Yet his success in leading Apple cannot be denied. So what was it about him that made him so successful in so many people's eyes?
1) Luck? Was he at the right place at the right time? A perfect alignment of the planets? A temporary fluke that wouldn't have lasted much longer? Or was it actually the employees who were hidden behind Jobs' showmanship, i.e., a positive (often unsustainable) spiral where the Apple brand attracted especially loyal and creative employees, who made the brand even better?
2) Pluck and Drive? He wasn't born with a silver spoon in his mouth, or a college degree to use as a crutch. He seemed to be more aware of his own mortality than most people, and perhaps following is own admonishment "stay hungry, stay foolish", this gave him an extraordinary amount of "drive" and an impatience when he perceived that his time was being wasted.
3) Vision? Some "mystical, creative" quality that gave him a clearer vision of what what he wanted in a new product? A lot of people tend to believe this, but he obviously wasn't the only creative person at Apple. Anyway, this is an explanation that seems most often perpetuated by the media.
4) Pragmatic reasons?
a) He took a $1 salary and no stock options. So his employees couldn't accuse him of being driven by short-term profits (nor was he) to inflate his own stock options. Hard to have a bad attitude when you can't point a finger at the boss.
b) He had "street cred"--he helped found Apple (not to mention two other companies). Again, hard for employees to accuse him of luxuriating well behind the battle lines while they do all the work. He earned his medals in the past, and he was not seen as demanding something unreasonable from his underlings.
c) He was the consummate insider, not some outsider bozo hired by the board of directors, who had previously worked at a snack food company.
d) He was not a bean counter. Instead of demanding the best product for a given cost target, he demanded the lowest cost for a product that fulfilled his vision and satisfied his demand for utility, quality and aesthetics. His products were not the lowest cost, but customers liked them and were willing to pay more.
e) Having co-founded Apple and Pixar, he had enough respect and clout to be able to overcome "groupthink". i.e., sometimes it is said that a camel is a "horse designed by committee."
e) A radical "world view" of product development? Jobs had a fundamentally different worldview when it came to product development--a worldview similar to his own hero, Edwin H. Land, the inventor of instant photography and leader of Polaroid. This was a worldview that was (and is) opposite that of most big companies. An interesting NY times article describes it as follows:
The worldview he was describing perfectly echoed Land’s: “Market research is what you do when your product isn’t any good.” And his sense of innovation: “Every significant invention,” Land once said, “must be startling, unexpected, and must come into a world that is not prepared for it. If the world were prepared for it, it would not be much of an invention.” Thirty years later, when a reporter asked Jobs how much market research Apple had done before introducing the iPad, he responded, “None. It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want.”Jobs says of Land "...he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that." Jobs did the same thing. Land believed in the power of the scientific demonstration. Starting in the 60s, he began to turn Polaroid’s shareholders’ meetings into dramatic showcases for whatever line the company was about to introduce. Jobs did the same thing.
So what do YOU think was the reason for Steve Jobs' success?
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