, not deflect ("it's not my fault because Tom told me we had to use xyz"). The other person who is at fault should also be accepting blame, but it's not your job to render the blame. In fact, you're never at all the arbiter of blame with anyone lateral, above you, or (usually) anyone in another department; it's always your fault.
Your boss told you to use xyz technology? You (and others, if necessary) should have convinced him otherwise. If you can't and his decision is a bad one, you have to be the one that says no. That's right -- it's your job on the line, not his. If you signed up to be vp of IOS software, you're in the wrong if something is broken in IOS software. That's why you need to learn to say "no", not only to clients, but to coworkers as well. If that's absolutely not possible, it's time to put on your big boy/girl pants and take the blame because you couldn't fix a problem that you knew existed.
If you're in a situation where different people are telling you different things, then it sounds like you get to decide the specific implementation. It's even probable that those different people telling you different things are really giving you their unsolicited opinion, rather than micromanaging your career.
I think it's cowardly to avoid responsibility for what you sign your name to.
People at this level generally don't have a problem saying "no." That's not usually the issue. The issue in a situation where a CEO is overriding other executives and dictating bad decisions outside of their domain expertise is that it's politics at this point.
The fact of the matter is that you can do your job extremely well, do everything right by any rational measure, have a strong political position, and yet still get screwed by unanticipated or uncontrollable external and internal forces, up to and including nonsense of others on the executive team, especially in an organization with a poor/weak/incompetent CEO or equivalent.
It happens all the time.
It's pretty easy and cheap to make a blanket "it's always your fault" statement, but back here in the real world it's typically much more nuanced and complicated.
I agree that I'll never be the arbiter of blame. I also agree that subordinates should give counsel to their supervisors when it can save them from making a mistake. Unfortunately, from my experience a lot of times a person's pride gets in the way of accepting such advice. Some of the best ideas I've ever heard came from people who were both young and inexperienced.
As far as having multiple people telling me what to do, I was mostly referring to my time in the military. Take my word for it, I wasn't expected to choose a specific implementation (unless it was theirs), and they were definitely not offering friendly advice!
You can be an executive and still be in a situation where a higher ranking executive can override you even when you are the domain expert and they aren't.
You don't even have to quit. You just say: no, I'm not doing that. Maybe they fire you and maybe they don't, but that's their problem. You just focus on doing the right thing.
Sometimes the reason for the overriding is stupid.
Sometimes the reason is that you can't see the forest for the trees because of your domain expertise.
If the higher ranking person has a decent level of clue, they'll always be aware that they're basically -betting- that they're right about it being the latter rather than the former.
If the higher ranking person has any level of personal honour, they'll precommit to taking full responsibility for anything that goes wrong as a result ... and to quietly letting you keep any glory that accrues for it going right, on the assumption that that was likely mostly a result of your decisions, not of their single override.
Given the preconditions of your boss having clue and honour, quitting should not be the automatic response to their overriding you even if you don't immediately understand why they're doing so.
In fact, I'd suggest that if you don't trust them sufficiently to accept that they'll only do it in cases where they genuinely believe they have a better reason than your reasons for disagreeing, you should be trying to move elsewhere right now, because you have no faith in your superior's ability to use their power appropriately, which is going to be no fun for anybody.
As said by other posts before, that is completely irrelevant in executive level. No one would or should care about your documentation at that point, as it might be for rank-and-file workers.
Get convinced of the CEO strategy and execute it, or stay convinced, convince the board and do your way - and in either case, take responsibility for whatever happens to the company in the whole, there is no such thing as "your separate area" or "only your direct actions/subordinates" at that level.
There's a lot we don't know. Was the court case the result of political squabbling, or maybe there were disagreements as to its validity? There's a long line of decisions and personalities in play on the Apple side, and while I think in context we can riff on Maps being the straw that broke the camel's back (the firing was sooner after the apology than the apology was from the court order), we don't have the slightest inkling what the camel looks like, or even whether it's actually a camel.
He's a very smart guy, he simply may not have made it all the way into the consumer side. A Linux distribution should try to get a pro bono out of him while he has extra time.
The apology in question is not the one court ordered by a UK judge. The apology in question is the one Apple issued and Tim Cook signed regarding the iOS Maps cock-up.
If Steve Jobs was talking about himself when he made that statement, then it's spot on. He micromanaged the shit out of that company and nearly always got his way. Fortunately, he did a hell of a job. If he screwed up though, he would have had not a single person to blame but himself, because he personally called most of the shots.
While I haven't been an executive at a billion dollar company, I have a good amount of leadership experience from my time in the military. I always try to be blatantly honest with myself and others. If I personally fuck something up, I tend to immediately own up to it and propose a solution. However, there have been a few very rare occasions where I've either had myself and my team thrown under the bus for something that was beyond our control, or failed to complete a task because it was simply impossible to achieve under the given deadline. Only a coward would let someone place undeserved blame on himself or his subordinates.