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In The Reputation You Keep, we explored how reputation starts from within and why internal congruence matters. In Think Different, we saw how Steve Jobs masterfully rebuilt Apple’s reputation by aligning internal culture with external messaging.
But what made Jobs successful where Steve Ballmer struggled? In The Pirate and the Thief, we’ll look at a fundamental psychological principle that leaders overlook.
The reputation you keep with yourself—your self-perception—becomes the ceiling for the reputation others will keep of you. The power of self-perception becomes crystal clear in a heated exchange between Jobs and Gates—one who saw himself as a practical thief, and another who saw himself as an innovative pirate.
The Psychology of Self-Perception
“You’re ripping us off!” Jobs yelled, “I trusted you, and now you’re stealing from us!”
Gates stood coolly, looking Steve in the eye. “Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox. I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found that you had already stolen it.”
This exchange, witnessed by Macintosh systems designer Andy Hertzfeld, highlights the self-perception of these two founders. Gates viewed both himself and Jobs as “burglars” taking from Xerox—a pragmatic, but cynical view of innovation. Jobs maintained a “clean” self-image, transforming borrowed ideas into something revolutionary.
This difference in perception, regardless of the truth, shaped their companies’ reputations. The reputation they kept with themselves influenced their leadership. And businesses, like individuals, rarely rise above their self-perception.
Self-perception theory explains why strategies like “fake it ‘til you make it” work: when you act differently, you begin to see yourself differently, which reinforces the new behavior.
Gates saw himself engaging in competitive imitation and embraced the practical thief identity. Jobs saw himself transforming ideas and maintained his innovative creator identity.
Research on Identity-Based Leadership confirms that our self-perceived identity directly shapes our leadership behaviors and abilities. Great leaders don’t just manage their own self-perception—they elevate their people’s. Alexander the Great transformed Macedonians from ‘uncivilized barbarians’ in Greek eyes into a respected, powerful force by building a vision of Macedonian greatness and making his people part of that identity. The reputation you keep with yourself becomes the ceiling for your reputation with others—and the best leaders raise that ceiling for everyone around them.
This explains why Microsoft employees felt their integrity was under assault during the antitrust years. They knew the reputation was earned. It persists even today. Gates established a reputational pattern: imitate, iterate, and litigate.
Jobs and Apple had a different pattern—they aimed to bridge the gap between sophisticated technology and “the rest of us,” making complex technology easy and fun to use.
While the slogans change, reputation endures. Over time, it’s a weighing machine. And to paraphrase another Buffett quote, the weighty chains of reputation are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.
Patterns Persist
At the 2023 Paris Peace Forum, Microsoft’s Brad Smith went to bat for OpenAI against Meta.
“Which would you have more confidence in?” he asked. “Getting your technology from a non-profit (OpenAI), or a for-profit company entirely controlled by one human being (Mark Zuckerberg)?”
Yann LeCun of Meta pushed back, “Regardless of who owns it, one is open, and the other is closed.”
Smith replied, “It depends on your definition of open.”
But it doesn’t. Meta’s Llama is open source; OpenAI’s models are not. Smith was muddying the waters with intellectual sleight of hand—a reminder that even under Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s culture remains comfortable with deception when it serves their interests. The earned reputation persists.
Apple faces its own challenges maintaining the reputation Jobs rebuilt. The company that once empowered Rebels now acts more like the Empire, prioritizing App Store revenues and marketing vaporware while struggling to innovate internally.
Labels stick because they’re earned through patterns of behavior, not single moments.
Gates’ admission about stealing from Xerox, Ballmer’s cloud focus, which aimed to ‘taking more value out of the system,’ and Smith’s semantic games around AI—these all reflect Microsoft’s unchanged reputation because its self-perception hasn’t changed.
Microsoft still sees itself as the practical thief, while Apple—at least in its prime—saw itself as the innovative artist.
Enduring reputations aren’t built on positioning statements. They’re built on truth—sometimes uncomfortable, always revealing. You can’t market your way to trust. You have to earn it, decision by decision, action by action, year after year.
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